Imaginary Worlds - A Nation Dreams of Itself

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine shocked the world, but this conflict was foreshadowed in Ukrainian and Russian speculative fiction. I talk with several fantasy writers in Ukraine about how they’ve used speculative fiction to break away from Russia’s sphere of influence, and why magic and folklore can be valuable tools to explore and defend their sense of national identity. I also talk with Ukrainian ex-pats in the U.S. about how Russian fantasy and sci-fi has grown increasingly imperialistic in recent years with fantasies of restoring a lost empire. Featuring Maria Galina, Borys Sydiuk, Volodymir Arenev, Svitlana Taratorina, Alex Shvartsman, and Anatoly Belilovsky. You can help donate to organizations resettling refugees like Direct Relief, Mercy Corps, International Medical Corps and Save the Children. This episode is sponsored by Brooklinen. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Like many people in the world, I can't stop thinking about Ukraine. And Ukraine was never

just a place on a map for me. The Malinsky family emigrated from Ukraine. My grandfather was 15 when he came here, and he told us many stories about his childhood in Ukraine. So in the last few weeks, I've begun to wonder, what is Ukrainian science fiction and fantasy? How does a country dream about itself through its speculative fiction? Now, back in 2017, I did an episode about Soviet science fiction. So I reached out to one of my guests from that episode for suggestions. And she put me in touch with a writer in Ukraine. And that person put me in touch with more writers in Ukraine. I wasn't sure if they'd be able to talk with me.

But I got the sense that they're actually glad to have something to focus on besides the war. Although the war was never far from their minds. Like I spoke with Maria Galina. For now, she's staying put in her home in Odessa. All right, well, first of all, how are you doing? I don't know really, because I'm in Odessa, and in Odessa there is comparatively calm here, unless I'm shooting from the sea. But to compare, for example, for Kharkov or Kiev, it is very, very calm. When life was much calmer, she wrote novels.

One of them was about folk legends of Lviv. And Lviv is the city in the west of Ukraine. And there is a lot of legends which is connected with mystical creations, mystical creations in Lviv. And it is very closely connected with Poland and Polish folklore. I also spoke with Svitlana Taratorina and her friend, Volodymyr Arenov. Svitlana is from Kyiv, but like many Ukrainians, she's fled to Lviv because it's to the far west near the Polish border. But before the war, I wrote the novels, sci-fi and fantasy novels, and some comics and the book for children. And I liked this very much, but now I can't say when I will be able to write again.

Her friend Voldemir has written over 20 novels across different fantasy genres, including a book called Ashes of Dragon Bones. And it's about dragon bones in the ground because in the past, dragons ruled these countries and their tyranny built this empire. But these days, he's staying put in the countryside, far from his home in Kiev. Now I'm sitting here and I don't write, but I hope I will. Maybe in the near days, because sometimes you just need to do this just for harmonization.

It might be challenging for some writers to feel creative during this time, but it's also tempting to dream about other worlds, when the real world is terrifying. In fact, Svetlana says even the way her friends have been talking about the war, they keep referring to fantasy epics. They keep referring to fantasy epics. Like we called our enemy, our Russian invaders, orcs, like from Tolkien saga, yes? Today in news I read, we called some troops on the Kiev, who lost in our forest. We called him like Waldens.

From Martin? Yeah, yeah, from George Martin, yeah. They write like this, and we called ourselves like Gonder, and we fight against murder. Maria Galina also told me that the story which has been giving her the most inspiration these days is Lord of the Rings. there is a sight of darkness and there is a sight of light and there is no shades of there is just you have to do very true things you have to do the right things yeah that makes a lot of sense uh because i remember in this country after 9-11 a lot of people found like as you said um found psychotherapeutic comfort in lord of the rings and lord of the rings movies because i mean even though it is this sort of binary world of light and dark um it doesn't feel simplistic i mean actually feels quite scary when

you're the one who has to confront these forces that have attacked you or have invaded you. Yeah, it is very scary. And I myself now look the Lord of the Rings movie. Oh, really? Yeah. You've been watching it again? Yeah, again and again. I wish the ring had never come to me.

I wish none of this had happened. So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you. When it comes to life imitating art, there's been a lot of discussion about how President Zelensky was an actor in a sitcom about a regular guy that becomes president, and the parallels between real life and fiction are eerie. But as I looked into the way that speculative fiction has been developing in Eastern Europe, I discovered that this conflict has also been playing out in imaginary spaces for Russians and Ukrainians long before it spilled out into the real world. We'll explore that after the break. losses work on Kraken? Let's say I have a birthday party on Wednesday night, but an important meeting

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Blackberry Yuzu and Mango Starfruit. Try them today, only at Tim's. At participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's Restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. During the Soviet era, Ukrainian speculative fiction was published in Russian. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian authors still wrote and published their books in Russian because they wanted to sell them in a much bigger market. But when Russia took Crimea in 2014,

Svitlana and Volodymyr told me that was a wake-up call, not just politically, but culturally. I think there appeared a lot of writers who started writing in this moment, like me, and we started to write, first of all, from Ukrainian language. We had an idea to develop Ukrainian language, speculative fiction since 2014. Would I notice certain themes coming up, certain genres people like? And what would I observe to say like, oh, you know, I've noticed that a lot of Ukrainian speculative fiction is about this and often speaks to these particular themes? I would say, okay, tell, tell, tell. All our books are so Ukrainian, and all books of Volodymyr are so Ukrainian. It's about our land, our tradition, our folklore, our history.

It's about us and for us, first of all, but about us for the world? I would say many of our stories, I mean, novels and stories wrote in these days are about war and about occupation and about our history in post-colonial point of view. Because many, many people

want to explore ourselves and how we could do this, by the history, by our traditions, by the understanding where exactly we are in this whole world. What is our role? History, alternative history, you know, a subgenre, is one of our very important parts of science fiction and fantasy. And then fantasy, surely fantasy about ancient times when we had foundation of our country. Another really popular subgenre is magic realism, where the world appears to be realistic, but there's a touch of magic to it. It's a huge and very, very old subgenre.

Why? Because in Soviet Ukraine, it was one of a few subgenres from science fiction and fantasy, it was okay, you could write it. It's okay when you write it. One of most important our writers at all, not in genre, Sergei Shadan, he wrote in magic realism and he works with our past post-colonial traumas and trying to understand who we are when we move out from the shadow of the Soviet empire. Now, I also talked with Boris Sadduk.

When we talked, he was staying put in Kyiv with much difficulty. He says when the Soviet empire collapsed, he got into the field of translating speculative fiction into English. And in the 90s, well, every second book issued in this country passed through my hands. Science fiction, I mean. Although he says science fiction has never been as popular in Ukraine as it has been in Russia, a big part of the Soviet mission was focusing on how they're pushing towards the future.

Even during Soviet times, the Ukrainian science fiction, Ukrainian language, say science fiction, was different from those in the Russian language. because Russian science fiction rather was as followers to American and English and British science fiction with the spacecrafts, well, science fiction machines and so on. Ukrainian, well, speculative fiction, not the science fiction, speculative fiction, were always been more magic with urban legends. It's rather based on fairy tales than on science fiction. I don't really know anything about Ukrainian folklore.

Can you give me an example of a uniquely Ukrainian folklore character who gets adapted a lot to character who gets adapted a lot to fantasy novels? Well, one of the most interesting characters in folklore and in speculative fiction used in our country literature is Mavka. Mavka is a girl who lives in the swamp, in the dark forests. It is considered to be evil, but in Ukrainian literature, it is not always evil. So there are a lot of plots about her. Usually it's romantic. You know that Mavka can fall in love with some handsome boy and try to attract him and to bring him to swamp and so on.

I mean, he's kind of chuckling with this idea, but with every folktale, it depends on how you spin it, how you make it resonate with modern day audiences. But Boris says another difference between Russian and Ukrainian speculative fiction is how seriously that genre is taken in each country. Actually, Ukrainian readers do not make a big difference between the so-called mainstream and speculative fiction, actually. It is all literature. In Russia, the difference is in Russia, in the Russian culture.

They say that mainstream literature is better, it's big literature, while the science fiction or fantasy literature is, well, little brother or little sister. In Ukraine, no. In Ukraine, it's all just literature. If you read a book, if you read a novel, it doesn't matter if it's science

fiction, is it fantasy or mainstream. It's a book. And Maria Galina says says there's an economic reason why speculative fiction has to be good enough to compete with realistic fiction. It comes down to the price of paper. Here there was very high prices on publishing process for paper, for process of publishing books. So Ukraine has to develop Hebrew speculative fiction.

For example, here we have the biggest literature prize in Ukraine, it is Shevchenko Literature Prize. In the final of this prize, one of the finalists, is the folk fantasy of Vladimir Arin. And it is a very interesting phenomenon. I cannot maybe imagine something like this in Russia. If the finalist for that literature prize sounds familiar, that's because Volodymyr Arunov is Svitlana's friend, who we heard from earlier. Lana's friend, who we heard from earlier. As Ukrainian writers have been fostering a sense of national identity through folklore and fantasy,

Russian writers have been fantasizing about their country in very different ways. Voldemir says in the early 2000s, Russian and Ukrainian writers were very friendly with each other. But the first major break happened around 2005, after the Orange Revolution. It was a political movement in Ukraine, where people demanded a more Western European style of government that was more democratic and more accountable. Yes. And in this moment, many voices from Russia, from our friends, they thought we should be very quiet, very friendly always. We don't have a right to think about other way, other way of our future. I also talked with Ukrainians who had emigrated to the United States, like Anatoly Belilovsky.

Anatoly lives in New York, and he's translated Ukrainian speculative fiction into English. He says in the early 2000s, Ukrainian and Russian writers were attending the same fantasy conventions, like Worldcon, which is a con that's held in a different country every year. And these Russian and Ukrainian writers were becoming friends on Facebook. Oh, absolutely. They all started out in the same group, at the same cons, in the same circles. And then it all went to hell. There are science fiction authors who have been at the same cons in the 90s who are now in charge of entire military units on both sides of the conflict. It's as if Heinlein and Asimov ended up on opposite sides of a civil war.

Even though these two communities have drifted over the last 17 years, Svetlana and Volodymyr were still horrified to see their Russian colleagues endorse and promote Putin's propaganda about the war in Ukraine. They were our colleagues, but now they are our enemy. And one of these authors, if I don't mistake, now is a guest of honor on a Worldcon in 2023. Sergey Lukyanenko.

Why we could speak about it? Sergey Lukyanenko after translated in English, he says we need to bomb all these cities and so on and so on. And he's the guest owner of Worldcon 2023. In China. That it will be in China. The Russian science fiction writer they're talking about has been so anti-Ukraine.

He even refused to allow his books to be published in the Ukrainian language. And this turn to the right didn't just happen in the world of politics. It happened inside the fantasy worlds of Russian science fiction. Alex Schwarzman is a Ukrainian-American living in New York. He writes fantasy novels and does translations. And he says a lot of Russian fantasy is not political. But there's also an entire huge industry of popular and populist novels that are very much kind of making their bread on the idea of re-emergent Russia and Russia regaining its place in the world, often through some kind of an invention,

or maybe the Russian people are the ones that contacted the aliens or developed the star drive, or something happened that made Russia a great power again. So that definitely has been a fairly common theme in Russian fiction, in Russian speculative fiction in recent years. And how does that happen? So you're saying it's a lot of it, is it a lot of it through science fiction, the Russians contacted the aliens, or is there any kind of like historical revisionism through historical fantasy? There's both. So as far as the fantasy elements go, there's a very popular sub-genre now called попаданец, which is a word that refers to somebody who got somewhere. So essentially, it's not necessarily that they're going into a fantasy universe.

It could be somebody who is a modern person that ends up in a previous era, in the historical periods. For example, there's a very, very popular series of novels about a modern era Russian nuclear submarine that ends up going back in time to the late 1930s and basically ends up destroying the Nazis and then subsequently defeating the Americans as well. There's been over 20 novels about this time-traveling Russian nuclear submarine. Anatoly says beyond putting America in its place. Also, at one point, they're putting Ukrainians in their place, by the way, just by the way.

The interesting part of that is, yeah, they mess with a lot of things. They steal the ship that's taking uranium from Belgian Congo to the US. But there's only one person they actually go out and assassinate in the United States. And it's very interesting who that person is. It's Hyman Rickover. Who? Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine fleet. Oh, huh.

Basically, the one person they consider irreplaceable in all of the United States in the 1940s is Hyman Rickover. I also learned that Hyman Rickover was born in Poland when it was occupied by Russia, and his family fled to the U.S. to escape anti-Semitism. And while Ukrainian culture has been moving towards a model of diversity and tolerance, Russian culture has gone in the opposite direction under Putin. And that shows up in Russian speculative fiction as well. Because of the association with homophobia and transphobia with the Russian government, transphobia with the Russian government, the people who would be likely to be more feminist and more inclusive have drifted toward the Ukrainian point of view in their fiction,

even if they're not actually Ukrainian. Ukrainian writers have been watching this imperial march of Russian fantasy for a while. That's another reason why they've had to develop a more protective stance in their literature, even if their novels aren't overtly political. Just the fact that they're set in Ukraine and written in Ukrainian makes them stand apart. Again, here's Maria. I think that there are the stories of national spirit. It's based on Ukrainian folklore because, first of all, they need to build their past, their own past, not as the past of the

empire, but the past of the quite independent country. quite independent country. For example, Spitlana wrote a novel in 2019 called Lazarus, which is set on the eve of the First World War. It's about Ukrainian folklore characters that are forced to live in ghettos.

My book, I think, it's about our post-colonial trauma because my folk creatures who lived in Kiev in the beginning of the century, they fight for their land. And this moment, they are the part of a big empire who discriminates these creatures in Kiev. And it was a difficult but hopeful time for us in real, in our history.

Now, some of her work is more directly political. Like her second novel is a post-apocalyptic story that's set in Crimea. And for me, this language of speculative fiction gives me a possibility to write about this very hard term. And I was born in Crimea, and eight years I can't go to my home. In this future that you imagine, can you describe a little bit what this future of Crimea is in your book? In my book, and I love fantasy for this.

Fantasy gives us hope for victory and for good future for all of us. And Boris told me about a project that's a collaboration between different fantasy writers across Ukraine. There is a very interesting project which is run right now, and they issued just the first books. It's called the Agency Independence. It's a project where the agency independence it's as projects where uh while many leading ukrainian writers come together uh gather together to make the uh a common vault things like what what uh dc comics do or

marvel do with their world you know oh like a shared a shared universe. Yes. Authors came together and created a world around Ukraine as a country, as a nation. And there is an agency that protects the country on many fronts, in reality, in time, in parallel worlds. Interesting. So basically the writers have said, let's create this agency of independence. We'll each keep writing our own stuff, but let's agree that in all of our books, this agency of independence exists. And we can even borrow characters from each other's books because this is a shared universe. Exactly. Because it's really a very interesting project, really. Because it's really a very interesting project, really. Boris put me in touch with the organizer of the project, who told me they have over 30 writers involved, all of them established Ukrainian sci-fi and fantasy writers.

This agency of independence mostly fights against a Russian agency called Wings of State Security, which is trying to undermine Ukraine with its supernatural abilities. So far, they've published one anthology of short stories. They're planning on publishing more, and they're hoping to develop a comic book and a TV series. But the war put everything on hold. In the news, I've seen a lot of inspiring stories about how Ukrainians are standing their ground, In the news, I've seen a lot of inspiring stories about how Ukrainians are standing their ground, often in very creative ways. But if Vladimir Putin's goal is to conquer Ukraine,

he's going to have to snuff out the idea of Ukrainian independence. And he will fail. Because to do that, he'd have to conquer the imaginations of the Ukrainian people. And that's one place his army can never go. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Maria Galina, Boris Sidduk, Volodymyr Arinov, Svetlana Tartarina, Alex Schvartsman, and Anatoly Belilovsky. I put links in the show notes to different charities that you can give to, which are helping to resettle refugees. Now, unfortunately, most of Svetlana, Maria, and Voldemort's novels have not been translated into English, at least not yet. But Alex Schwarzman lives in the U.S. and writes in English,

least not yet. But Alex Forsman lives in the U.S. and writes in English, and his new novel, The Middling Affliction, comes out in May. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook and Instagram. I also tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts, or mention it on social media. That always helps people discover Imaginary Worlds. And if you're interested in advertising the show, you can drop us a line at contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org, and I'll put you in touch with our ad coordinator.

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