‘I was astonished by the fierceness of people’s desire to stay’: Dave Eggers In Dialogue With Yuliya Musakovska
In order to comprehend the events of recent days, PEN Ukraine has launched a series of conversations entitled #DialoguesOnWar. On February 16, 2023, Ukrainian poet Yuliya Musakovska held a conversation with the American writer and publisher Dave Eggers. This is a transcription of key moments from their conversation.
This conversation is suppoerted by the US Embassy in Ukraine.
By PEN Ukraine with Dave Eggers and Yulia Musakovska
Photo: Mohsen Mahdavi/Unsplash
Dave Eggers: I first met Yuliya in Lviv in December of 2022, when we were visiting Ukraine with a delegation from PEN America. As we are approaching the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion, what is your state of mind? Are you more optimistic now than you were at this time last spring?
Yuliya Musakovska: It is a pleasure to continue the conversation we started in person in Lviv.
Today we did not have enough sleep. Another massive missile attack on Ukraine took place during the night, and we were woken up by the air raid alarm at 3 a.m.
When the full-scale Russian invasion started, we were shocked. Up until mid-April, we felt quite abandoned, as if we could only rely on ourselves. Our day-to-day reality consisted of work and helping our friends, the army, and people in need. It was just a matter of survival, and it still is. Back then, the world was watching and testing whether Ukraine could really hold off the Russian invasion and trying to decide whether they should give us weapons, or it would all just be a waste. This was my feeling at the time, I remember it very clearly.
It has been an emotional rollercoaster when the joy of liberation of territories was followed by harrowing discoveries of atrocities committed by the Russian occupiers. Mass graves, torture chambers, and the deportation of children. The entire world was shocked. Was it the atrocities committed by the Russians that have moved the world, or the ability of Ukrainians to take back our land and fight off the enemy with the little weapons we had at that moment?
We have realised that the war is not going to end soon. This is not a sprint, but a marathon. However, now we feel the support. Getting military help was critical for Ukraine’s survival.
We are determined. We must win because there is no other choice. This is a matter of survival. Now we are more confident in ourselves, in what we can achieve, and in those who stand with us and support Ukraine.
Dave Eggers: You have travelled around the world since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion and spoken about your experience. What were the misperceptions and false narratives that you were trying to correct?
Yuliya Musakovska: This is a very interesting and complex question. The main thing was calling this war “Russia’s war”, “a conflict”, or just “the war in Ukraine”, when the oppressor is being left out of the equation – as if it is not at fault, as if it does not exist.
Another thing was the idea that all Ukrainians wanted to leave the country. This is very hurtful because all those who are leaving have the hope to return home – of course, if they have a home to come back to. Leaving the country under such circumstances is not like going on a vacation or travelling to visit your family. It is a completely devastating reason to leave everything behind.
There are also many efforts on Russia's side to spread propaganda. Some media outlets, even if they are sympathising with Ukrainians as victims suffering from the aggression, often repeat the narratives about this war being “US-financed”, about how giving weapons to Ukraine is “prolonging” the war, and how we should sit down and negotiate with Russia and then the peace will come. They say that without knowing the historical background of our relationship. The fake narrative of “brotherly nations” is also somehow inserted into people’s minds. Now it should be obvious to everyone that there is nothing in common between Russians and Ukrainians, and [that] the main difference is the set of core values that we do not share.
Of course, the idea of the “greatness” of Russian culture is still present, and somehow it is not conflicting with the events of the Russian war in Ukraine. These two things exist as two separate entities, and this is really infuriating. Our diplomats and cultural activists have been doing a lot of work on the cultural front. A recent example is the Metropolitan Museum of Art renaming Edgar Degas’s Russian Dancers to Dancers in Ukrainian Dress. Should have been Ukrainian Dancers, but it is still progress. We are trying to reclaim the artists who have Ukrainian identity at their core, like Ilya Repin and Ivan Aivazovsky. There are so many examples of this cultural appropriation.
There is still a lot of work to be done here. As long as people are open and willing to listen, we will try to explain and convince them. To take back what is ours.
Dave Eggers: That was the point of our mission. PEN America’s delegation came to Ukraine in December 2022 to highlight cultural erasure as a weapon of war. The key part of the Russian strategy is to pretend that Ukrainian culture as a distinct entity never existed and should be subsumed again.
It was very interesting to see the fierce determination on the part of everyone we met to reclaim, reidentify, to make sure that Ukrainian culture was distinguished clearly. We visited the National Museum of Ukrainian History in Kyiv and talked with one of the guides there about her own efforts to educate, one by one, people who have been coming to the museum since 2014. She felt like it was her responsibility, person after person, school group after school group, to tell this story and to clarify things.
She also drew an interesting distinction between generations. Those of you who grew up after the independence seem to have a more fierce and clear sense of Ukrainian identity than the generations before, who grew up under Soviet rule. Can you talk about this generational divide?
Yuliya Musakovska: I would not say that the difference is purely generational. Of course, the younger generation is more active, but this is just natural. I think this difference depends mostly on the experience that one’s family had during the Soviet occupation. Those who were persecuted by the Soviets, their families and relatives, and those who took part in the liberation movements would not see surrendering to Russia as an option.
Both sides of my family had horrible experiences during Soviet rule. Russia has always been seen as a potential enemy. My grandmother’s entire family was deported as ethnic Ukrainians at the time of exchange of ethnic groups between the Soviet Union and Poland during the Second World – it was easier for the Soviets to control the monolithic ethnicity on the lands they had occupied. My father was forced to quit university because of his avid interest in foreign languages and Western culture. There are zero positive sentiments about the Soviet past in my family. My grandfather, who is still alive, was born in Armenia and served in the Soviet army during the Second World War because he was forced to. He is 95, and he clearly says that Putin is a crazy maniac who must be stopped.
On the other hand, some people were part of the system. Some of them, unfortunately, passed this nostalgia for the Soviet times to the younger generation. Sometimes we hear younger people, who have never lived through Soviet times, saying how nice it was back then, how ice cream tasted differently, sausages were cheap, and everybody was just nicer – simply because they heard it from their relatives. Those who know history know why sausage was cheap: it was because millions of people were doing slave labour on collective farms for the Soviets.
At the same time, many people vividly remember Gulag and the Holodomor, the great artificial famine inflicted by Stalin. If you think about the percentage of the generational divide you were talking about, maybe, the majority longing for the Soviet past is, indeed, among older people. But the majority of the older generation is not like that. There are many stories of senior citizens donating their life savings to help the army, and older ladies volunteering to cook food or knit socks for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They do everything they can. So I really would not divide it by generation.
Dave Eggers: When we met the deputy mayor of Bucha, she told us that most of the residents that had stayed during the occupation were older people; they simply refused to leave. I also kept meeting people whose grandparents and parents were still living in Mariupol. They refused to leave because this is their home.
During our visit, we toured many sights, including a little town called Yahidne, where the Russian troops came to set up a base to attack Chernihiv. They took hostage about 350 people, and they kept them in a basement of a school for about a month. Twelve people died during the occupation. The groundskeeper of the school showed us the site. I remember other journalists saying, “This story has been told many times, we do not need to tell it again”. I personally did not know this story. I came back to the US and told it to people, and no one I knew had heard it. So I decided to write about Yahidne again in a longer piece that I am finishing now.
The Western media is so driven by new stories. How do you tell the world that we need to continue to remind everybody about what happened, especially in the early days? How do you keep people from forgetting all these atrocities and war crimes?
Yuliya Musakovska: I think this phenomenon of “Ukraine fatigue” appeared pretty early. We started hearing about it last summer, just a few months into the full-scale war. But this is our reality. This is what we are living through. And this is the truth.
Reaching outlets and people with this news is becoming more and more difficult. But I think, once you start telling really personal stories and you reach the audience on a human level, the conversation becomes completely different. That is why I used all my vacation time last year to travel and talk about Russia’s war against Ukraine.
As witnesses, our role is to testify. This work may be systematic and boring, but we have to continue doing it. Telling personal stories of different people who have changed their lives completely, artists and writers who have abandoned their craft and went to serve in the army. We have no other choice but to keep repeating and explaining why it is important not only for Ukraine, and what would happen if Ukraine falls. Many people do not realise that the failure of Ukraine’s struggle for independence and freedom will have a horrible meaning to the entire world. It will signal other authoritarian states that they may act as they wish.
We are not fighting just for our own freedom, we are defending not just our own land, we are the shield that prevents evil from spreading further.
Dave Eggers: This is where storytelling is important – to make sure that these stories are told in many different venues, are told very personally, and from new perspectives. Ukrainian writers have to continue finding new ways to awaken audiences and make people feel what it’s like, and tell stories of people who cannot do it themselves.
Starting from 2014, but especially in the last year, how has your own writing been? Do you ever find your own fatigue, a time where you would like to write about something other than Russian aggression?
Yuliya Musakovska: As you mentioned, reaching people emotionally can be very effective, and poetry is a great tool for that.
I had not been able to write in the first few weeks of the full-scale war. And then, when I started again, the first poem I wrote was in English. I just couldn’t find words to express what was going on in Ukrainian.
I started writing about Russia’s war back in 2014-2015. There was this feeling that the war was not going to end in the east of Ukraine and in Crimea; a looming threat for the entire country persisted.
Since the full-scale invasion happened, I have not felt as if there is something else to write about at this moment. I do not write a lot, but when I do, I write about war.
War affects the way we see things like love, family, and friendship. They do not disappear, they continue to exist, and we appreciate them more than before – because every day may be our last one. Even if we write about those things, it is still through the lens of war.
There are lots of books written for children about the war. A great example is Children of Air Raid Alarms by Larysa Denysenko. It has already been translated into various languages. There is also a seemingly child-ish book by Oleksandr Mykhed, Cat, Rooster, Cupboard, which is not a book for children but it is composed that way. It is based on the events that happened in Borodyanka in the Kyiv region.
Dave Eggers: I was very moved when I was there for the funeral of children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko. I felt very shattered by his death and the way he died. I felt a kinship with him in terms of what he wrote about.
What I have been trying to get across in my essays from the trip is how incredibly high-functioning Kyiv, Lviv and so many cities in Ukraine are. It is astonishing that the restaurants are working, the concerts are taking place, the subways are always full, and life is going on. There is unbelievable resistance in everybody’s determination to continue living, and living fully, despite this existential war.
When you travel in the West, do you find that people understand that life is going on in Ukraine?
Yuliya Musakovska: I am telling people about that, but they mostly think that everything is somehow damaged or broken. I can feel it in my daily work. My day job is in IT. The first days of the full-scale war were very challenging because we had to keep our business running, and we were getting tons of messages from the clients asking what was going on and how everything was functioning. After a while, they realised that nothing has changed from our side, and we continued to deliver what we have been delivering before.
When you were planning your trip to Ukraine, what were your expectations? Have they changed after you visited Lviv and Kyiv?
Dave Eggers: I did expect a war zone from border to border. I did not expect, pulling into Lviv, to see busy traffic, hotels, and generator-powered lights downtown. Life in these cities is going on. Restaurants are working, grocery stores are full, and you can buy whatever you want to. This surprised everyone back in the US. On the border with Poland, we saw an endless line of supply trucks coming to Ukraine. I found this incredibly surprising and inspiring.
I interviewed many people, perhaps too many to even write about, but I was astonished by the fierceness of people’s desire to stay, especially younger people that I met, students, PhD students, people that have been working on anti-corruption measures before the full-scale invasion started, agencies that were working in the east of Ukraine to create stable local administrations to resist the Russian colonial takeover.
It has been almost three months since I left, and I am still unpacking everything that I saw and everybody I talked to. I was very sad to leave Ukraine because I loved my time there so much, as grim and shattering as it was to see the sites of mass graves, Yahidne, the bridge in Irpin, the destroyed neighbourhoods, and to meet people who had lost their loved ones. It was alternately shattering and inspiring.
Edited by Cammie McAtee
Photo: Wilhelm Gunkel/Unsplash