Sasha Dugdale: Can you tell me about your childhood in Soviet Ukraine? I’m keen to hear how it felt to you growing up in the stagnating air of the late USSR, especially as the child of a dissident actor working and living in Lviv, the centre of a Ukrainian cultural revival during this period. Was there a large gap between private and public realities?

Oksana Maksymchuk: It’s fascinating how the stagnation of one culture creates the conditions for the revival or reinvention of another, isn’t it? As a child, I had a sharp sense that the inner family world was very different from the official outer world, and that the traffic between them needed to be tightly controlled. Growing up in the Soviet Union involved leading a double life, defined, from a child’s perspective, by a nightmarish economy of punitive mechanisms: my parents warned me that if we weren’t vigilant about what we said outside of our home, they could be arrested, and I would be put in an orphanage. At the same time I think they knew that you could only expect so much from a kid, and they tended to self-censor so that I wouldn’t unintentionally reveal their secrets. There were plenty of stories of such incidents – sometimes because a child had made a mistake or had been bribed, at other times because a child genuinely thought they were doing the right thing in reporting on their parents. We, the children, were often given examples from literature and Soviet hagiography, and the child who chose the State over the Family was always portrayed as a hero (‘Nothing great is ever easy!’). So it would have been foolish for a parent not to prepare for any eventuality.

The first experience of the dissociation between the inner and the outer world that I remember very distinctively was this: I was three or four, and for a celebration of the Great October, or maybe International Workers’ Day, I was assigned to read a short poem, in Russian:

I am a little girl
I don’t go to school yet
I have never seen Lenin
but I love him very much.

The poem was simple, it rhymed, and it was in a language I perceived as both serious and foreign, the language that unified ‘all twelve sister-republics’ (a line from another poem I cherished); I delighted in my future performance and kept practising reciting the poem around our tiny apartment. My father didn’t say anything then, but a couple of weeks later, as I was greeting guests at the door and making small talk (how I’d grown, what I was learning at day-care) he spontaneously recited the poem I’d been practising, imitating my childish pathos. And everyone laughed! It felt like they were laughing at me, and at Lenin. I remember, mostly, getting flustered and really, deeply hating my father. Years later, in first grade (1989), as we read story after story about Lenin’s heroic feats in our Russian-language textbooks, the teacher said that no man in the world deserved our affection and admiration as much as he did (he was still on display at the Mausoleum in Moscow, and every young pioneer’s dream was to visit his relics and pay tribute). I raised my hand and announced in front of the whole class that I didn’t love Lenin. I was taking back those earlier poetic words of devotion – initiating an anti-baptism, rescinding a promise to love and obey. The original recitation of the poem was like a spell, and I had decided to break it, exorcising myself. By that time, I had already been promoted to a young Octobrist, in two more years I’d become a Pioneer. After the lesson, I was taken to the headteacher’s office and reprimanded. A year or two later, in 1990 or 1991, a few of the girls from my class approached me at break time and said: ‘Remember that time you said you didn’t love Lenin? We don’t love him either.’

Had the Putsch in 1991 been successful, had the USSR prevailed, what then? I think I would have gone back to keeping my mouth shut, going through the motions. Performative conformism was a condition for pursuing one’s studies, for getting a job. So I would have enacted the role – as most of my family members had done, with varying success.

Tell me about your proximity to the theatre and the effect it had on you as a girl. Your father was a well-known actor at a time when theatre was a leading force in cultural dissent in the USSR. Soviet theatres also had a very collective feel as they were repertory, the actors often lived and worked together for years and they forged creative and personal bonds which are hard to imagine in the West. Were you the child of an extended ‘theatre family’? And how has the artform affected your own creativity?

You’re so right that a theatre collective resembles a family: people love and support each other as much as they fight and compete, gossip and scheme. I remember when it seemed to be the funnest, freest place in the world – actors came across as much more emotionally complex and authentic than the average Soviet citizen.

Growing up in the theatre further normalised dissociation, a splintering of identity, impressing upon me that in different spheres in life, we may be called upon to play different roles. I learned that when a person I know is acting out of character, for instance, it’s because they’re currently enacting another script, navigating a virtual situation which may be incomprehensible to others. In this domain, my earliest memory also dates back to early childhood. This must have been one of the first times I went to see my father ‘at work’, and I was terrified: Tato was in trouble, he was being confronted on the stage! Suddenly a shot rang out. I was beside myself and began screaming – Tato fell on his knees, then collapsed. My immediate thought was that he was being punished because I’d said something ‘prohibited’. It was just as I’d been warned: Tato was dead, and now I’d be put in a children’s home!

When I was cast in the role of Macduff’s young son, my father began coaching me. I often recited verses from memory, and he’d help me adjust my diction, timing, rhythm, intonation and so on. We only worked on one piece at a time, which I would then go on to perform at school functions and recitation competitions. In fact this early practice became a hindrance and it took me years to shed my dramatic training; to unlearn the exaggerated articulateness, and chiselled diction. My preferred mode of ‘enacting a poet’ emphasises vulner­­ability and discomfort. I don’t wish to smooth over the difficult parts: I want to expose the resistance and strangeness of the material.

Father didn’t just work at the theatre. Our first home as a family was a tiny studio in the theatre courtyard. My mother, a medical doctor, thought it was very romantic. When I was two, we were finally assigned an apartment in a brand new fourteen-storey building. There were three fourteen-story buildings in a single row, like a triple rhyme. We got a corner apartment on the thirteenth floor, overlooking an expanse of private houses with gardens known as the Warsowian district, with a church in the middle and low rolling hills in the distance. And the vast, vast sky!

My father had started expanding his circle of friends beyond the theatre when he was still a student in Kharkiv. He sought out writers, artists and intellectuals and over his lifetime he befriended many of the most prominent figures in Ukrainian culture. Some of his friends had been imprisoned and got out, and some were still in the camps when I was growing up. There was a distinctive sense that the people we knew were not what they appeared – that despite their blemished biographies and menial day jobs, these were giants who’d change our world, and there was an aura of transgression and excitement about their work.

Our apartment was tiny and yet it was regularly packed with up to half a hundred people for various occasions – birthdays, holidays, spontaneous celebrations when someone got out of prison or was allowed to publish after years of state-sanctioned ostracism. I remember a lot of laughter, giddiness, joy and levity – even though so many of our guests had a virtual sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Poems were read, toasts were offered, the guests were dressed up, sometimes even in costumes.

As a prominent dissident was your own father touched by the waves of repression?

Father had a series of direct confrontations with the authorities, and he had been tailed by the KGB since the late sixties. One of his close friends had turned out to have been an informer, appointed specifically to keep an eye on him. His performances were regularly cancelled and he was denied promotions and roles. But unlike many of his friends, my father was never arrested, and this was a source of unease for him. When so many people in his circle had been arrested and he hadn’t, this naturally led to suspicion: was he cooperating with the secret services or were they just trying to sow distrust? My great-aunt, who had been married to a KGB general, told me her version a decade ago in Kherson, where she still lives: her husband, my mother’s uncle, upon learning that my father was about to be indicted, travelled incognito to Lviv, and ‘edited’ his file. When I told my father, he winced. If not getting arrested tormented him, the narrative of getting saved by a KGB general certainly didn’t ease his discomfort.

Your own poetry must have been affected by this miraculous childhood, surrounded by elite cultural figures who must have treated you as one of their kind. What were your first attempts to write?

Looking back on my earliest childhood attempts at composing poetry, I realise that they usually emerged as an attempt to improve something I found slightly ’off’ or lacking. I often changed poems as I performed them, substituting words and rhymes, sometimes reinventing whole stanzas, altering their order. I also owned a large collection of illustrated children’s books – my parents insisted these were my most treasured possessions (I did not agree!) – and occasionally I’d have a feeling that a poem didn’t live up to the illustration, so I’d rewrite the poem. My first recognition as a poet dates back to an afterschool programme in primary school. I wrote a tightly-rhymed poem about a picture I saw in a book: a large bunny on a tractor, looking out of the window (breaking the fourth wall!). My friend Olia was waiting for me to finish, her elbows on my desk. We were both giggling as I read the verses to her, and so the teacher came over, and when she saw what I’d done, she took the notebook and darted off. My friend and I thought we must be in trouble and we hid under the desk. The teacher returned with a colleague, and they sat down with us and edited the poem, but only slightly: how about instead of this line, where you say that a bunny is gulping water out of the well like a junkie (narcoman), we say that the bunny is drawing water out of the well for his thirsty family? Wouldn’t this be a better way of describing an industrious bunny on a collective farm? I should add that narcomania was a new widely-discussed social issue at the time. Playing Hopscotch and Elastics, we would exchange scary stories about junkies catching you to plunge a needle into you, either to draw your blood or to inject a dangerous substance into your bloodstream. Just that summer, Grandma Olena, my father’s mother, had found her poppy patch vandalised, the unripe poppy heads missing, white juice seeping from the stems. I drew on that context to compose the poem, and unexpectedly experienced my first act of censorship.

You write poetry in both English and Ukrainian, but your most recent work is in English. How did that come about and what was the transition point – the moment that gave you the sense that you needed to respond to your surroundings in a new language?

When I moved to the States in 1997, I signed up for a poetry class – sensing, correctly, that it would help me with my transition to the new language. I went on to publish in our high school’s journal Unique every year – I wrote my poems right before the submission deadline, dropped them into the envelope taped to a classroom door, and most of them ended up in print. My high school was highly selective and very competitive, and I was at a disadvantage, a non-resident alien with no money for college, so I was trying to build up my CV.

In college, I went back to writing poems in Ukrainian. My first serious publication, with an introduction by Andriy Sodomora, the foremost living translator of Latin poetry and philosophy into Ukrainian and a prominent poet and essayist in his own right, appeared when I was nineteen; it was a portfolio of ten poems, and it made me feel like a rock-star. I remember going to parties and getting introduced as ‘a published Ukrainian poet’ – a mysterious, lofty outsider. This feeling of distinction counterbalanced some of the struggles I was facing: I was poor, working three campus jobs (as a waitress, a grader for calculus, and a Language Learning Laboratory administrator); and because my mother was still fighting to secure papers for us, I couldn’t travel back home for six long years.

Could you say a little about the language politics during the period of your childhood in Lviv? As you’ve said, Lviv was a thriving centre for Ukrainian culture and language within an enormous Soviet empire with only one state language: Russian. What did this mean for everyday living in practice?

When I was growing up, everyone in my family only spoke Ukrainian, but such different dialects that to me they sounded like different languages. In Lviv, where I was born, my parents and I were outsiders – everyone was; it was practically a new city, demographically speaking, after the war. The Jewish third of the population had been exterminated under the German occupation or transferred to the camps, and the Polish half had been deported on Soviet orders. Of the original pre-war population, fewer than one-fifth remained in the city. But the surrounding villages were Ukrainian-speaking, so by the time I was born, Lviv was three-fourths Ukrainian. Nevertheless, Russian was the dominant language on TV; many of my books were in Russian. We children often tried speaking Russian to each other during playtime – all our curses and threats and spells and counting-out rhymes were in Russian, for instance. Later on, in the early nineties, when we started playing with Barbie dolls and watching foreign soap operas, almost universally dubbed in Russian, we would apply the melodramatic dialogues from the soaps to our games. It was a language of intrigue, and sex, and everything prohibited we weren’t supposed to speak about – a language that held our dirty thoughts and adolescent anxieties.

By the time I was a teenager, I could read and write Russian with fluency, and went on to win awards in essay competitions in the native speaker category in the US. I’ve come to recognize this as a typical feature of the colonial predicament: the colonial subject learns to imitate the coloniser, to ‘pass’ in order to reap the privileges that accrue to the coloniser’s power; but while her cultivation of fluency requires her to develop an intimate understanding of the coloniser, she herself remains outside the scope of the colonizer’s gaze. She sees and she knows, yet she is unseen and unknown. This is one reason why some Ukrainians are reluctant to speak Russian, even if they know it: they refuse to pass, choosing to assert their difference.

When you began experimenting in English creative writing as a way to improve your English, did you find yourself trying to bend English to forms and themes you already held dear (as someone close to Ukrainian culture) or did the English take you in different ways, form new senses of self? I wonder if you encountered more freedom in your adopted language?

My first teenage attempts at writing in English felt like self-translation – poems borne out of a different register, from another world. Upon arriving in the US, I was overwhelmed with noise: the gurgling and hissing and roaring that was, I knew, a form of communication, and to which I was expected to respond. I was drawn to poetry, yes, but I didn’t feel eloquent or deft. I did cheat a little, sneaking in a locution here and there from some Ukrainian poet I loved, which, I felt, elevated my writing, made it more distinguished and authoritative. Occasionally, I still splice a word or phrase into my poems, sometimes citing a poet by name, sometimes positioning my interlocutor generically, as ‘a poet’. Even without such splicing, traces of foreign literary DNA inevitably make it into one’s work: we learn by imitation, and we create through dialogical friction, exchange; it’s an almost-erotic process: the Platonic reproduction in the presence of Beauty.

I do feel freer in my adopted language, as I do in my American identity – it’s a more playful terrain for me. In Ukrainian, my poetry tends to be formally constrained: syllabo-tonic, tightly rhymed. Much of my energy is expended on coming up with innovative rhyming patterns, new types of line. The ‘I’ is more or less anonymized; it’s hardly even gendered. In the tradition I chose to follow, you distinguish yourself and assert your uniqueness through a sort of technical mastery, which is fruitful and rewarding in its own way. By contrast, my English-language poetry is a form of storytelling, and its formal elements are subordinated to that purpose: to carry a story, to cast a spell. I give myself permission to be awkward and vulnerable, to get confused. In English, I’m also more likely to be charmed by the apparent flaws and imperfections in the work of others. When I switch to Ukrainian, I become an excruciatingly harsh critic – my optics and sensibilities really shift! Sometimes, I need to rewrite the poem in English in my mind to begin appreciating it.

And did the process of linguistic ‘reckoning’ change the relationship with Ukrainian?

Living in what felt like exile made Ukrainian a language of home and longing for me, a lost continent of coming-of-age. As an immigrant, I experienced a second childhood – I learned to talk and walk, to dress; to calibrate my sense of humour; to negotiate my rights, insist on my autonomy. The transition gave me a sense of an open future – and it also created a gap, like there was a parallel reality that I was no longer living. It was out of that painful, frustrating rupture that my poems emerged, as a way of asserting my presence in the world I’d lost, and that closed in around my absence without leaving a mark. I wanted to make sure there were traces, tracks, that would hold a place for me and allow me to make my way back, eventually.

You are now a translator and editor of Ukrainian poetry and so you are in a position of being a bridge between two cultures. You told me once that seeing a lot of contemporary poetry (particularly relating to war) has made you think about how you want to write about war. Could you say more about that?

One interesting aspect of writing and translating war poetry is that you’re never alone: your voice is always already a part of a chorus. There are certain experiences that strip us of our defences, change our sense of temporality and spatiality, compel us to question what is real; what matters to us; and why. Love is often like that, but it overtakes us privately. By contrast, the experience of war is synchronic; and even though it can be terrifyingly private and isolating, it is also collective, unifying. You wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone, but I also understand people who speak of war envy. What is bad for individuals may be good for communities, and what is bad for life may be good for art, and vice versa.

I started writing my own ‘war poems’ a year or two before the invasion, in 2011–12. But then the actual war started, and I lost my voice. When I did pick up again, it was in English, and I was living in Ukraine. As warnings of the full-scale invasion started coming in from abroad, I wrote poems out of that anxious waiting, feeling out the contours of what was already taking shape, but was still mostly invisible, inconceivable. I had, by that time, co-edited an anthology of contemporary war poetry (Words for War, published in 2017), and for that we’d sifted through thousands of texts, out of which we selected just over a hundred. So I was attuned to what other poets in Ukraine have been doing, often spontaneously, without knowing much about world war poetry or about witness poetry; without any conceptual frameworks or significant examples to guide them. Often, war-time writing is highly expressive, emotional, bound to the terrible moment it bears witness to. Writing in English creates, for me, the illusion of temporal distance, which allows me to speak in a freer, more even voice. I’m still learning how to speak about difficult, liminal experiences – experiences that force us into the realness we’re all too ready to forgo for comfort or illusion of order – without distorting or flattening them into a clever artifice or a prolonged primordial scream.