The Orphanage: A Novel

"Yes, in Ukraine he is probably the leading novelist; outside of Ukraine, I think Andrey Kurkov is better known. Both Kurkov and Zhadan wrote on this current war. Andrey Kurkov’s book is Grey Bees . I didn’t include it because I want to read it, but I haven’t yet. The Orphanage is an extremely interesting book. Serhiy Zhadan comes from Eastern Ukraine and during Maidan was taking part in the clashes in the second-largest Ukrainian city, Kharkiv, which is now under the threat of possible attack. He is a multi-talented person: he has his own band and sings, he writes novels and poems, he draws. To me, it’s a brave book because it’s talking about the things that one was not supposed to talk about during the war. The war says, ‘This is us, and we are in the right. We’re the heroes, and the other guys are everything that is the opposite of that.’ And certainly we are Ukrainians, Ukrainian patriots. But in the novel he writes about a guy, Pasha, who has this post-Soviet identity. He is ethnically Ukrainian but is not really Ukrainian or Russian. Exclusive identity is not his. That’s very much the story of the Donbas, which is now outside of Ukrainian control, and many parts of Eastern Ukraine as well. The national identities are not really formulated. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Pasha is a teacher and is not taking sides in the conflict, in the war. But he has a nephew who happens to be on the other side of the dividing line, in the area controlled by separatists. He feels he has to go and get the nephew and bring him back to the family. In the process of travelling there and travelling back, he realizes where his home is. That is also a big, important thing: the war shapes Ukraine and Ukrainian identity. It leads to attachment to a nation that maybe wasn’t there before in those eastern parts of Ukraine. It’s a story of discovering where you belong, on which side of that divide. Again, I was saying that it was a brave book, because if you read about this guy, you sympathize with him. The novel is a kind of explanation of this blurred identity that is neither here nor there and which, of course, opens up all these possibilities for manipulation. The novel is also very well done. It reads well. It’s almost a photographic portrayal and presentation of this society where the war is taking place, without an attempt to somehow ideologically paint it one way or another, or pretend that it is not what it is not. In that sense, it is a very honest book as well. This is another part of the coping mechanism in Ukraine, that people just stopped listening or watching. It’s a form of denial, but it’s also a form of coping with the situation. Will Putin attack today or not? Or maybe tomorrow? A person can’t live like that for four or five or six months. Right now, in Ukraine, I understand there is no panic. Everything that is normally in the stores, is there. People are not stocking up on toilet paper, like we did when Covid came. Everything is in abundance. The only thing that is not there are hunting weapons and guns that people can buy. That’s the only thing there’s been a run on. It’s interesting, the way society reacts. For whatever reason, they’re not stocking up on anything except the weapons, which means they want to stay and resist. They want to be able to protect themselves. The point is to finish unfinished business from 2014. His goal is either to make Ukraine pro-Russian or dismember it. He didn’t succeed in 2014. He grabbed part of the Ukrainian territory but it mobilized the rest against Russia. In Ukraine, the number of people who want to join NATO went up by three times. Ukraine became closer to the West: conducting joint military exercises with NATO and so on and so forth. It’s the absolute opposite of what he wanted to achieve. So the plan now is to come back and threaten the Ukrainian government, to create internal crisis, to grab more territory—basically, the goals are the same. Yes, between 13 and 14,000. Also, in these kinds of wars, it’s not the military who are the most vulnerable, but the civil population. It’s the average citizens who suffer from the bombings and airstrikes the most."

"The Orphanage , first published in Ukrainian in 2017, came out in English translation from Yale University Press in 2021. Written by a hugely popular Ukrainian poet and novelist who’s also a rock star—he fronts a ska band—it’s a viscerally compelling novel about civilians caught up in the early days of the war in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine, that began in 2014, years before the full-scale Russian invasion of the country in 2022. The author grew up in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, so it’s drawn from deeply personal experience. But like Bellová, he never names the places he writes about—or identifies the soldiers—reflecting the real chaos of war, and creating a sense that such conflagrations could potentially happen anywhere and take anyone by surprise. The protagonist, Pasha, is a 35-year-old Ukrainian language teacher in a dysfunctional family who reluctantly travels from his hometown, called “the Station”, to the front line to retrieve his 13-year-old nephew from an orphanage where Pasha’s sister has left him. The orphanage—really a boarding school—is now in occupied territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists, and the three-day journey is like a descent into a Dantesque inferno. Pasha imagines himself to be uninvolved in the conflict, and ‘apolitical’, but he shares the fear, hunger, dread and desolation as he wanders through mud and snow across the shifting border, never sure who is friend or enemy, and trying to guess by listening to language and Russian accents. If anything, the novel shows the complexity of allegiances in this combat zone, where identity is not as simple as what language you speak. There are many other insights. Pasha’s ‘old-timer’ father is glued to a TV that spews out propaganda. A foreign war correspondent named Peter gets short shrift from Pasha, who says, “he really just isn’t interested in anyone … He’ll leave, we’ll stick around.” But as a poet, Zhadan’s imagery and metaphors are inspired, and brilliantly translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler."