The Only Path to Memory is the Memory of Literature -- Tetyana Teren on Memory and Babyn Yar
The center of our attention today is the multidisciplinary program “The Pain of Memory” that took place at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv 15-21 August 2016.
We are talking about memory and how it can be utilized in contemporary art. Our guest in the studio is Tetyana Teren, a journalist and curator of the literary program “The Pain of Memory” that took place at the Pinchuk Art Centre.
Iryna Slavinska: The name of the program “The Pain of Memory” made me think of two questions. One of them is: is it really pain?
Tetyana Teren: You know, those who attended our events, especially the first ones, were somehow trying to discuss the theme of this title. They often said it is not the pain of memory, but the memory of blame. And the word “blame” I believe sounded even more often than “pain.”
Iryna Slavinska: No wonder, because we are talking about the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre. Therefore, we have to talk about blame. All the countries that had episodes of the Holocaust sooner or later face the topic of blame.
Tetyana Teren: We had a discussion by historians and philosophers that was called “Babyn Yar: Memory and Oblivion,” and one of the participants—Anatoly Podolsky—said that it is correct to speak not about blame, but about responsibility, and when there is responsibility, we can talk about our memory.
Generally speaking, this phrase itself, those words “the pain of memory,” are taken from Sergey Bukovsky’s movie that we screened during the program. This is the movie Spell Your Name. In that movie, one of the witnesses of the Holocaust in Ukraine attempts to describe his memories, his feelings, and he says that it is impossible because the memory is so painful. That is where I found this phrase.
Iryna Slavinska: My question is if it is really about pain, then it also touches upon the Ukrainian context. How much do you, as curator and journalist, feel that the topic of pain is present in the Ukrainian context if there is a discussion about Babyn Yar? I mean from the point of view of the victims, the righteous of the nations, and the executors?
Tetyana Teren: I don’t know. Perhaps I do not feel pain. For me, it is very important these days to feel that the topic of Babyn Yar is present. I think it was not sufficiently present, but at the end of 2016, because of the anniversary, this topic will be heard better, both on the official level and on the level of the private institutions as well.
Аnd I would not say that this is about pain. It has to be not about pain, but about memory today. I think the theme of memory, the problem of memory, is more important.
Iryna Slavinska: Let us talk about memory then. This is the 75th anniversary and there will be a broader discussion in society. In your view, if we are talking about memory in Ukraine, how much memory has been gathered, so to say? Is there a process happening today? Or is it more like some definite amount of oral and written memory within the scope of knowledge that an average Ukrainian would have? Or can we narrow this amount of knowledge down to the group of people who come to the events you curate?
Tetyana Teren: You know, when I started to prepare this program, I did not even realize it was the 75th anniversary. I was already in the midst of my work when I understood what year it is, and that it would be in September. As a matter of fact, I was inspired by the Pinchuk Art Centre exhibition called Loss. In Memory of Babyn Yar. Three international artists took part in it, and I started my work from that point. When I was just starting to work I thought that the Babyn Yar theme was practically nonexistent in our book market. At that moment, of course, I understood that now there is Katya Petrovska’s novel Maybe Esther, and we talked a lot about it.
Iryna Slavinska: And this is a phenomenon of German literature.
Tetyana Teren: Yes, and we call it German literature. On the other hand, everyone knows about Anatoly Kuznetsov’s novel, and we also talked about it at the Pinchuk Art Centre. I thought that would be it. Luckily, I decided to consult with Leonid Finberg—the chief editor of the Dukh i Litera publishing house—and it turned out of course that there are not only these two books. There is a poetry anthology, there are lots of written testimonies, and there are very many books with the viewpoints and research of historians. But what concerns me is that no matter how much I read I think that this topic is still to this time not sufficiently present in literature.
Iryna Slavinska: At the same time, I recall a wonderful novel by Larysa Denysenko called Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased. It is not directly dedicated to the events of Babyn Yar, but it more or less draws on the Ukrainian and German legacy in what is connected to the Holocaust and more broadly the Second World War. This novel is very important because it is historical, but it also has some comic and satirical elements that are inherent to Larysa Denysenko’s style. From the point of view of this therapeutic approach, such writing is probably the sign of some healthy processes that allow us to recall and talk about this without excessive strain.
Tetyana Teren: I think this combination of recall, especially of these personal stories for Larysa and Katya Petrovska, is a personal story that is connected to their families. Throughout this program I was thinking that this is the only way to attempt to understand and to tell this story today. I do not believe that someone who was not somehow connected to this and did not hear these family stories, or perhaps those stories of the people from Kyiv, I do not believe that this person can recount this to us.
And why is the novel Babi Yar by Anatoly Kuznetsov so piercing and touching? Because this is really his story, the story of this eleven-year-old boy who saw all of this with his own eyes. That is why it works. On the other hand, Leonid Finberg gave me a book of memoirs of those Kyivites who survived Babyn Yar. You understand that those texts that only simply provide a chronology, a very painful chronology from people who were in the Syrets concentration camp and then later in Babyn Yar, these texts from the point of view of literature do not work. It is already impossible today to tell the story about what happened in this manner to a contemporary audience. I think for me the only path to memory is the memory of literature.
Iryna Slavinska: We will continue talking about some individual texts. Today, in this part of the discussion, I would like to continue speaking about the program. It is really very multidisciplinary. It has cinema, discussions, and literary conversations. It is also striking that it is not only about Babyn Yar as a place where Jews were killed. A very important thing here, of course, is the lecture dedicated to Olena Teliha. [Ukrainian poet and activist executed by the Gestapo in Babyn Yar in 1942—Ed.] Along with her, there is also an entire pantheon of other names of people from Kyiv and elsewhere who saw each other in Babyn Yar on this sad day in this sad period during the Second World War. Please tell us more about this concept. How did you collect these names? These destinies? These subjects? And how did you choose those who discussed all of this? Not all members of the program are specialists in Judaism or the history of the Holocaust.
Tetyana Teren: Actually, we also worked with experts in Judaism. On Friday we had a discussion with Igor Shchupak who is working directly on this topic. He was talking about the echo of the Holocaust in contemporary Ukraine.
As a matter of fact, I wanted two important concepts to be present during the program. Like you said, Babyn Yar is not only a tragedy for Jews. People very often say: “Your tragedy is the Famine, and the tragedy for the Jews is the Holocaust and Babyn Yar,” but this is very wrong.
Iryna Slavinska: By the way, there is also a landscape marker to show that the idea of Babyn Yar as only a Jewish tragedy is incorrect. I remember one of the interviews that was also on the “Encounters” program. We were discussing the idea of creating a memorial landscape park in Babyn Yar. When the organizers were preparing documentation for the competition, they counted around thirty different memorials in Babyn Yar. They commemorate the various aspects of this great tragedy.
Tetyana Teren: Here we can turn to my second concept. I also would like to say that on one hand what happened is a Ukrainian, a wider Ukrainian, tragedy. On the other hand, I would like to talk about how these events influenced our future and our life today.
I talked about these memorials with the historian Vitaliy Nakhmanovych. I called him because I wanted to know what we can do where. For instance, tomorrow we would have poetry readings at Babyn Yar, and we were discussing where we can and where we cannot do this, because it is important. On one hand of course nobody today knows where it happened and where exactly people were killed. He told me that we should not forget that Babyn Yar is not about the past but about us, people today. He compared this situation with the memorials at Babyn Yar with the Maidan. Of course, we are now talking about some memorial complexes for the Maidan, and there are some discussions and projects there. In Babyn Yar the situation is more complex, but there are some similarities. On the Maidan there are also a lot of memorials, I am not sure how many exactly. In Babyn Yar we did not count, but the situation on the Maidan is very similar.
Iryna Slavinska: I do not know how this can help to evaluate the situation, but on the Maidan some memorials are rather handmade. For example, this memorial wall at the beginning of Instytutska Street, where there are candles, the photographs of people who died there, and memorial plaques for some of them—all this is handmade. In contrast, at Babyn Yar these memorials are institutionalized in some way. People had to have permission from the city council and so on to set them up. From the point of view of the context it does not change much though.
Tetyana Teren: I do not think they are all so institutionalized. I think there were also many handmade memorials there. The first so to say “correct” memorial was the Menorah erected there by the community in 1991. Before that, there was only the memorial to the Soviet people who died there, military prisoners, and officers. There was no memorial to those people who really died there.
As a matter of fact, you can also see crosses and memorials to some individual citizens erected there by other individuals. The entire Ukrainian nation is not erecting those memorials, some communities do that, and this is also something very significant.
Iryna Slavinska: I think we should mention some names and texts from the program. I will name what I highlighted in the program for myself: literature and memory, Paul Celan, Olena Teliha, Janusz Korczak, memory and oblivion, landscape memory, the echo of the Holocaust and modern war, Sergei Bukovsky’s film Spell Your Name, “The Depths of Memory” poetry reading, and, of course, the documentary novel Babi Yar. This is a pretty wide assortment of texts and movies that we can talk about. Perhaps let us characterize them separately. What is their role in this context that we described in the first part of our program?
Tetyana Teren: Well, they are all in some way connected to the topic of the Holocaust and Babyn Yar in particular. I would not say that the program is very broad. I think I even wanted more from it. The question is, and we talked about this before, are there enough literary texts and movies? When it comes to films, there are very few of them. Yesterday we were talking about this with the critic Dmytro Desyateryk. We are all talking about Sergei Bukovsky’s film with its strong documentary component, but if we talk about feature films, they do not exist. I mean features about Babyn Yar. I looked at the 2003 German movie called Babij Yar, and frankly speaking it was very hard to watch. The whole movie is based on some stereotypes…For example, if the director wanted to show that the locals, Ukrainians, were also guilty in what was happening, he shows it to the extent that the audience cannot understand that there were also those Ukrainians who saved and supported Jews and those who ended up in Babyn Yar. Therefore, I think there is a big problem with feature movies.
I do not know what [Sergei—Ed.] Loznitsa is filming these days because there has to be a movie about Babi Yar. The shooting did not start yet, and it is still unknown if it will be a documentary or a feature movie, but it will be very interesting to see what comes out of it. If we talk about texts, then we can say that all the characters are connected to these topics or are writing about these topics. I was, for example, very surprised to find out that [Ukrainian writer Oleksandr—Ed.] Irvanets is translating Korczak. I knew he was translating from different languages, but did not know about Korczak. By the way, his translations of Korczak are considered the best in Ukraine. In our lecture-presentation he was reading “Prayers” by Janusz Korczak to different people. They are indeed very powerful texts, and I think Irvanets translated them quite well.
Of course, there was Katya Petrovska who wrote Maybe Esther, and I think, and I am not alone in thinking this, that it is the only modern text about Babyn Yar. Whether it is German literature, or now after Yurko Prokhasko’s translation already a part of Ukrainian literature, but this is really a text about Babyn Yar, and with Katya we agreed that during its presentation we were going to talk not only about this novel, but also about memory, and she herself asked to describe it as a “memory of the landscape.” We were talking about the difference in the landscape from the past and what is now in Babyn Yar, or, how they call it, “the Babyn Yar Memorial Reserve.” People who are jogging, children playing frisbee, families on picnics, and they are in a place where there is no exact information on how many people died, although definitely not less than 100,000 people. Thus, we have this constant difference between what we have now and what happened there before, and we talked about this memory of the landscape in this place.
Rostyslav Semkiv read a very important and extremely good lecture about Olena Teliha. This is one more stereotype, one more thing that we do not know and that is excluded from memory. I would like to confess that I knew that this lecture would happen from the very beginning because just recently I had a very unpleasant talk with an older Kyivan lady who angrily told me that Olena Teliha Street does not have the right to exist in Kyiv because, and now I am quoting her, “it would be the same as naming a street after Hitler in Kyiv.”
Iryna Slavinska: Why did the lady from Kyiv not like Olena Teliha?
Tetyana Teren: I was very shocked by this, you know. Yes, there are these stereotypes. Teliha was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. As a matter of fact, she was one of those members of that organization who spoke out against Stalin and Hitler at the same time. They were disseminating leaflets, and Teliha moved to Kyiv already knowing that she would die here with her husband. It is very important to talk about this. We should know who Olena Teliha was, and what she did. We have to read her works, see the very strong poet in her, and, as Rostyslav Semkiv did, show her as a part of a group of very powerful Ukrainian women. This is a real phenomenon, and during the lecture Semkiv showed this visually. He showed the path from Marko Vovchok [Ukrainian writer 1833-1907—Ed.] to Oksana Zabuzhko and Marianna Kiyanovska. There were always women who were not only poets and writers, but who also took upon themselves the role of civic activist.
Iryna Slavinska: I want to remind listeners we have discussed the role of powerful women in Ukrainian literature as well as Olena Teliha on other programs on Hromadske Radio and they can be found on our website. I would like to go back to the novel we mentioned before, and that is Maybe Esther by Katya Petrovska. This novel is really written somehow in a very “contemporary” way, but that is not a very good word. But this novel, as a very particular quest by the main character, helps to better examine the frightening tragedy without plunging into this darkness from which perhaps there is a certain fatigue. In any event, there are documentary videos and written testimonies. There are people who have the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem for example and see how the Holocaust exhibition functions, for instance, in Israel, and so on.
Maybe Esther allows us to look at this story through the eyes of a modern person who lives today and has the baggage not only of a family history from the Second World War, but also has family history from the 1990’s, and family history of other years, and also has a set of certain stereotypes and phrases that appear in her mind suddenly and this helps to structure reality in some way. The novel Maybe Esther concludes with a very powerful scene, when the character is standing at Instytutska Street nowadays, which is also a very significant place for today’s Kyiv, and she is talking to a woman. Maybe that woman is real, maybe she is imaginary, who knows, but she says something to the effect: “You come here too often, girl.” Do we not come here too often when we talk about the memory of Babyn Yar?
Tetyana Teren: I think we return there very rarely. Our attention and media are built in a way that we pay heed to it when there is some kind of anniversary, and this provides a good reason to come and talk about these main facts of history, and we remind people about the victims of the tragedy and when and where it took place. In our meeting with Katya we also were talking about that scene on Instytutska Street, and about what happens to us when we do not remember. Something repeats itself anyway. We come to the same and only place regardless.
Iryna Slavinska: Are we moving in circles?
Tetyana Teren: I do not know if this is moving in circles, but it reminds us of something. With Babyn Yar there is that horrible story connected to the Kurenivka tragedy. [The 1961 Kurenivka mudslide occurred when a dam securing the pulp dump of a brick factory failed and flooded a downhill neighborhood, killing by official estimates 146 people, while unofficial estimates are much higher—Ed.] It is very frightening when the Soviet government tried to do everything so that this place would be forgotten. They wanted to place the road here, later on the subway, then the television tower, and so on. They had a park for people in Kyiv developed there. They put the pulp from brick factories here, so that the place does not exist anymore. Whether Soviet or Jewish people…but the place does not have to exist anymore, and there will be no extra problems. And how does this end? At the end of all of this there was the Kurenivka tragedy, which, I think, is almost forgotten in Kyiv even though there probably are witnesses to this tragedy still living in Kyiv. Not that many people still remember Babyn Yar, but the Kurenivka tragedy was in the 1960s, and people should still remember it.
Iryna Slavinska: Continuing our talk about the documented testimonies, we already mentioned the documentary novel Babi Yar by Anatoly Kuznetsov as one of the elements of this program. Let us talk more about this text. How much is it present in Ukrainian contexts today? How is it written? Who is its author? Perhaps among our listeners are people who hear this name for the first time.
Tetyana Teren: You know, I was very surprised with such coincidences in our program. I mean, we did not choose a specific date for the program. We took into consideration when people can come, for instance when Katya Petrovska could attend. It was in the process of planning that we discovered that the first day—the 15th of September—is very important for Jews because this is Memory Day.
Also in that process I discovered that [Sept.] 18th is Anatoly Kuznetsov’s birthday, and this was also not planned. I think this text is not sufficiently present in the Ukrainian context today. We can have various attitudes about our school programs, and what children are learning there, and how it should be reformed, but I think this text should definitely be included. For all sorts of reasons—from what is said there and how it is written. I mentioned that there are testimonies of people who still remember, so Kuznetsov took a lot from them. He took some individual episodes, some certain facts from there, wrote down the testimonies himself, but only he with his writer’s talent could combine it in a way that this documented story is built in an artistic way, and it works very well, and enters our memory, and what is important, into our perception of Kyiv.
This is very important text for Kyivites in order to understand in what a tragic place we live, and what was happening on what streets. After the first week of reading this text, I experienced some physical pain when I was on those streets around Babyn Yar. It is really the text that should be read to understand where we live. This is really his very big achievement. The text was written quickly, in Soviet times, it was censored, and only when the author fled to Great Britain could he publish it uncensored, because it was not that easy in the Soviet Union. He also shows it in the text. He put the parts that were censored in italics. Kuznetsov’s fate was also tragic. Having lived through all of this, I think all those events never let him go, and it was very difficult to live with all of that, especially when he saw that people were trying to forget all of it.
The famous poem by Yevtushenko “Babi Yar” was also inspired by Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov took Yevtushenko to Babyn Yar where there were no memorials. Now there are 29 of them, as we mentioned before. That is why it was Kuznetsov’s personal story. He died early, when he was 49 years old. His son, who came to our program, was telling us that these events did not let him go. That is why, already having left the Soviet Union, where life was not easy for him and where he could not publish his text in its original version, he died very early, after having the full version published. This was a very heavy historical burden that he experienced himself, and his life ended too soon.
Iryna Slavinska: That was Tetyana Teren, who spoke about the “The Pain of Memory” program that took place at the Pinchuk Art Centre, part of a series of commemorative events marking the 75th anniversary of Babyn Yar which we have been covering. This has been the program “Encounters” on Hromadske Radio. Listen. Think.
Originally appeared in Ukrainian here.
Translated by: Olesya Kravchuk, journalist, interpreter
Additional translation and editing by Peter Bejger
