How does life make it possible to meet people among themselves. We and my friend after another event in the “Portal” in November, a few years ago, ran to see a cup of coffee in Terethenia. There were met with poets Yulia Stakhivska and Oleh Kotsarev, talks a few words. Who then knew from us that we will meet again in the same cafe in the fall and on the eve of the event, which also took place in the «Portal» on November 17 this year, is the presentation of the “Anthology of the Young Ukrainian Poetry of the Third Millennium”. Now, with Yulia Stakhivska, really talked about almost everything in this poetic world, and first of all – about Zhytomyr,people, the potential, creative life-being
Zhytomyr “I was born in Zhytomyr, I studied here at school and in the artist. 17 years have been associated with the city – today it is half my life, and now I am here regularly”
“By the way, for me it is significant that my great-grandfather’s mother, Miron Vasilchenko, came from Kiev, came to study at the Zhytomyr land surveying school. He left interesting memories of his life and his studies and Zhytomyr in particular. For example, an excerpt about the school’s house: “It was a three-story mansion that once belonged to Baron de Sodawara, who sold the house to the treasury. A parquet, a two-tone concert hall, a library, everything was bought with furniture. It was located on one of the central streets – Berdichivska, just opposite Mykhailivska. Beautiful house with six columns and wide mirrored doors. ” And this is a memoirs about the pre-revolutionary bookstore on Mykhailivska: “I got friendship and out of school”. On Mykhailivska Street there was “Book Trade” of Sovinskyi. The seller there was a pretty boy Athos. I have little money for money, then I often came to visit him. There were good Ukrainian postcards and even books in Ukrainian. For the first time, I bought the Konotop Witch, Kaidashiv Family, two volumes of Capital in the translation of Stepniak-Kravchinsky. ” We think with relatives to give them, so there will be no need to quote them”
“Daddy, though from here, had no deep ground, because he was very orphaned and did not know all this family of the city and the surrounding area. One can say that for him I do this: I find close relatives, places, something in the archives – private and public – in short, I constantly draw a map of my “own” Zhytomyr ”
“Zhytomyr is native, and therefore with him it is the same as with the nearest one: he will support in the most difficult moments, but at the same time it can also be hijacked, because the nearest one sometimes requires a distance. Please note that ValeriI Shevchuk (a kind of “our Joyce”, for his works, you can walk the city and develop routes!) Wrote the most about Zhytomyr from a distance, with the necessary optics. But while reading it, you may well feel that in fact he never left it. ”
“What has changed? There were a lot of interesting events and locations. For example, the notable festival “October in ” Zhovten “is a great initiative, guests. I remember “ArTherapy”, from my brother I heard a lot of good about a small “Vulba” in Denyshi, a book fair “Dieslovo” … When it was a high school student, and this is 2002-2003, the most common meeting place for readings was a library or assembly halls at institutions. There, for example, we met with Bogdan-Oleg Gorobchuk (by the way, they studied together in the same class of the 33rd school) or Ilya Strongovsky, many others, and read-listened to poetry. Now there are more interesting spaces, and hence there is a movement »
Identity “Oddly, literally, for me, Zhytomyr is a musical, sound city. I would not definitely build an identity on “cosmicity.” And the city’s chip in the family “nests”, which gave the city and the world the first major musicians: Zarembsky, Paderewski, Richter. And Boris Lyatoshynsky is an avant-garde, this “came out of him” almost all modern Ukrainian meters, such as Valentin Sylvestrov or Yevhen Stankovych. Listen to Lyatoshynsky – he will hit you and will not be just a granite monument on the street of the same name. And the chorus chapel “Orea”? And different bands, the same “Second River”? I’m not a theoretician of music and I’m not going to talk about a harmonious tradition, but agree that there is a whole layer that we obviously underestimate. And somewhere there people are surprised: Lyatoshynsky from Zhytomyr, impossible?!”
Poetry “In the” Anthology of the Young Ukrainian Poetry of the Third Millennium, “which appeared in the publishing house” A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ha “, was published among other poems of six Zhytomyr citizens (Lesik Panasyuk, Oksana Haji, Ilya Strongovsky, Yuliya Kruchak, Bogdan-Oleg Gorobchuk, Yulia Stakhivska), out of the total number of authors, over seventy is a significant percentage that makes it possible to state: in Zhytomyr there is a distinct poetic environment, and it is much wider. This year the anthology won the prize at the Forum of Publishers in Lviv as the best in its genre”
“We were so laughing at: someone was joking, can an IV anthology already be recorded? In my opinion, the anthologies are concluded only for the historical and literary purpose, in order to show the cut, which were the tendencies of the newest poetry – from the rhymed and folk to the futuristic, influenced by it, which was geography”
“Rhymed poetry remains in Ukraine in the first place, it’s a tradition, and not at all. In the anthology “Ukrainian avant-garde poetry. 1910-1930 “, which was arranged together with Oleg Kotsarev, – so many verliberries, all the same. But is it not possible for us to teach it in general in schools, normally – in universities? It was a huge “hole” in time and content, and only now it has more or less come to the surface – this period is devoted to festivals, filming – and the European-wide literary context emerged as it was a hundred years ago: experimentally, with irony, good metaphor, and free verse”
Influence “The New York group of poets influenced me tremendously. At school I read a few verses by Yuri Tarnavsky in some of the anthologies. Later, I started to search more on the Internet, found the site Aquarium at sea, on my first year at the Ostroh Academy (further I studied in Mohylianka), our teacher of foreign literature, Lidia Zelinska, conducted a distance seminar with the same Yuri for a small circle of her students and students. Tarnavsky, and I was lucky to become his party. As a student of Mohyla, I interviewed LytAktsent in Bohdan Boychuk – it was very important for me to understand their relationship with the Soviet Sixties”
“The modern world is a world of pictures. So, video poetry is like a “backlight” to a “structure” of a work. It does not change anything in the very architecture of the text, but it attracts attention, senses the details”
About the illustration “At first I feared that I would cope technically, and then realized that my strength here is a metaphor – and this should be shown. So far, I have illustrated several children’s books, a series of adult covers for the publishing house “Komora”, a lot of author’s postcards, posters, several prints ”
Plans “I think of a book, first of all for the daughter of Yasi. It will be all the stories about the foxes – “Fox and the Forest.” Illustrations are enough, I want to make it myself and make no one long to explain what ”
Music “It is all. I fell in love with Vivienne Mort (laughs)
Films “One of the favorite directors – Otar Iosseliani. He is a Georgian, and emigrated to France in 1982. His “Morning Monday” is a way of telling me, he is about how to go beyond the ordinary, automatic life and return to him with new forces, because it is essentially beautiful in itself ”
Reference from Zhytomyr.Travel “Anthology of the Young Ukrainian Poetry of the Third Millennium” was published in the publishing house “A-ba-ba-ga-la-ma-ha” and became the best book in the category “Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry” at this year’s Publishers Forum in Lviv. In the anthology, poetry of six poets from Zhytomyr and from Zhytomyr (all in the book is the work of 74 authors of Ukraine) are published: Oksana Haghii, Bogdan-Oleg Gorobchuk, Yuliya Zakarzhevska-Kruchak, Lesik Panasyuk, Julia Stakhivska, Ilya Strongovsky.
Yulia Stakhivska – poet, illustrator, author of the books “Red Men” (“Smoloskyp”, 2009), “Verde” (“Smoloskyp”, 2015). Graduated from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Coordinator of anthology “Ukrainian avant-garde poetry (1910-1930 gg.)” (“Smoloskyp”, 2014). He also worked in the field of cultural management: the art manager of the Knyharny “E” network, a program coordinator of the Czech Center in Kyiv at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Ukraine. Illustrated several children’s editions, a series of covers of the publishing house “Komora”, postcards. Lives and works in Kyiv and Bucha. From time to time returns to Zhytomyr.
Translated by Aliona Matushevich
