PEN in Ukraine

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Here's one response to the invasion of Ukraine built around the idea that the pen is mighty, not just a sword. It's an international gathering of writers in Greenwich Village, plus another group in Los Angeles beginning today. It's being organized by the free speech Writers group known as PEN. They're calling it an Emergency World Voices Congress in response to the invasion. It's part of their annual PEN World Voices Festival happening today through Saturday here in New York and in LA.

A main feature of this convening will be their annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, to be given this year by probably the best-known Ukrainian novelist and President of PEN Ukraine, Andrey Kurkov. His novel, Grey Bees, set in Eastern Ukraine after the Russian invasion of Crimea, is now out in paperback in this country, in English, translated from the original Russian. Andrey Kurkov joins us now along with PEN America CEO, Suzanne Nossel. Suzanne, welcome back, and Andrey Kurkov, thanks for coming on the show, welcome to WNYC.

Andrey Kurkov: Thank you for having me.

Suzanne Nossel: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Suzanne, would you set the festival scene for us first? You're making a point, I see, of concentrating a whole bunch of events in one New York neighborhood, Greenwich Village. A few writers have walked those streets over the years, Greenwich Village. Is it usually more spread out, though?

Suzanne Nossel: It has been more spread out in the past. We've always wanted to give people the experience of a true festival, where you can walk from event to event, and it's a whole immersive experience on a beautiful spring weekend. We're hoping that there's more of that feeling. It's very easy to take in two or three events in succession, particularly over the weekend. We're inviting New Yorkers to do that. I think we're all hungry for some inspiration, for some enlightenment, some voices from outside of our bubble. That's really what the festival provides.

Brian Lehrer: Did you even have a PEN World Voices Festival in person the last two years with the pandemic?

Suzanne Nossel: We did not. In 2020, it was very sad because the festival was entirely planned and ready to go in March, and, of course, we had to cancel the entire thing. We went virtual, but it was a far cry from the experience of these vibrant events and parties and people getting together, not having seen each other. Then last year, it was almost entirely virtual because the pandemic was really still raging. It's a big deal to be back in person. I think New Yorkers are hungry for this kind of engagement and the chance to meet writers face to face. It's actually remarkable. We've had one writer who has had to pull out due to COVID, but other than that, many dozens who are already here in the US ready to go. We are very excited about what's about to unfold over the next five days.

Brian Lehrer: Many dozens of writers with many dozens of laptops and iPads, no doubt. Andrey, I see a theme of the conference is the role of the writer in times of turmoil and brutality. Do you feel like you have a role in the current war as a Ukrainian writer or have the bombs and missiles and the physical bravery of the national defense overwhelmed whatever role writers might have?

Andrey Kurkov: Well, any Ukrainian writer has a role. Actually, they are playing different roles in this situation in Ukraine. I have been just reading, actually, messages from the frontline where Ukrainian writer and member of PEN Ukraine, Artem Chekh, is sitting in the trenches, actually, and fighting the enemy who is trying to occupy the whole of Ukraine. Majority of writers actually are writing essays and texts about what is happening now in Ukraine.

Personally, I stopped writing my novel that I was writing before the war, and I'm doing the same, actually, I'm giving talks and lectures about situation in Ukraine. I'm publishing several texts in different mass media over the world every week. I'm in touch with writers who are now actually in hiding in occupied territories in the town of Melitopol or in occupied Kherson.

The activists and the administration of Ukrainian PEN Center is keeping in touch with every member, and we are also collecting money to send money to those who are either as refugees abroad or even on occupied territories or as IDPs, internally displaced persons, in the western part of Ukraine. Most of the writers became either activists or-- They were activists, but they became much more active. They are trying to help the country and to help the other writers.

Brian Lehrer: Can you tell us a little bit about your novel, Grey Bees? First, what does the title refer to?

Andrey Kurkov: Well, actually, this is a novel about grey zone. Grey zone exists in every war, especially if the war is frozen. One can say the Ukrainian-Russian war in Donbas was frozen from 2014, 2015. Grey zone is a strip of land which has the same length as the frontline because this is the space between positions of the Russian and separatist army and positions of Ukrainian army. This grey zone is sometimes 300 meters wide, sometimes several miles wide. There were dozens of villages and even a part of the town of [unintelligible 00:05:58] that found themselves in this no man's land.

These villages were and are without electricity, without gas, without running water, without post offices and pharmacies, and any kind of medical help. There were thousands of people who remained there in the middle of the war. This, actually, novel, I wrote to give voice to these people because when I started writing this novel, there were already 200 books published about the war in Donbas and they were all about battles, about combat, about Ukrainian soldiers and separatists et cetera, but there was not much attention paid to the civilians that were caught up with the war.

This is a story about two enemies from the childhood, the only two inhabitants of the village who remained in the village after everyone else left because of the war. The main character, Sergeyich is the beekeeper. In the beginning, he defends, in this war, only his bees because he doesn't understand the reason for the war. At some point, he decides to take his bees away from the war for holidays to the Ukrainian-controlled territory to give them a chance to collect pollen on the fields not destroyed by the war and not covered with burned gunpowder.

It's this human story of somebody who is trying to understand what is happening, who is a bee, a human bee, because actually, he loves his bees because he also was a hard-working miner who didn't care about his salary or about what country he lives in because he was only working and surviving. This is a war about, also, annexation of Crimea because this is the first case when the life in the annexed Crimea is described. This is the third part of the novel. For this, I'm very grateful to Crimean Tatars who were my advisors and told me everything, what was happening there, and I could actually also describe Crimean Tatar life before and after annexation.

Brian Lehrer: I haven't read the book, I've only read about the book, but one thing I read is that a theme is about Ukrainians after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, maybe like your beekeeper, trying to live normal, private lives, but politics and war keep getting in the way. Would you put it that way yourself?

Andrey Kurkov: Well, this is part of the topic, but in fact, the main character slowly understands what is happening because naturally, he is good, he knows what is good and what is bad, what is truth and what is lie. The situations he find himself in, actually, make him not a better person but better understanding person, more politically engaged, more reflective. This is also about growing in one's head as a citizen from being just an inhabitant to the level of being a citizen of the country.

Brian Lehrer: Suzanne, that could be such a universal thought, right, in this country and so many places that maybe aren't even in the midst of the acute crisis that Ukraine is in right now, where people who are just trying to live their ordinary lives do a disservice if they don't get involved and then something makes them.

Suzanne Nossel: I agree, I think it's true in our own country, Brian. We've been in a series of cascading crises right here. As an organization that works on free expression issues, what we've witnessed over the last several years in terms of the denigration of truth, the rise of disinformation, online harassment, the demise of local news, the polarization, I think really forces all of us to consider our role in this. That's actually one of the reasons we're [unintelligible 00:09:59] the Emergency Writers' Congress that you mentioned, as part of the festival.

We felt, "Look, we've got all of these writers from all over the world who are grappling with this." It's a situation where really government is falling short. If we're relying on government to solve this chaos, it's clear that governments are defied and they're paralyzed internally. The question becomes, who's going to step forward? What is the role of civil society? What is the role of authors like Andrey, who have an important audience and message and power in their ability to deliver it? We're trying to use this moment in a catalytic way to elevate our collective ability to meet this moment.

Brian Lehrer: What else would you say, Suzanne, about the role of literature because the press release for the festival and this Emergency Congress of Writers that indicates an all-star lineup of international and American writers in discussion says it's going to be on climate, borders and migration, autocracy and democracy, history and ancestral lineage, and more. That list of topics could be for a convening of historians, scientists, and economists, the official experts in those fields. What's the central contribution of writers of fiction, of literature to what could sound like a public affairs meeting?

Suzanne Nossel: Yes, look, what I think writers bring uniquely is the ability to imagine, to see different futures, to envision things that our policymakers may exclude from their worldview, to help us see what may be on the far horizon, and how we get there. How do we get past this devastating situation in Ukraine? What might the future look like between Russia and its neighbors? How in this country do we overcome polarization? How do we come to grips with the ramifications of technology?

Can we invent a world where all of this feels a little more controllable, a little more humane, and it's really stories that awaken the ability to think beyond what can be the very confining and distressing parameters of our daily news cycle, wrapped up as we all are in the threads of our social media. We need authors to help us see beyond that, to pierce the bubble to be able to envisage something different, and then ultimately to work toward it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls in our remaining time, maybe any writers are out there and want to call in about the role of literature in wartime, the war in Ukraine or any other, 212-433-WNYC. Any readers of Andrey Kurkov, or anyone who wants to ask him a question just based on what you're hearing here, or anyone else, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer as we talk to Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, and arguably the leading writer of fiction in Ukraine and from Ukraine, Andrey Kurkov, his book, Grey Bees, set in Eastern Ukraine after the Russian invasion of Crimea is now out in paperback in this country, in English, translated from the original Russian.

He will be giving PEN America's annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture on Friday. In fact, I'll give you the ticket information about that. This is going to be at NYU Skirball Center Friday night at 6:30. You can also buy tickets to live stream it, and we'll have a link where people can get tickets or get more information, that's on our webpage at brianlehrershow.org.

Andrey, I saw where you told The New York Times that you're concerned that the war is going to make literature in Ukraine more militant and that while vigilance is certainly important right now, you're concerned that literature that may have been more emotionally, politically complex would become more simplistically militant. Am I reading into that correctly?

Andrey Kurkov: Well, some books definitely will be and are already because from 2014, we practically have two literatures in Ukraine instead of one, because we had until the beginning of this phase of the war, 400,000 Donbas war veterans. There were a lot of them who started writing books, not only novels and short stories, but diaries and memoirs and their thoughts and essays. At some point, a couple of years ago, we had already about 300 books published by these people, by these veterans. They set up their own publishing houses.

This literature is interesting, but at the same time, traditional writers were trying also to write about the war without their own military experience, but with a lot of empathy, with a lot of, I would say, patriotism and excitement. This bulk of literature, of course, is of different quality, and some books are very good, but some books, and many of these books, they will not remain, but they are the reaction to the war, the reaction to what is happening and what was happening in Ukraine.

Ukrainian literature before 2014 was very poetic, romantic, and was not very much politically engaged because for Ukrainian writers, after 1991, the political novels or novels about social issues were something that would provoke associations with the Soviet past where all the writers were writing politically correct, ideologically correct pro-Soviet pros. This is changing now completely. I hope we will have enough love stories also after this war, but the war will remain very present.

Brian Lehrer: Jean in Brooklyn has what looks like a really interesting question. Jean, you're on WNYC.

Jean: Hi. Can you hear me?

Andrey Kurkov: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Sure can.

Jean: Okay. No, I just wondered if Andrey knows whether the writings that Ukrainians are doing about the war are reaching Russians in Russia.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and you write in Russian, Andrey, right?

Andrey Kurkov: I write fiction in Russian and nonfiction in Ukrainian and children's books in both languages. The books written in Ukraine are not to reach Russia, including my books which were not published in Russia since 2008. Actually, Russians prefer either to remain unaware of what is written in Ukraine, or they are limited by the actual limited access to internet because they don't have access now to Facebook, to Twitter, to Instagram, to YouTube. It was switched off inside Russia by Russian authorities to keep Russian society away from the reality of the world.

Brian Lehrer: That's unfortunate. Even your books are being blocked, basically, from getting the truth into Russia, even works of literature, or works of fiction. To that point, Suzanne, I see that the press release says the festival is in part to forge connections between writers and intellectuals as a counterweight to hostile standoffs. Crucial discussions will collapse geographical distance and bring together colliding perspectives. How far can that go? You probably don't bring Russian pro-invasion writers to have a dialogue with Andrey, somehow I don't think so. In the context of this war, at least, is there some version of something?

Suzanne Nossel: Yes, sure. It's a good question, and it's a delicate issue, as you can imagine. It has not been the moment for that type of convening, even dissident Russian writers, many of whom have left the country, there is an understandable sense, I think, and Andrey can speak to this, that Ukrainian writers, for them, it's not the moment for that kind of engagement. That said, the interlocutor with Andrey on Friday night after his Arthur Miller lecture, by his own choice, is Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-American writer who we all know and love. That is a form of dialogue.

At the Writers' Congress on Friday, we'll also have writers from around the world, including a few Russian-American writers. That is an important way of keeping some level of dialogue open, and we look toward a moment where more will be possible and where conflicting perspectives will come together. It's not necessarily people who are in favor of Putin's invasion, but just even giving a Russian perspective at this moment for a country that's under bombardment, that's not necessarily the message that people are ready to hear.

We've got interesting debates within PEN about how to deal with Russian culture right now. Should it be boycotted, should we separate the actions of the regime from individual writers and artists and allow them to be considered on their own terms. PEN is an organization of writers, and so by their nature, we don't always agree on everything and that's been a really important and complex thing to wrestle with.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Andre, I'm curious, since you're in New York, how you see free speech in the United States. I don't mean just if you've been here a few days, how you see it on this trip, but if you have any observations in general, looking in from the outside, there are very heated debates here, as you probably know, from both left and right.

Andrey Kurkov: I was asked many times about what I think about freedom of press, freedom of speech in the States and in Western Europe. I can tell you that actually, we have similar freedom of speech and freedom to write in Ukraine. Although, of course, in the war time, not many people listen to what one wants to say. Regarding different opinions about the war in Ukraine, in the States, I know that some people think that America is guilty because they believe Russian narrative, and Russians are very good at propaganda and spreading any kind of fake news and false narratives.

In France, I know that if somebody is pro-Putin, it means he is anti-American. The same is happening now in Latin America where Russia is very active, spreading the propaganda that Ukraine is an anti-Semitic country, and Ukraine is run by fascists, and of course, Ukraine and Ukrainian writers cannot counteract on mass in this situation, although everybody who is interested even for two minutes to go into Google and to find out that in Ukraine, a Jewish Russian-speaking young man was elected as a president with 73% of the vote. This will quash immediately any kind of anti-Semitic accusations of Ukraine.

The same can be told about so-called fascist government because in the Parliament of Ukraine, there is not a single nationalistic party present. I enjoy freedom of speech in America, in New York. I don't mind when people disagree with me and they say their own opinion, because I respect my opinion, but I respect the opponents' if they are not using fake news and false narratives as argument.

Brian Lehrer: Since you mentioned fake news and false narratives, before you go, I know you've got to go in a couple of minutes, you write book-length stories, do you also use Twitter, or other social media?

Andrey Kurkov: I do use Twitter and Facebook. That's my main media. I'm present on Instagram but what I write usually on Facebook is copied automatically to my Instagram page.

Brian Lehrer: What do you do in those short forms?

Andrey Kurkov: I'm trying to pass the most important messages or the most important captures of the war of the situation in Ukraine because I know people are always in a hurry, they don't have time, but even those who are interested to find out more, they don't have time. One should be very attentive when choosing what to post, what information to share. I'm trying to be active every day, it is not easy because I am on the move, I'm going from Ukraine usually by car, I live in car in the nearest airport in Eastern Europe, flying to one or another country, and trying to write articles at the same time, giving talks, and share what I think is important on Twitter and on Facebook.

Brian Lehrer: Suzanne, last question in this segment. I'm just curious if you have any thoughts about Elon Musk saying yesterday that he would let Donald Trump back on Twitter once his purchase of that platform is finalized, which could be a few months, but he said one of the reasons not to ban someone like Trump permanently, is that doing so, in a way, feeds the radicalization of people who are drawn by what he says because it makes him look like more of a victim. I wonder if you have an opinion about that.

Suzanne Nossel: Yes, look, I have some sympathy for that perspective and I've argued myself before the election in 2020, that Trump should not be removed from the platform, that there was some benefit to American voters [unintelligible 00:24:31] but they hear this unfiltered version of the then president and judge for themselves, and I think there's even some evidence that that may have made a difference. I think primarily, though, that a platform like Twitter or Facebook has got to articulate a rationale. I think Musk is right in the sense that he's focusing on the fact that this is a permanent ban.

What is the justification for that? Perhaps there is one, incitement to violence, is that a permanent strike where your account cannot be restored? I think it's crucial if he takes over. Even if he doesn't, this is something Twitter never did, which is really articulate and spell out the rules that they were enforcing. This came across as an arbitrary decision. Facebook, their oversight board made the same comment and said the company's got to come up with an articulable rationale for how it's going to handle a case like this.

I think that relates directly to your point, which is, without that, people will just think this is high-handed, it's politically motivated, this is a company of Silicon Valley left leaners who just don't like Trump, and that does increase polarization and antagonism and I think has fueled some of Trump's support. It's complicated.

Brian Lehrer: Versus the fake news and even the danger that provocation could put people in so that conversation continues. Listeners, if you want to see Andrey Kurkov give the 2022 Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture as part of the PEN America World Voices Festival, it's Friday night at 6:30 at NYU Skirball Center. You can also buy tickets to live stream it from wherever you are. We have a link where people can get tickets and more information that's on our page at brianlehrershow.org. Andrey and Suzanne, thank you so, so much.

Suzanne Nossel: Thank you, Brian.

Andrey Kurkov: Thank you.

 

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