editorial About “I Used to Live Here”
by Mariya Deykute & Arlyce Menzies
We are all out of our depth when it comes to war. What authority stands through this earth-shaking, even as buildings and bodies, institutions and gods fall? If I believe in any, it’s the power of the universal/ intimate voices we hear in art.
And I feel that in these voices, if in anything, lies the “truth of the world” – the complexity and humanity of what is happening in Ukraine and outside her borders; the impact not of enormous geopolitical shifts or agendas or debates, but the butterfly effect of millions of personal horrors. The pain echoes – and its soundscape, its fathomless depth – is not abstract or distant, or detached. War has a way of simplifying realities, especially if we are outside looking in. But the voices in this issue remind us that no matter where we are, we are all in it. They are asking us to come to terms with a momentous, ongoing, tragic breaking point – but also with the realities of lives, art, and identities disrupted by the war in Ukraine.
The works of The Izmail City Organization of the National Union of Ukrainian Artists introduced by Dr. Tetyana Stanislavivna Shevchuk and featured in the gallery were created before the February invasion of Ukraine. As Shevchuk wrote in 2020, “Landscape holds a special place in the paintings of local artists.” Dmytro Ivanovich Dyoshin’s "Old Artsyz" shows a winter street flattened, immediate in its vertical presentation of characters– boys playing in the snow, a woman at a well, street performers, and pretzel peddlers. “Coziness, love of rural life, and simple everyday things are conveyed in the works of Sergei Afanasyev Kostov and many other artists,” Shevchuk pointed out. “The Hearth” by Kostov, the quintessential center of the home, exemplifies this. From the holiday preparations and field work in the depictions by Volodimir Mikolayevich Afanasyev to the “Childhood Memories” of Tamara Markivna Tkach and fish dirigible dream by Alla Petrivna Chakir, these works are meditations on “home,” on tradition, land, and culture. They reflect seasons and ages that are past even before the artist finishes the work.
Rubble can all look the same to those who haven’t lived in the places leveled by artillery and bombs. To those who know those grounds which are now epicenters of violence, social media pictures show once-familiar streets lined with poplar trees, now blocked by blackened carcasses of cars; classrooms where they spent a year or more sitting, learning, now crushed through to the floor below; and “home” demolished. If you compare the most current artworks in this conversation to the ones included in the pre-invasion gallery, you can catch a glimpse of how Shevchuk’s observation that Volodimir Mikolayevich Dudnik’s “provincial motifs from the life of cities and villages of Bessarabia evoke a sense of peace, tranquility” (“Everything will be Fine!”) is gone from his more recent “Spring.” Valeria Yurivna Leventsova, painter of the Cubist take on the painted eggs for which Ukraine is famous, “Pysanka Rhythms,” wrote about her recent piece “Русский корабль- иди на…”: “On May 9, I wanted to draw lilacs or dandelions, but because of the alarming situation in Odessa, after my beloved city was bombed once again, I decided to calm my nerves– I made my own version of ‘Russian Ship- Go to …’. Although I am an intelligent person, knowing about the atrocities of the fascists, it's hard to survive all this, to be constantly in the zone of a real threat of a missile strike.” The pre-invasion piece that tops the current conversation page is Tetyana Mikhailivna Mitaki’s “The Road Home.” We’ve also included Gritsenko’s recent "Keys to the House... We'll be Back." Both of these works evoke nostalgia for the familiarity of home.
Dangerously, the yearning for what used to be – whether real, or imaginary; fabricated or remembered – is also used to create Putin’s construct of the ‘Russian World’. This ideology, frankensteined over the years of grudges, nostalgia, xenophobia, misinterpretation, and gatekeeping, is Auden’s Ogre whose malicious fists demolish the very landscape it claims as its own, kills the people it claims to liberate, and tears to shreds not only Ukrainian cities and lives, but also Russian society and future. And like Auden’s Ogre, it tries to lay claim to the Russian language itself. Some authors in this issue vehemently and poignantly dispute this claim and take ownership of the Russian language for themselves – in the poems and essays by Kazakhstani scholars and authors Kseniya Rogozhnikova, Ivan Poltoratsky, Mikhail Akulov and Yuriy Serebryanski that consider not only the ongoing war in Ukraine, but the echoes of Almaty’s Bloody January and the general future of decolonized Russian; in the autofiction of Grozny native Shamil Didi that unflinchingly stares at the culture of sexualized violence and ravenous yearning; and even, perhaps most poignantly, in the work of Ukrainian poets like Maria Galina, Lera Bondareva and Olga Bragina who are writing in the epicenter of the war. Others, like art historian Tetyana Shevchuk, choose to write in Ukrainian, with language as a celebration, a necessity, and a statement. There is no escape from the fact that the breaking point of history that Olga Bragina writes “is happening here and now” is a loss not only of physical landscapes, homes, and realities where we used to live, but is also an irretrievable, but perhaps necessary, loss and reckoning of our linguistic realities and identities. As Ivan Poltoratskiy writes — with the painful clarity of truth — “Nothing changed in our lives before. Maybe someone built a windmill. And also, we are no longer there.” What the world will look like tomorrow will depend on how we are able to walk, speak, write, think – forward and look into the eyes of the present, the now. The authors in this issue and the artists are doing just that – each within their own complex world of a human being.
Each in our own depths, through refusing to abstract from what is happening now, we can share in what will be tomorrow.
