Victoria Narizhna from Kovyla Publishing on the inspiration for “Stories from Ukraine” (Part two of three)
Victoria Narizhna at the Book Space festival held in Dnipro in September, 2021. Victoria is the founder and editor-in-chief of Kovyla Publishing, a new publishing house based out of Ukraine.
Kovyla Publishing are focused on sharing new Ukrainian voices with Western and other foreign audiences to help improve people’s understanding of Ukraine and Ukrainians. We met with their editor-in-chief, Victoria Narizhna, to discuss the inspiration for Kovyla Publishing and their first books.
This is the second part of our conversation with Kovyla’s editor-in-chief.
What’s the Idea: What themes stood out to you across the three volumes of Stories from Ukraine?
Victoria Narizhna: When you read story after story after story, you start seeing the bigger pattern. You start seeing how a lot of things connect, even though I didn’t know they're [present in] all these stories. The theme of language, for example, goes through all of them.
The story of displacement [too]. A lot of people are displaced, it's also not something new. It's a thing that you go through when you have Russia as a neighbour because it's [been] Russia's policy for hundreds of years now to displace people that live inside the empire, to weaken them with constant displacement. So, it is also present through the stories, from the stories of the oldest generation to the young people who are experiencing this displacement right now.
What’s the Idea: As you progress through these three volumes, you're pulled into the individual stories, but you also have all these themes that run through them, like language. There was an interesting exploration of the very different meaning the Ukrainian language and the Russian language have for the generation of today compared to what it meant for the “Fighters” generations or for the “Keepers” generation.
The cover of the second volume of Stories from Ukraine. Fighters focuses on the experiences of the current generations of Ukrainian adults.
“The language became very significant symbolically. They did not want to share the language anymore with the people who came here to kill them.”
Victoria Narizhna: I was actually surprised to see how many of the stories touched the topic of language in one or other way because my own story, written for the second volume, also touches the topic of language. It really was surprising for me to see because, in Ukraine, the topic of language [has been] manipulated and misused for such a long time. Russian politicians were using the topic of Russian language and the need to add Russian language as an official language of the state. Somehow, Russian-speaking people are [apparently] discriminated against in Ukraine, which was obviously a very silly thing to say for anyone who had been in Ukraine for one day. Everyone who knows Ukrainian life understands that it's the other way around.
Until 2014, most of the foreigners who were coming to Ukraine never, ever learned Ukrainian. They didn't need it. They learned Russian. There are many more Russian study courses. In any country, you just name it, you can learn Russian. You do not need to put a lot of effort into finding the teachers and the courses. So, they were all coming here knowing Russian and they were all speaking in Russian. [It was] only after 2014 that it became a matter of a good tone, I suppose, [for foreign people] to learn Ukrainian and to be able to say something in Ukrainian. Before that, a lot of diplomats, even some ambassadors, didn't know Ukrainian. They were speaking Russian in official settings. What kind of disrespect for the country when a diplomat does not know the language of the country. Of course, all of that has a very understandable source in our past. But because of [how] this language topic was manipulated, a lot of Ukrainians started to avoid it.
When someone started to talk about language one way or another, whether about if the Ukrainian language is being discriminated [against[ or the Russian language is being discriminated [against], it was always a dangerous sign that someone wants you to ignite and that someone is manipulating your opinion. You were not comfortable speaking Ukrainian anywhere, but Russian you could speak everywhere, even in the western part of the country where most of the people are Ukrainian speaking. But [the full-scale invasion] was the point of no return for a lot of people. The language became very significant symbolically. They did not want to share the language anymore with the people who came here to kill them. So, they started to speak Ukrainian publicly for the first time in their lives.
Maybe before they felt embarrassed for their poor Ukrainian, or they'd be embarrassed to speak Ukrainian because it was considered by some to still be a language of the village, of the countryside, and not a language for the big city. But the 24th of February 2022 changed all that, and it was so visible, and it is so visible when you read these stories through all three volumes how much language is part of identity, and how choosing a language is a way to choose an identity in Ukraine.
If you are speaking one language or another, you're telling other people what your identity is, and who you are.
A field of yellow grass and the big blue skies of Ukraine. The iconic steppes and the wheat fields are some of the distinctive characteristics of Ukraine.
“Sometimes you need to choose, are you staying or are you fleeing? Whose side are you on? What can you sacrifice?”
What’s the Idea: That theme of choice of identity comes through very strongly throughout these stories. For example, you have stories featuring people in their 60s and 70s who have spoken Russian their entire life but are now choosing to learn and speak Ukrainian. Other stories have people making other choices: to change their language, to change the people that they associate with, and to change their entire lives on account of the invasion, along with other moral choices. These stories capture and convey this important idea of choice; who you're going to be and what you're going to do under very extraordinary or very ordinary circumstances.
Victoria Narizhna: I think that you are right that this theme of choice is really vibrant through all three volumes, and I think it's part of why the war in Ukraine reverberates so strongly with people all over the world. I think that choice is actually the possibility of choice. Not only the right to choose, but an obligation to choose in some circumstances is really downplayed [and] diminished in the contemporary world. It's like we're so used to choice—that we can choose when we go to elections, when we're going to the supermarket— that we stop thinking about choice as a difficult decision.
Sometimes you need to choose, are you staying or are you fleeing? Whose side are you on? What can you sacrifice for some things? Are you willing to sacrifice something or not? I think that, for a lot of people outside Ukraine, these choices seem terrible. And the need to choose such things seems terrible, and it is terrible. It actually is. But at the same time, it is very empowering when you know that your own choices today as an ordinary small person are really important every day. When you live in a time of war, it’s not just a phrase. It's not some kind of abstract principle. It's a thing. You choose every day to do something, and it affects all. You choose to put on your electric kettle or not. That's a very important choice when your country is in a blackout and there is not enough electricity for all. You are the other kind of citizen if you don't care and choose to use your kettle. It's small, everyday things [that] become very, very important and significant when the whole nation goes through such kinds of struggle. That's why it is called total war, because everyone and everything matters. It's really empowering to live through a time when you really matter and what you do really matters.
I think that's the feeling that even invokes envy in people sometimes. I heard that a lot from people who come to Ukraine to witness, to write about us, to document the Ukrainian war, like journalists. [They say] that they feel more alive than at any time of their life, and I think that that's not only due to the adrenaline boost because you are in danger and your chemistry works. No, I think that's because every day is meaningful, and that is something a lot of people in the Western world do not have the chance to feel through their lives. Because life is full of important scenes and its important struggles. You can choose to struggle or to not go to some, I don't know, rally for responsible climate policies. You can live all your life [without] choosing anything, but here and now, we do not have this luxury or this curse. I don't know which it is.
What’s the Idea: There's a difference between choosing the two choices that are on the piece of paper or the five choices at the grocery store and making fundamental choices about who you are or whether you're going to stay or not, for example. There are no clear answers a lot of the time, unfortunately. But within that theme of choice, you chose to stay in Ukraine and to do this work that you’re doing with Kovyla Publishing, to share these stories with Western audiences, and to introduce those audiences to Ukraine.
A river in Zaporizhzhia, a city built on the Dnipro river in southeastern Ukraine.
Victoria Narizhna: My personal choice to stay has nothing to do with what I'm doing now. Of course, from the very beginning, it was one of the most dreadful scenarios: that I will need to leave my home or not leave my home. I couldn't bear the humiliation of this feeling, actually. I remember that, in the first days of the war, I was constantly talking about it with my husband. Maybe we need to pack our things and move to the western part of the country, because we live in Dnipro. It's very close to the front line. It's been very close to the front line since 2014, but when the front line is frozen, you do not feel it so much. But it's about 150 kilometers to the front line now and it was about 250, 200 in some places since the beginning of the war in 2014. But we were really thinking about it, and it was so painful for us both. This prospect of fleeing was really, really frightening [for] us, and we decided that, if Russian forces are fighting for Zaporizhzhia—it's near our oblast, about 80 kilometres to the place where we live on the outskirts of Dnipro—then we would go... but that never happened to this day. I think it’s a blessing that it never happened because when we were checking the news to see how fast the front was moving and if we needed to start fleeing or not, I had this feeling that I am the person who can postpone and postpone and postpone this decision until it's too late. And I understood so well people who found themselves in occupation because they couldn't leave their homes. It’s not because they were inviting Russians or waiting for Russian forces to move in, but because they couldn't find it in themselves to leave their homes. I understood that it's a very difficult choice. It's the most difficult choice of your life, to leave your home and flee. So, it was out of the question from the very beginning.
“When I found this purpose, my own purpose and the purpose that my colleagues shared and also believed in, it really changed my life.”
I was volunteering as a psychologist, because I have a psychology degree, though I didn't work for some time in this profession, but I was able to help in the shelter for the displaced people with some of my knowledge. As the volunteer psychologist, I was helping on the hotline of evacuation initiatives. We were taking these calls from the people who needed evacuation from the front line cities, from under the shell, and it was a really difficult experience. I would be doing a lot of things, like writing, giving interviews, helping foreign journalists to find some anchoring for them in Dnipro. I was doing all of it, a bit here, a bit there, but when I found this purpose, my own purpose and the purpose that my colleagues shared and also believed in, it really changed my life.
I understand that it's maybe a bit too enthusiastic, but it's really changed a lot for me. I feel that I not only chose because it's who I am, but I actually need to be here because you cannot tell the stories without being, I think, in the same place as your heroes and heroines. It's very important to have the core of the team in Ukraine—our team is dispersed through Europe—because that gives perspective. It allows both us and our colleagues who are abroad to fill the beat, to stay on the same page with the people we are telling the world about. So yeah, right now it's not only personal, but [also a] professional choice for me to be in Ukraine and to see all that is happening from an insider perspective.
It was my personal choice to stay because I didn't see myself leaving Ukraine at such a time. To speak frankly, I don't have the need to leave. A lot of women left because they’re bringing their children to safety and it's perfectly understandable, but I have the means to live through this. I have a good social network around me, [which] a lot of people do not have. Or people who lost their homes, they do not sometimes have a choice, [so maybe] it was easier for them to leave the country than find something here where a lot of safe regions were overflooded with internal refugees. So it's like, I am a happy one. I can fulfill this wish not to leave the country because, in a lot of circumstances, I would be amongst those people who just are forced to leave the country because it's the only way for them. So yeah, I'm a lucky person that I do not need to.
What’s the Idea: There are unfortunately a lot of circumstances where choices are made for you and, as you're saying, you have to act.
Victoria Narizhna: Yeah. Yeah. And you need to [choose] between bad and worse choices. When it's war, there are a lot of situations when you choose between the bad and the worst.
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The interview was conducted by Matthew Long using Google Meet.
Written by Matthew Long
Edited by ATP Editing