If only Ukrainian trains could talk, they would tell so many stories about their passengers and about those third-class carriages with the always damp Soviet sheets, the endless snow-covered plains and that darkness that seemed to devour everything even though the train was traveling east, towards the dawn of Sun. Even more remarkable was the colorful gallery of character actors who crowded that night train from Sumy to Luhans’k: ex-convicts, prostitutes who robbed customers after drugging them and probationary conductors who were already drunk before the starting whistle. At the center of the story is the protagonist-author who sometimes pays for the ticket, but more often avoids it because he knows how to navigate inside the carriages, skilfully avoiding the ticket inspectors. During a night trip in particular Žadan meets a young student from the police academy and is gripped by a piercing doubt: why can’t policemen have sex with each other? Maybe they’ll put some bromide in their kompot to help them stifle their urges? Serhij Žadan, born in 1974, Ukrainian poet, writer, musician and activist, declared in an interview that he wanted to write a book on anarchism. He himself doesn’t know why he said this sentence: he didn’t even want to write a book on this topic. And this however – he concludes – is not a reason not to write it…
Can anarchism be poetic? What Serhij Žadan seems to be saying is that anarchism can only be poetic. Divided into six parts, this book, so difficult to define, seems to combine form and content in a divertissement in which many different genres can be found: from autobiography to a sort of anarchist manifesto, from travel diary to historical reportage, from grotesque tales to suburban fairy tale. It is as if Žadan had wanted to write a Bildungsroman without the novel and with an education destined to become the destruction of every form of oppressive power, including the cage of the literary genre. The raw material is the author’s own memories, despite the fact that he himself says that “going back to the places where you grew up is almost like going back to a crematorium where they have already burned you once”. Yet the author can’t help but reminisce, like a child scratching the scab of a recent wound even though he knows he’ll bleed again, but he can’t help it because it’s too funny. There are so many themes, characters, memories that crowd into these pages full of irony, fun and strangeness that it is really difficult to reduce everything into the space of a review. What is striking is Žadan’s impact in whatever he tells, which takes on such an ironic dimension that it becomes a sort of anti-epic. Every action of his has a human and extraordinary dimension. His clumsy replacement of a red Soviet flag with a Ukrainian flag. His passion for pennants and his clashes with the postman. The enormous Hotel Kharkiv, where you could spend your whole life without ever leaving, not even when dead. The bizarre Šura and his spoiled boxer St’opa. Having sex with a drunk girl who begs not to touch her hair with the worry of switching sides to Sticky Fingers before the precious vinyl self-destructs. As indicated by the book’s title itself, there is a lot of music in these apparently unrelated pages. In fact, a possible key to understanding is precisely in the fourth part: the “ten tracks that I would like to listen to at my funeral commemoration”, in which each song is connected to a memory, a story, an extravagance. Perhaps the same volume is a long playlist (rather than a jazz improvisation) of memory in which the sound of the words and their meaning are at the same time music and lyrics of many songs that stir the imagination of Žadan himself. The translation effort of Giovanna Brogi and Mariana Prokopovyč is truly remarkable, as they managed to give the text a sound and musical texture, certainly restoring something of the prosodic flow of the original into Italian. Don’t miss the afterword: afterwords are always a gesture of particular kindness towards the reader and seem to say “make up your own mind about the book”, then if you want to hear something more… I’m here. The hope that this book will also contribute to making Ukrainian literature more visible among European literatures is absolutely to be shared (since it has nothing to envy them). The decision to indicate the toponyms according to the Ukrainian transcription and not according to the Russian transcription, even when more common, is appropriate.
