“The Muddle,” a short story in this week’s issue, examines the war in Ukraine from the perspective of family divisions, generational divisions, and a division between lifelong friends, the writer Sana Krasikov says.
,” opens as a woman named Shura, who has lived in the United States for many years, is trying to get in touch with her childhood friend Alyona, in Ukraine, shortly after Russia’s invasion. When did you start thinking about writing a story about the war? You were born in Ukraine—did that have an impact on your response to the conflict?
Early on in Shura and Alyona’s friendship, when they are in their second year of school, their teacher gives the children an assignment to paint the spring. Shura looks at the scene outside the window on a dreary, gray day and re-creates that, but the teacher had a more cheerful image in mind—something that Alyona immediately understood.
After I wrote the story, I realized how much the politics of language works its way into the lives of these characters. Shura would have been enrolled in the “Jew school” by her parents because it’s a Russian-speaking school, and her first language is Russian. In the former Soviet republics, families could send kids to schools that taught subjects in Russian, or in their native language—Ukrainian, Georgian, Latvian, etc.
In addition to Zhadan, there are many other contemporary authors who give good glimpses into what’s happening in the country, among them Yurii Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko, Taras Prokhasko, Vasyl Shkliar, Kateryna Babkina, Les Podervianskyi, Sofia Andrukhovych, Yuri Vynnychuk, Lyubko Deresh, Max Kidruk, Haska Shyyan, Serhiy Martynyuk, Valerii Ananiev, Artem Chekh. Many have been translated, and some have not been yet—and this is by no means a complete list.
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