Dark Side of the Moon

Language is the house of being. This famous expression belongs to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. No matter how we treat or condemn him and his ideological preferences, this man was right when he said so. Indeed, language, if it does not form a being, determines a certain range of human perceptions of this boundless world. What you are able to name, you are certainly able to see. What you can see, you have a chance to understand.

The unconditional correlation between being and language is comprehensible. What is questionable is the attempt to cram the entire world, all eternity, and all otherworldliness into the framework of a single language. No matter how beautiful it may be. Language as a form of consciousness, into which sometimes the bittersweet chocolate of our present is poured, and sometimes is poured a stream of blood. And only if I try to think about it in this register, is there then a chance to understand how it happened that in my life at the end of my fifth decade I changed my language from Russian, my mother tongue, to Ukrainian.

…

The year 2022 turned out to be deeply difficult. In January, most of the world’s media, together with US intelligence, predicted a Russian invasion. In Ukraine, people reacted to this news in different ways. Some seriously prepared for this disaster. Some, like my wife and I, tried not to think about the hard things, and instead diligently turned our attention to current affairs and creative projects. Although, to be honest, my Olesya and I had been thinking about the possibility of  war for the last eight years. We felt it coming. We knew for sure that it would happen.

The fact is that for my family this war between Russia and Ukraine began not now, but back in 2014. For us it began when Russian militants entered our city of Donetsk—a provincial industrial town in eastern Ukraine. They entered and took it quickly without a fight.

Donetsk was not small, this city, almost a million people lived there and if we take into account the entire conglomerate of small towns and villages surrounding  the city, probably over three million. But in 2014 Russia prepared its special operation much better. And, we, Ukrainians, were absolutely unprepared for such an outright brazen invasion. We were dumbfounded by what happened then. We could not believe what we were seeing. On the eve of the invasion, no one could seriously conceive that Russia, our “big brother,” as so many people in eastern Ukraine thought of them, would invade our lands and start cutting away pieces of our territory. But it happened. This so-called “Russian Spring.” This brazen invasion, this violation of international treaties and laws. This annexation by Russia of the Ukrainian Crimea and a large chunk of Donbas—an industrial region, of which our hometown, Donetsk, has always been a part.

…

Donetsk was a predominantly Russian-speaking city, although this was not always the case. In the first third of the twentieth century, Ukrainian was the dominant language in these lands. But this changed after the Second World War. Workers were brought in from all over the multilingual Soviet Union to restore the coal and metallurgical industries destroyed by the war, which, together with the agricultural sector, formed the economic foundation of the region. Many more people came here on their own to hide from the Soviet punitive system. A blind eye was turned to those who took jobs in the mines and they were usually not touched by the penal authorities. The common language for this new multi-ethnic population was Russian. And the Soviet government, for almost all the years of its existence, continued the strategy of tsarist Russia towards Ukrainians; it diligently implemented special measures to Russify the region. This strategically important industrial region had to become predominantly Russian-speaking, so that by the time of my birth the Russian language dominated in the large cities of eastern Ukraine. Anyone for whom education, a good job, or career growth was important had to speak Russian.

My parents wrote, read and spoke exclusively Russian. The first book I ever read was in Russian. I studied Ukrainian in school, but I could not communicate in Ukrainian at all until 2014.

At university, I studied at the Faculty of Russian Philology. I wrote my first poems, short stories, and novels exclusively in Russian and received international literary awards for them in Moscow. Until the age of forty-five, until the arrival of Russian “defenders” in my house, I had no idea that I would one day learn Ukrainian, that I would one day write in two languages or that  one day such events would occur, after which I would forever stop communicating in the language of my of my first books, my first literary work, the language of my mother and father.

When Russians seized Ukrainian territories in 2014 under the guise of protecting the Russian-speaking population, it suddenly turned out that Russian militants had came to my city to protect me from my homeland. These were the slogans they wrapped themselves in. But I did not need to be protected! For forty-five years I had been using the Russian language exclusively in my everyday life, in my education, in my creativity and no one has ever said a bad word to me. When I began to realize the literal meaning of those Russian slogans, the rhetoric that the Russian propaganda machine used and still uses, I was shocked. These slogans about the protection of the Russian-speaking population made me, me, Volodymyr Rafeenko, one of the main reasons for this war. Do you understand? The reason for the annexation of Ukrainian territories, this horror that began in my city with the arrival of these “defenders.” That is, the very cause of this tragedy that was playing out in the city of my childhood was none other than myself. And I was guilty, in fact, only in that  I had spoken and written Russian since childhood.

Of course, these armed people who occupied the center of my city in early July 2014 were not at all actually interested in the fate of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. In fact they did not care about it at all. They were just doing their dirty work for a bit of money. The propaganda machine of Russia, inventing these slogans, had in mind not so much us, the inhabitants of the region, but Europe, the United States, and the Western world.At that time my family and I then lived in the very center of Donetsk, twenty meters from the boulevard named after the Russian poet Pushkin. In the days of the so-called “Russian Spring,” literally under our windows, long bus convoys stopped, bringing hundreds of Russians from Russia, who then went to the square in front of the building of the regional state administration and there on the cameras of Russian TV channels play acted the enthusiasm and joy of the “local population.” It was a bad, but well-paid theater.

As we looked at all this we slowly realized the depth of the abyss to which our city was heading and us along with it. Much later we learned that a developed network of Russian subversive groups was operating in Donetsk in early 2014. That this spring had been prepared for a long time and thoughtfully. For years before that, Russians had been recruiting and attracting the heads of Donetsk law enforcement agencies to their side. At the beginning of this special operation, they were at least loyal to the systematic seizure of the city, sabotaged security measures, and allowed agents of influence and officers of the Russian special services to do their job. In that spring, people who came to pro-Ukrainian rallies with slogans of unity of Ukraine were exposed to terrible danger. There was simply no one to protect the civilian population in the city.

That year spring turned out to be blooming and frothy. Almost every day there were showers, through which orange hot lightning struck and struck again over the city. The greenery was incredibly abundant. The smell of apricot made my head spin. The smell of doom and flowering trees floated over Donetsk. We hoped that Kyiv would send military and police units to Donetsk to clear the city of Russian mercenaries. But our hopes were not to be fulfilled.

…

By July, it became clear that the “Russian Spring” had turned into an open occupation. There was simply no chance for Ukraine to return to the region in the near future. The situation had gone too far. My family and I had to decide what to do.

To be honest, we did not hesitate for long. We saw the faces of those who came to our city with weapons. We heard what they were talking about. We clearly understood that if we stayed in the city, with our pro-Ukrainian views, we would not survive.

We left everything: our homes, our friends, our parents who did not want to leave, because they still had sentiments about Russia as a “brotherly country.” Theparks and rivers, the familiar streets from childhood. The vast and boundless Donetsk steppe, which I know of nothing better than. And the great Ukrainian sun that rose every day over the steppe, full of grasses and springs, and floated there all day to the west over the sown fields, fertile gardens, overall this life that was already doomed to death.In the train from Donetsk to Kyiv I looked at the moon rolling over our steppe, and thought that it, like me, also has two sides that never meet. The side that everyone sees and the one that is always hidden from view, unseen by our eyes. In my soul, the clear and open side has always been the Russian language. It was natural to speak and write Russian in my Russian-speaking family, in my Russian-speaking region. But there was also a side that remained invisible for many years. My grandmother’s, my father’s and my mother’s native language was Ukrainian. And if the first books I read were in Russian, the first folk tales I listened to were in Ukrainian. My late grandmother Marfa Oleksandrivna told them to me in my childhood. It was the custom in my family to talk about our strange situation with language, but after everything that happened, I realized that I had to do something.

So on that train, on that sleepless night, when I was leaving my city forever, I promised myself that I would learn Ukrainian, that I would speak and write in this language. And I would do it so that everyone who has eyes can see that for a Ukrainian, even if he was born in Donbas, the Ukrainian language is not a problem. Because every new language you master is happiness and joy. A new language is a  new key to the formation of the ontology of one’s life.

I cannot say that it was easy for me to fulfill the promises I made to myself on the night in 2014. It took me several years to master only the most conversational aspects of the language. Three more years and  I began to write my first novel in Ukrainian. I wrote and at the same time continued to study the language. I read in Ukrainian, listen to songs, and communicate in Ukrainian as best I could. It took another three years to finish the novel. But, as it seemed to me, those years were not in vain. The novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love was first published in Ukraine. And before the war, it was translated and published in English by the Ukrainian Institute of Harvard University and  translated by Mark Andryczyk.

I made a decision from that day on to write in two languages: one novel in Ukrainian, then one in Russian. And so on until my death. After Mondegreen I worked on a novel in Russian for almost three years. This winter I had planned to finish it. But then the full-scale Russian invasion began. After that, returning to it became impossible for me.

…

In early 2022, my wife and I were living in a friend’s country house thirty kilometers from Kyiv. A small country village located in the forest on the shore of the large beautiful Lake Gloria geographically approximately between Bucha and Borodyanka (you may have already heard these names in connection with the war in Ukraine). On February 24, year after year, my wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary. This year we decided not to go anywhere, as the covid times made traveling difficult. So we chose to celebrate our family holiday at home.

But on the morning of February 24, the day of our anniversary, Russia invaded Ukraine. Rockets attacked. Russian tank columns marched on Kyiv along the roads where we stood.  As early as nine o’clock in the morning, there were battles raging between us and the capital. Heavy artillery was firing. It was so loud that the house was shaking and the doors swung open by themselves.

In a matter of days, there was no electricity, no mobile communication, no water and no Internet. All communication stopped. Shops and pharmacies closed. There was no way to get anywhere. All roads around us were clogged with Russian military equipment, which the armed forces of Ukraine were diligently destroying. But the terrible truth was that we once again found ourselves in occupied territories. And there was no chance for rescue.

We lived under occupation for more than a month. I will not describe all the horrors of that time. Russians raging through the nearby villages. They killed civilians. They mocked the Ukrainian troops by placing  their tanks between the huts of the village, and firing from there, knowing full well that our people would not be able to shoot back at them without risking hitting the house. They did not come to our dacha cooperative in these first weeks of the war, because strategically it was not a good location for them. We had neither electricity nor water, and the Russians, of course, needed comfort. And besides this, perhaps the fact that on the map this series of summer cottages, which ran along the lake, was marked only as “Nearby Gardens.” It was not explained on the map what these “Nearby Gardens” were, so it is quite possible that the Russians thought that there were no people there, only gardens or woods. But whatever it was, frankly speaking, I was sure that my wife and I would not survive if we stayed. We were lucky. A friend in Kyiv found help connecting us with  volunteers who risked their lives to take us in their cars to Ukrainian territory. We drove slowly from one Russian checkpoint to another. As we passed by I looked at the tanks stationed between the village houses, and at the Russian soldiers checking our cars, and I thought about the impossibility of ever returning to the Russian language, at least in my work.

Finally the string of Russian checkpoints ended, and our Ukrainian ones began. The road to Kyiv was clear, and we were driving steadily towards the moon as it came out from behind the trees. The sun had not yet set, but the moon had already risen. I looked at it and realized that I would never be able to write in Russian again. The language of murderers, rapists, and thieves. I realized that my Russian language was completely moving to the dark side of the moon, that is, entering the shadow in which my Ukrainian language had been for almost fifty years. I also thought about my family, about old family stories and about the fact that life is a very strange and unpredictable thing.

…

I wrote a play about the weeks we spent under occupation, as well as a whole number of essays for various newspapers and magazines, mostly European. All this time I have been writing almost exclusively in Ukrainian. I think in Ukrainian. From the dark side of the moon sometimes I can hear the Russian-speaking voices of my soul, but my native language slowly begins to rest in me. She is perhaps present somewhere in my consciousness, but increasingly she recedes into the shadows.

The moon never shows us its dark side. The truth is that for the moon there is neither tragedy or existential tension. Nor does it feel the pain that is always with me now.