Have you watched Martyn Yakub Sho ° on YouTube? If not here’s a new product just for you! In addition, a Zhytomyr resident talks «for life» with well-known and not very, but undoubtedly interesting Ukrainian writers. Of course, we were reluctant to talk to him! Martin Yakub is a professional advertiser, producer and writer. Before taking a resounding literary pseudonym, Vasyl Shulha graduated from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University with a master’s degree in political science, worked as a line producer for Steven Spielberg, and became a co-owner and CEO of Positive Pictures. So really, there was something to talk about
«When I prepare for the show, I watch and read everything I can about the person I have to meet. The main thing is to feel what kind of person he is, even during training: what he is interested in, what worries him. My goal is not scandals and intrigues. I want to show a person to potential readers as he is, the course of his thoughts. It’s a conversation between two friends somewhere on a picnic. I try to provoke people to honesty. The recording takes about an hour and a half, and the material is practically not edited – we can discard ten percent»
«My public activity is an attempt to revive people’s love of reading. We have a phenomenon when the most significant writers of the 90’s broke away from the population: they create some meaning and at the same time believe that they are influencing something. But they are read by about 100,000 people in a country of forty million. I invite to myself people in whom I see the potential to change this situation – those whose works, in my opinion, will be read by the whole world. That’s why I have Kidruk, Dorzh Batu, Pavlyuk, Dniester. These are people who are not fully accepted by the elite literary party, despite the fact that they have much more circulation. And people do it in Ukrainian! This is a willful decision, because if you write in Russian, the coverage will be much greater. When I wrote non-fiction about the photo business in 2017, the publishing house and I decided to publish it only in Ukrainian, although this area is totally Russian-speaking. The positive thing is that the information I provided in the book has no alternative to Russian. And not even in English. People began to buy and read, and for some it was a great surprise: it was the first book in Ukrainian they had read in their lives. And they are: «That it! It turns out that I can read Ukrainian normally, and no problems».… That’s why the whole Martyn Yakub Sho ° project, on which I spend my own money, is my public activity. I can not to do that – I have my own business, I can write my own books. But I want to unite a progressive community of 30+ who already have experience. Like the same Pavlyuk, a TV producer who volunteered for the war; or Ananiev (Marcus), a famous blogger, traveler and also a military man; or Dorzh Batu, who works in a closed space laboratory in the United States»
«For there to be any change, the intellectual bourgeois intelligentsia must grow. That is, people who have not just earned money, but have already reached the level of need to change the environment around them. This will be reflected in various spheres of life: both in culture and in everyday life. We, for example, at home, in Levkiv, fought not to throw garbage on the river bank. 400 trees were planted, and ten years later a small nut came out there – people come for picnics. And they are already trying to take the garbage with them, because they see that everything around is clean. In addition to us, there is another man who follows the order. And little by little, the village is changing after a dozen people, two families. If there are half of them, we will have Europe, which should appear inside, not just geographically. A person should take care not only of his yard, but also of what is behind the yard… It’s all real»
«If we talk about ignorance of some or shameful behavior, it is everywhere – in any city or village. The time now is such or such people. Without the desire to develop, people find pleasure in what is around: beer advertising, bookmakers or something else. It takes some willpower and patience to read a book. You need to work with yourself somehow. I saw ignoramuses not only in Zhytomyr or Ukraine – there are many of them in Spain and France – all over the world»
«I don’t think that Zhytomyr is very different from other cities in Ukraine. Maybe a little more intimacy than in the same Kyiv, the focus on urban issues. Maybe it just seems to me, Zhytomyr is a little bit in itself»
«People are very open now. There is a writer Caitlin Aliferenka, she wrote a book «I will always write in response», which became «The New York Times Best Sellers» – a hundred thousand copies sold. And then her book became the National Bestseller in America – one million copies sold. I read the book, wrote a review and downloaded it. She liked it. I write: «Hello!». She answered, and then it turned into a kind of micro-friendship. Caitlin agreed to give me an interview. Well, what do you lose if you write to anyone? He will not answer? Well, okay. And if he answers? There is a story about a Ukrainian student writing to Stephen King asking for permission to screen his story. And he agreed and sold the rights to the film for one dollar»
«I don’t really see myself in a modern literary party. I will always be an «exile» there. Some consider themselves intellectuals, imitators of the traditions of Ukrainian writers of the past. And it’s cool! But I create other literature – genre, with an interesting plot. And maybe another party will be created»
«I wrote my first text when I was eight years old: I was on vacation with my grandmother in the Zhytomyr region and wrote a detective story. But even then, I thought, «It’s not cool if a detective is either a classic policeman or a detective a la Sherlock Holmes». And at the age of eight, I came up with the idea that the main character in my detective would be a prosecutor. That is, the task of my story is not to expose or justify, but, on the contrary, to oppress someone whom everyone considers innocent. Fortunately, this text has not survived»
«Now I have consultants: a police colonel, a surgeon and even a pathologist. If someone dies, I must clearly understand the cause of death. In addition, I read a lot, watch movies, browse the Internet. I am interested in the psychology of crime: what happens in people’s minds, why do they do it? My first novel, Dead Models, is fairly linear. And in the second, which is called «Not your business» is more complicated. The question of the novel, and it is the main question of our society today: can evil be punished by evil? We see the injustice around us and understand that we cannot defend our truth legally. Then you need to include another force that becomes even more evil: when the best defense is an attack. Here’s a novel about it»
«I see myself as a writer who makes a lot of money. Only then will I be able to call myself a professional writer. So far, I invest a lot of my own money and time. And why literature? It has been with me the longest: all the time since I was eight I always wrote something»
«Remembering Zhytomyr, I want to restore some Zhytomyr identity. I don’t want us to dissolve, as if we don’t have our own peculiarity and we are no different from our neighbors. In fact, we are unique. Because when I say some words, the people of Zhytomyr will be more likely to know them. For example, «procrastinate», «promise», «jar». None of my «non-Zhytomyr» friends know what a jar is. To the question «Where?» my grandmother answered: «Ontamogozdechki» – it’s just a song!»
«Mohylyanka is cool. I came there to study in 1998, and I really had the feeling that the best people had gathered. Ukrainian was awakened in me there, I saw educated, intelligent people who spoke Ukrainian. I won’t say I hadn’t seen them before, but that’s where their concentration was. And as we were told at the first lesson that we are the elite of our nation, so we believed in it – we rammed the walls to move further»
«At school I was informal: if everyone was a bully, then I was a rapper. Now bullies listen to rap, and before there were metalheads, rappers, acidists – and everything else. In the 90’s I was small. There was one case when I was shot by teenagers from the next yard. They did not beat, but began to slap. Suddenly, even older boys came at them and said, «Don’t touch, he’s ours». Our area was called the «five». And yes, I was no longer touched, because I allegedly had a «roof». I still remember the eldest boy saying, «When they touch you, just say you know Potap»
«Such criminal antics are wrong, but people had some hypertrophied rules of life, justice, we can say. Probably, this is inherent in all transition periods. The protagonist of my novel «Dead Models», Max Gedz, also has that hypertrophied justice»
«My mother saved me from some companies – I went to bed at nine o’clock. If it weren’t for her, I would have stumbled into some kind of story. And then I entered Mohyla. I didn’t want anything at that time. What to entering? I was lying in bed and didn’t want anything. I graduated from music school with a degree in saxophone and dreamed of playing the flute. I applied to many universities, entered somewhere in Zhytomyr, but went to study in Mohylyanka on a contract basis. The parents borrowed enough money for the first two years. But then there was still the possibility of moving for good education to go «on a budget». And I passed – had an average score of 95 out of 100 possible in all subjects. I switched to a budget, and then immediately went to work»
«I like the forest – it’s my place of strength. However, when I arrived to Norway, I realized that Zhytomyr lacked the sea. Give us the sea here, and cold, and we will have a brutal Scandinavian. I don’t like heat, I don’t like warm sea. By the way, when I held a children’s writing competition with the condition that Zhytomyr should be mentioned in the works, one girl wrote: «In 2028, the sea was dug in Zhytomyr». I still have frostbite on my skin. Well, really, can’t we make a sea of ourselves? Made in the Carpathians «Artek» and the lake»
«I don’t know if a movie will be made based on my books… I’m not sure that the Ukrainian market, like any other (except for big, economically stronger countries), can feed a serious cinema. In order for a film to develop, it must be profitable. Something like «Our cats»
«Now I’m thinking about how to reach the reader directly. And how else, if there are only 200 bookstores in a country of forty million, and those only in big cities? Ask someone from the village next to Zhytomyr when they last saw the book, or do they have books on the shelves? Do they want to read? But they probably want to. Do they know that there are Ukrainian writers? Hardly. One girl on the street told me: «A modern Ukrainian writer is Hryhoriy Skovoroda». Here are Kotlyarevsky, Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. That is, a Ukrainian writer must be dead. If he’s alive, he’s not real»
«I’m not sure I’m ready to get lost for a few months to do a promotion. Maybe I will make presentations in big cities, and in Zhytomyr as well… Now I am writing a new novel. The place of action is a village in the Zhytomyr region, invented Nedyshi. But the village has its own real prototype. So I think I will make a presentation there»
«I feel like a Zhytomyr citizen. I even want to emphasize my «Zhytomyr» with a T-shirt – this is my homeland. I love Zhytomyr and the people of Zhytomyr… The whole country walks in our socks, eats our ice cream, knows that Koroliov is from Zhytomyr… Zhytomyr is the center of the universe, so I always tell everyone… And this dignity is worth remembering and restoring, not feeling like some peasants , and understand that we live on this earth for tens of thousands of years. And we have something to be proud of. When the attitude of Zhytomyr residents to themselves changes, when they start broadcasting it to others, the city will start to change. And our Zhytomyr will be loved by a huge number of people»
