Ukrainian literature, like Ukrainian identity, has developed and lasted into the twenty-first century despite centuries of repression under various ruling powers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during a long era of evolving Russian rule, printing books and teaching in schools in Ukrainian was banned. In the 1930s, when Stalin ruled Russia, Ukrainian poets and writers were arrested and sometimes killed, their generation now known as the Executed Renaissance. In 2014, Ukraine’s concession to Russian pressure to nix an agreement that would have brought the country closer to the EU sparked the Maidan Revolution, which toppled the sitting government and paved the way for a new, more independent Ukrainian government that has since made Ukrainian language (rather than Russian) compulsory in many public settings.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year reopened difficult debates in the country’s literary scene about the ties between language and nationhood. With these histories in mind, I spoke with Olena Rybka, a member of the Ukrainian publishing house Vivat Publishing, based in Kharkiv. Vivat, the second-largest publishing house in the country, previously released hundreds of books a year. Since 2014, it has focused on releasing Ukrainian-language books; it also works to promote Ukrainian literature domestically and abroad, through book events and by selling rights overseas. Vivat’s publications include Dissidents by Vakhtang Kipiani, a collection of interviews with dissidents under the Soviet Union; The Country of Women, also by Kipiani, about prominent Ukrainian women of the twentieth century; and The Wild West of Eastern Europe by Pavlo Kazarin, a book of modern Ukrainian history.
Rybka is the senior editor of Vivat’s modern Ukrainian literature department and previously led the children’s literature section. We spoke, through interpreter Natalia Okolita, about how the publishing house views its duty to preserve the country’s linguistic and literary culture, about the role of language in cultural identity, and about the many histories that influence how we pass down our own personal stories. As a Kharkiv-born Ukrainian immigrant, I was reminded by this conversation that even as the war continues, so does creative work. Books are still published; manuscripts are still being acquired; and authors, poets, and artists are still creating with fervor and depth.
– Anna Sergeeva for Guernica
Guernica: Could you share with us how you got into publishing, and what your work was like before the war?
Rybka: I graduated with a masters in Ukrainian philology, which is the study of literature and language, and after I had my child, I grew especially interested in Ukrainian books for children. I became involved in children’s book publishing, and Vivat offered me a position in 2015. I joined the publishing house right after Maidan, when Vivat had just implemented a new policy to cut all ties with Russia. We completely reoriented our publishing portfolio and started to publish more about Ukrainian cultural figures. Since then, I gradually became involved in publishing beyond children’s books, including the publishing of Ukrainian novels and fiction.
Guernica: How has the Russian invasion affected Vivat’s work?
Rybka: Right after the invasion, Julia Orlova, our general director, called me and asked, “Okay, so what will we do next? There is a full-scale war going on and we don’t know what will happen to us tomorrow.” We were all in this big unknown together, but it was during that conversation that we decided to keep going. A few days later, on February 24, I received a phone call from one of our authors, Vitaly Zapeka, who told me, “I’m going to war. I will be in the frontlines. I would like to pass on my manuscript to you now.” At that moment, we understood that whether he lives or dies, it is our mission to make sure his manuscript is published. It is our responsibility, and our value as a publishing house, to keep working and keep publishing these Ukrainian voices.
After the invasion, we had an internal team joke that it’s good we experienced COVID-19 before, because we were prepared in that weird way to work online and remotely. We also organized a charity to raise money to provide supplies and bulletproof vests for our authors who enlisted and their units.
Guernica: Are you able to print and distribute new titles, or are you releasing new content online?
Rybka: We continue to print books, although the rate of print publishing has dropped significantly. The largest printing houses in the country are in Kharkiv and do not work as fully as they did in pre-war times. We know that not everybody can be as involved because some people are volunteering to help the war effort or humanitarian aid efforts. Also, some people are not in as safe a place as I am [in Poland]; some people are still in Kharkiv, which is still getting shelled. But we are all trying our best. It is still our intention to print everything that was scheduled to be published for this year. Meanwhile, we have also increased our online-only content, such as by selling electronic versions of books.
Guernica: What about distribution? Have you been able to keep your bookstores open?
Rybka: We have two bookstores, one in Lviv and another in Kharkiv. During the first days of the war, the Lviv store was closed, but we had a little note on the door with the number of a team member, saying that you can call us to request books. People started calling us and asking for books and demanding that we open the bookstore. We even had readings in the bomb shelter underneath our store.
In our store in Kharkiv, we managed to publish and distribute Sergiy Zhadan’s Ukrainian translation of a book by Adam Mansbach, Go the F*ck to Sleep. It is in the style of a children’s book, but it’s for parents who have a hard time putting their children to sleep. And it actually coincided with a time when so many Ukrainians were spending their nights in the bomb shelters, where somehow they still had to put their children to sleep and to explain to them what’s happening, why they have to sleep at this time and not at that time. So it was of good use.
Guernica: I spent some time in Ukraine before the invasion, and my personal experience was that the language you speak there is unavoidably political. Do you feel that there has historically been a tension between the Ukrainian and Russian languages, and is that changing now?
Rybka: We know that there were tensions between the people who spoke Russian and the people who spoke Ukrainian in Ukraine in the past. And I noticed a transition after this war started, after February 24, in Kharkiv specifically. Kharkiv is a predominantly Russian-speaking city and my friends who knew Ukrainian and could speak in Ukrainian used to feel sort of ashamed, maybe, speaking Ukrainian. But now it has completely flipped, and now they [hesitate to speak] even a word of Russian. So the situation has changed drastically. And I don’t think any publishing house in Ukraine will publish Russian-speaking literature for years to come.
But when I say “shame,” I don’t mean the shame of speaking Ukrainian; the shame was related only to not wanting to speak poorly in Ukrainian. It is the issue of not speaking beautiful Ukrainian, Ukrainian that is at the level that represents their thoughts. After we introduced quotas in 2016 for the radio stations to play Ukrainian music and cinemas to show movies translated in Ukrainian, gradually — and despite some internal resistance — people got used to it and they began to appreciate the language and enjoy it. When I would hear my friends say, “I will not speak Ukrainian because I do not speak as eloquently in Ukrainian as you do,” I always responded, “The only way to get to eloquent Ukrainian is […] if you go through the way of poorly spoken Ukrainian first.”
But now after this invasion, it is the Ukrainian language that identifies us and distinguishes us from Russian culture. Take, for example, in the city of Kharkiv: we still have streets that are named after Russian poets, like Pushkin, and our vision right now is to change these street names to Skovoroda or Stus Streets, because those are the streets that we want to walk. This war is not only the war for our territory. This is the war for our identity, for how we self-identify and how we feel about ourselves as Ukrainians.
Guernica: Do you feel that this earlier hesitation to speak Ukrainian came from not practicing or not reading Ukrainian regularly, or because the language wasn’t taught to children?
Rybka: For children who grew up with Ukrainian literature, it is much easier for them to switch from language to language. Whenever they get into a Ukrainian-speaking environment, like most of the schools and kindergartens, it’s very easy for them to speak Ukrainian. Unfortunately, the influence of Russia was prevalent, especially in Eastern territories. For example, in the city of Mariupol, there was only one Ukrainian school. A colleague from there told me that they managed to keep the Ukrainian language alive by speaking Ukrainian in their homes, but outside everything was in Russian. The clear agenda of Russification in those Eastern territories made it very easy for Putin to say, “We came to Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking people.” But I want to stress that those Russian-speaking people are not Russians. They do not identify as Russians, although they speak Russian. And this is the challenge right now: to prove that, despite speaking Russian, they are different people. They live in a different country, and they have a different cultural identity.
In terms of our publishing practices, Vivat publishes only in Ukrainian now, but we used to have to duplicate, meaning we would publish a book in Russian and in Ukrainian simultaneously. But as they say, people vote with money, and right now people buy more Ukrainian books.
Guernica: This duplication in Ukrainian and Russian, did that stop after Maidan or only more recently?
Rybka: We have only had a few duplications since Maidan, and it was only done because of the desire of the author or due to a vision of the audience. For example, in 2015, we published a book about Mustafa Dzhemilev, a Crimean leader of Tatarian descent, in both Ukrainian and Russian, with the main argument being that we need to bring this book to people in Crimea, who are mostly Russian-speaking people. The Ukrainian version sold out instantaneously compared to the Russian version, which did not sell out. Today, when we sign a contract with our authors, we include a caveat that the book may be published in or translated into other languages, except for Russian, and that it will not be distributed in Russia.
Guernica: Prior to your work at Vivat, you were the deputy director of the Hryhorii Skovoroda Museum, which was recently hit by Russian missiles. Why do you think that the Russian military targets Ukrainian cultural centers and monuments? And what can be done to preserve these monuments in the cultural memory once they are destroyed physically?
Rybka: It’s not only the Skovoroda Museum that was destroyed, but also the Kuindzhi Museum in Mariupol, and a museum holding works of Maria Primachenko in Ivankiv. They also destroyed churches. Russia denies the existence of Ukraine as a country and culture, and this destruction is part of that denial. The Russians even try to call Skovorda their own Russian philosopher, despite the fact that he was born and lived and wrote only in Ukraine.
We will celebrate the 300 year anniversary of Skovoroda this year. And Skovoroda taught that the most important task of man is to know himself. Now, when musicians, poets, athletes, and kindergarten teachers are forced to be warriors, it is especially valuable not to forget that we can return after victory to what is our essence. And many even now are helped by books. So of course, Skovoroda is a very valuable symbol in this war.
But something that gives me massive hope [is] that we will renew and rebuild all of it. You may have noticed if you saw the picture of Skovoroda Museum after it was shelled that it was all burned out, but among the flames of this burning museum, the statue — the white statue of Skovorda — stayed intact.
Guernica: Children are the inheritors of cultural memory, and I know that a passion of yours is publishing children’s books. Can you speak more about the importance of children’s books in Ukrainian, particularly those who have been displaced from their Ukrainian homes?
Rybka: The first thing that I did when I came to Poland was to look in the public library for Ukrainian children’s books for my daughter. And it was not only me. Our colleague Nadiia Kuzinska works with libraries, not only in Ukraine but all over the world, and she has started getting so many requests about having Ukrainian books in libraries internationally. The needs of the Ukrainian people now spread across Europe are not only for food and shelter, but also for Ukrainian books and the ability to read to their children in Ukrainian. Unfortunately, we know that some of these people, and especially children, will never come back to Ukraine because their houses were destroyed, with some villages completely reduced to nothing. So we hope that they will have access to Ukrainian literature elsewhere in Europe where they stay.
Guernica: What does your work with Vivat at this challenging time mean to you personally?
Rybka: I’m amazed at the amount of human spirit now in our living musicians, our poets, our writers. Some authors lost their voice during war, which is understandable, but some authors regained their voice, and now they are speaking at full volume. Like Ostap Slyvynsky, who is now working on “The Dictionary of War,” a testament to […] Ukrainians who became refugees — not a dictionary of words but a dictionary of stories, of simple symbols like an apricot tree, or a swing on a playground, or a doll. And behind that doll, the whole story of a war evolves. There are authors who are now noticing, recording, and processing the war in the way that they write.
And Vivat means something important to writers now, too. An important moment for me was when one of our Kyiv authors, Iren Rozdobudko, received an author’s fee from us, and she was so grateful that she received this payment during the war. She called me and she said, “You know, Olena, it’s not about the money that I received. It’s that one morning out of the blue, I received this note from you with the payment. And for me, it’s the hope it gave me, hope for our victory.”