EP. 14: Capturing Ukrainian Stories to Build Justice with Sasha Dovzhyk

00:00:04: Welcome to the podcast Yak Ty? Ukraine Life. Yak Ty means how are you in Ukrainian. I am your host, Luzia Tschirky, a former correspondent, now a book author, and a freelancer. Today, I am joined by Sasha Dovzhyk. Sasha Dovzhyk was born in the industrial city of Zaporizhzhia, in the southeast of Ukraine in 1988, three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. She has a master's degree in cultural studies from the National University Mahila Academy in Kyiv and a master’s degree in Victorian studies from the Birkbeck University of London. She was awarded a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Birkbeck, also in London. She taught English Literature and Ukrainian Literature at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, UCL. From 2021 to 2023, she was a Special Projects Creator at the Ukrainian Institute of London. In 2022, she created a writer's residency, Ukrainian Lab, and she's the editor-in-chief of the London Ukrainian Review. Since the beginning of 2022, just divided her time between the UK and Ukraine, and she engaged in advocacy and writing about Ukrainian resistance for the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, CNN, New Alliance, and other publications. After nine years in London, at the end of 2023, she went back to Ukraine. Set up a new cultural and research institution in Lviv. Welcome to the podcast, Sasha. Thank you so much for joining me here today. And wow, what an impressive amount of work you're doing.

00:01:33: Thank you so much, Luzia, it's an honor to be here and thank you for such a generous and detailed introduction.

00:01:39: I always start this podcast with the question, Yak ty saras? How are you right now?

00:01:44: Actually great, you know, we are currently in the moment when there is an uplifted spirit in Ukraine and I think globally regarding the war, since this weekend Ukrainians managed to kick the ass of our nuclear weaponized enemy aggressive state Russia with some homemade drones. That Ukrainians managed to destroy about one third of Russian strategic aviation, which is something that has never been done in history. And I think that Ukrainians have again exceeded expectations and demonstrated to the whole world that it is actually possible to get a victory against the aggressor in this unjust war. This has just happened. My mood is very much optimistic and very much hopeful.

00:02:36: I'm very happy to hear that you're in a good mood. I think this is the very first time someone joining me on this podcast is in such a good So I'm happy about that. Happy to hear you are joining us. If I understood you correctly today from Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine, you moved back to Ukraine after living nine years in London in late 2023. What motivated you to leave a life abroad and return to Ukraine?

00:02:59: Yes, I'm currently in Lviv and I have just returned from where I was at the Kyiv Book Arsenal Festival, which is one of the major literary events in Ukraine. And it's always a great occasion for us to witness the thriving of Ukrainian culture against the backdrop of this war. So yes, I'm actually based in Lviv. I actually moved to Ukraine in February 2022 and stayed here for about half a year as a local producer. So I took a decision to return before the full-scale invasion because for me it was important to be on the ground in case something happens. And I worked in Ukraine during the first months of the full-scale invasion as a global producer for foreign media companies covering the war. And then I returned to London for another year to teach Ukrainian literature. University of London, which was a great experience, which demonstrated to me that while I was employed full-time in the UK, I managed to travel to Ukraine a couple of times per month because my heart was actually here. And I realized that it was necessary for me personally to move to Ukraine and to establish myself here full-time permanently without, you know, splitting in and without going back and forth between the two countries that are close to my heart. So I eventually ended up here, as you have rightfully put it, in the end of 2023 with the idea in mind of creating a new institution, which is now properly established, and it's called INDEX, Institute for Documentation and Exchange, a cultural and research center in the western city of Lviv. Where we are engaged in two strands of work that are actually captured in the title of the institution. It's documentation of wartime Ukrainian experiences and its exchange because this documentation is rooted in international intellectual exchange between Ukrainians who remain in the country and between our international peers, fellows and friends who need some kind of nuance and contextualize the picture of what life looks like in the country amidst the full-scale invasion and we are providing an opportunity to do just that.

00:05:27: Before talking more into details about your current work and the work of INDEX, I would like to briefly talk about your current life in Lviv and then surely about your biography also like growing up in Zaporizhzhia. I assume that still like you know moving back and forth between the UK and Ukraine is something different from really living you know constantly in Ukraine. Did anything surprise you personally about living day-to-day life in Lviv when you moved back?

00:05:55: I think my experience of moving back full-time has been smoothed by the fact that I was here quite a lot at the start of the full-scale invasion. But life in Lviv obviously differs greatly from life in, say, even or Kharkiv, where I happen to be very often. Or Zaporizhzhia, which is my hometown. So I'm here closer to the European border. The European border is just one hour away by car. We, I might say, enjoy a quieter life. So. Our daily routine is not interrupted as often as in other places by air raid alerts or actually air raid. And the air raids and attacks that have devastating consequences happen here less often than even in the capital. So there is this privilege of a comparative safety in the rest of the country. But at the same time, I would not go as far as to say that the war is not felt here. Because it only takes one visit to the military cemetery in the city, which is called Mars Fields, the Fields of Mars, the other shuttle cemetery, to see the consequences of Russia's invasion and the impact on Ukrainian society. The cemetery actually grows day by day. By day was mere military grace of Ukrainian defenders. And to see this monstrous, I would say, growth is really devastating. And it's a constant reminder of the price that the entirety of the country pays for, in this fight for Ukrainian sovereignty and independence.

00:07:29: You briefly mentioned in the beginning that your heart has always been in Ukraine, while you lived abroad in London. Ukrainians living in Ukraine have told me on several occasions that their compatriots abroad are sometimes more worried than those who remain in Ukraine. They say that being far away from loved ones, who were in danger is often harder for them than facing danger themselves by being in Ukraine. From your experience, have you been more worried about the fate of people in Ukraine while you lived in London? Or do you have not felt any difference?

00:08:02: I think it's a very fair observation and depends on the person obviously, and I'm among those who feel much more in control when they are on the ground where there are some practical things that they can be doing alongside some more like, you know, advocacy related things. Obviously, the sense of control is quite illusory because there is not much you can do if there is a missile flying at your city. But still being close to my friends and to my fellow citizens for me means a lot. And it means a lot that I'm sharing all the difficulties with other people in Ukraine.

00:08:40: You grew up in Zaporizhzhia, as you already mentioned, a city that used to be predominantly Russian speaking. You attended a Ukrainian school there and wrote in an article I read that you hated Ukrainian literature as a school subject while growing up. Today you are an expert on Ukrainian literature. Can you describe how your relationship with Ukrainian literature obviously has changed?

00:09:07: Yes, thank you for this question in Ukraine, many people in my generation share this experience of not quite getting Ukrainian literature because of the way it was presented to us and because of the way we were taught at school. So basically, we are the truly the Soviet generation. We are people born around the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991. It means that we were told mostly by people. Who were from the Soviet Union and who got their education in the Soviet system. Some of the approaches that they used were quite obsolete and were quite ideologically tainted, even though we are talking about post-independence schooling in Ukraine. So, one of the ways the Soviet regime used to diminish Ukrainian literature was to present it as the literature and culture of peasant folk. There is nothing wrong with peasants and their culture, but it was just the way it was presented to us, that it was of a lower rank than the noble and aristocratic culture of the imperial centers of Saint Petersburg and Moscow. So Ukrainian literature was all about the struggles and strivings of the small folk in the villages and their day-to-day life. Their routines and not this high and elevated upon dreams of highly educated aristocrats that we encounter in Russian literature, for example. And this approach was very much held during my schooling and this is what I unfortunately did absorb when going to school in the 1990s. However, later I discovered that, first and foremost the literature that I read in school as insignificant and provincial was actually full of meaning to me. It had some powerful anti-colonial messages and it also was a literature on fire that I didn't find in the imperial culture. And secondly, I discovered some other Ukrainian authors that were sidelined in the school program. Lesia Ukrainka is the most obvious example. She is the author at the top of Ukrainian canon, who was presented as first a children's author, and then, you know, as this a suffering writer with a lot of health problems and we concentrated on the side of her biography instead of concentrating on her literary achievements. When you start treating Lesia Ukrainka as an adult or like with a refreshed lens on Ukrainian culture, you discover that this is a feminist and anti-colonial thinker. Of global scale and of global importance. And some of the breakthroughs in her literature are in parallel to the literature of her time. And that would actually took a couple of generations of feminist thinking to catch up with her discovery, not only in Ukraine, but also in Europe or North America. So yeah, through this exploration, I actually changed my view of the Ukrainian literature and my engagement with it took a different turn.

00:12:33: Far as I understand from your biography, you teached Ukrainian literature abroad, but never in Ukraine itself. Do you know about the situation at the very moment? Is Ukrainian literature nowadays teached differently from the time you were teached in school? Do you know about that?

00:12:51: Sure, sure, um... There has been a rediscovery of Ukrainian literature and a trickling of this interest in Ukrainian culture all over Ukraine, especially since the full-scale invasion, but actually even before that. And Ukrainian, it always depends on the teacher, and it always depends on school, but there has been an effort of including more contemporary Ukrainian writing and also of reviewing the canonical texts that children at school are taught, so the situation would be quite different today.

00:13:23: So hopefully you wouldn't hate Ukrainian literature if you would go to school nowadays. Good to hear that.

00:13:29: Hopefully not, hopefully not.

00:13:31: Talking more about the work you are doing and your vision of Index, the origin of Index for those who aren't familiar what Index is, it's the Institute for Documentation and Exchange. How did it come to be established in Lviv? Could you tell us the story of how this idea was born and why it felt necessary to you personally to create a new institution in the middle of the full-scale invasion?

00:13:53: So, the idea of Index was actually born in Vienna. There was a wonderful program which still exists and which is called Documenting Ukraine at the Institute of Human Sciences. And it's a program which supports Ukrainians who document the war in various ways through photography and literary means and intellectual reflection and oral history. So really diverse field of professional. So they are supported with grants to continue the work that they excel in. And I was one of the lucky recipients of this grant, and I thought that, okay, this is actually quite radical and revolutionary. You have a lot of trust people to, you know, to... This documentation work without some framework imposed upon them. I was very excited about this program and then I heard about the idea of running it in Ukraine, establishing an office that would administer this program in Ukraine and I was invited to head this office. Since then the situation has changed, the Documenting Ukraine program remains in Vienna at the Institute for Human Sciences. But the work that we started doing here in all of this appears quite important for us and appears quite important for to continue. So we were launched as in a pilot format in autumn 2024. As Index we welcomed the first cohort of fellows. These are people again who document the war or provide intellectual reflection on the war. And they come from other regions of Ukraine like for example from Kharkiv or from Kyiv and they come from abroad as well and they're invited to index, to Lviv, to our premises where they work on their individual projects and engage in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural discussions through a series of internal seminars where they can brainstorm their new ideas or get feedback on the existing projects through public engagement events where the fellows engage with the local community. They present their research through talks at public institutions and cultural centers or go to universities and present their work to students. Or go to other Ukrainian regions and engage with our partnering institutions, such as PEN Ukraine, a human rights and literary organization, or in Ivano-Frankivsk, or universities in other region of Ukraine, or like literary museum in Kharkiv with which we have quite a warm connection. So and through all this work they develop their projects which are aimed at capturing this moment in time in Ukraine, documenting the facts. Providing an intellectual response to what is going on and preserving this knowledge, which will shape the idea of this war, not only for us, but hopefully for future generations as well, will provide some kind of framework for how this war and Ukrainian resistance is perceived. Through this changed framework of perception, I hope that we will be getting closer to the idea of justice for Ukraine, because justice is obviously not only the legal justice that can be achieved in courtrooms or in jail cells, but also the historical justice, the epistemic justice, in how this war, its causes and its consequences are perceived in Ukraine and globally. And we want this perception to be formed here with us and rooted in nuanced and boarded knowledge of what is Ukraine today.

00:17:48: Talking about this sense of justice, was it important for you to have this at the core of index, at the work of index? Because I assume that before getting justice in front of courts for all the war crimes the Russian army committed on the territory of Ukraine, it will take many years, maybe even decades. Was it also important that this kind of justice can be established also in a sense right now and one does not need to wait for years or even decades. Did I play a role for you personally?

00:18:20: I think it's the right way to go. I'm thinking where to root this story, so to anchor this story. Justice, if we think about epistemic justice, it also reflects to how stories are captured and how stories past on. So not quite long ago, I worked on the book, which is called, Looking at Women, Looking at War, a Warring Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina, a writer and war crimes investigator who was killed in as a result of Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk in 2023. At the time of her death, the book was left unfinished and during the year that followed, a tutorial group which included Tatiana Teran, Yaryna Grusha, Alexa Mellon and myself worked on the draft of this book and on Victoria Snow. On some chapters that were written quite beautifully and deleted and some chapters of which only the headings remained. So we went through audio files and we went through the telephone notes to figure out what Victoria would want this book to look like. We assembled it and the book was published. And one of the... I published this year in February 2025. And one of the key ideas that Victoria communicated through her writing was that telling someone's story, capturing the testimony is also a form of justice. For those people with whom she spoke as a war crimes investigator, this definitely was a form justice. To capture your truth, to communicate it to a wider community and to the world at large is already doing the work of justice even if the perpetrators are not yet punished. Just to see your truth reflected is already an achievement. And I think that this idea currently in Ukrainian society is quite prevalent. And this is the idea that Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties and Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a fantastic brilliant human rights defender, often advocates that for justice can take. Many forms. For someone it would be seeing Putin in jail, for someone else it would be telling the story of the disappearance or like an atrocity that happened to their loved ones and capturing their name and capturing in detail what happened to them. While we are not in Hague, we are in Lviv, the legal justice is not something that we can provide. But assisting in capturing truthfully the stories of Ukrainians is definitely something that we can do.

00:21:09: Was this also something that became important to you as an expert on Ukrainian literature, I assume when you were reading certain books, from Ukrainian authors written by Ukrainian authors during the 20th century, for example, that you had the impression that so many, many moments of sufferings were not documented in detail so that people would never know about the suffering of Ukrainians - did that also play a role why you established index and one of its center core of index with this sense of justice?

00:21:40: Yes, there is actually this history of institutional and generational erasure in Ukraine, where a generation doesn't have an opportunity to tell their story, or their story is being ripped apart by the colonial forces and colonial violence. And we saw it with the executed renaissance of Ukrainian fighters in the 1930s, when the whole generation of cultural practitioners, writers, artists was purged during the Stalinist terror and their works were destroyed. And then we saw the same story repeated in the 1960s. So the generation of the Ukrainian 60s who were researching the fates of their predecessors were likewise persecuted by the Soviet regime and killed or repressed. We can hear, think of Alla Horska, a wonderful artist, monumental artist, mosaics artist, who was not only killed by the Soviet regime, but whose works that are situated physically located in Eastern Ukraine are now being destroyed by this new wave of Russian invasion. And it's like a layer of Ukrainian culture that has been eradicated with intent. By Russia to create a sense of an empty field, a wide field, a loco deserta, where there is no culture, there is no language, there's no nation, there is no art, there no history, and where you can come in, plunder, invade, and plant your life. And this is what we try to prevent, right? We try to preserve the memory of the previous generations, and we try to preserve the memory of our colleagues who have already been lost in this war. This is one of the impulses behind one of the initiatives in which INDEX participates. It's called the Monitoring of Cultural Losses Killed by Russia, Ukrainian Culture Makers. And this initiative actually documents Ukrainian people of culture; creatives could have been lost since the full-scale invasion. Just preserving their stories for us is very important to show not only the scale of physical destruction but also the scale of violence against Ukrainian culture.

00:24:10: We already talked about your roots in Zaporizhzhia. So the city itself, Zaporizhzhia, is under Ukrainian control of the region itself. The whole Zaporizhzhia region, more than 70% are currently occupied by Russian forces. I assume, you know, many, many places you visited during your own childhood that are now currently occupied. That personal experience of yours, not being able to visit places, you know from your childhood, did that play a role in your decision to set up index and does it influence your work you're currently doing.

00:24:44: I miss the south of Ukraine and the southeast of Ukraine a lot. And I often speak to people who had to flee places on the Sea of Azov that have been occupied by Russia since 2022. People from Mariupol, Berdyansk, Krylyivka, Nizhetsk and so on. These are the places where I grew up, which I visited every summer when I was a kid. It's something that forms and shapes your identity, something that in a way predetermines your choices when you're a grown-up. And of course, I'm looking now at two pictures of the Zaporizhzhian landscapes that one of the index fellows presented to me. So it's always with me and it's something... That I'm motivated by. I want to see these places liberated. I want to go there and I want to participate personally in the rebuilding of landscapes and sites that have made me the person that I am today, right? So definitely this is something that I've very deeply invested in. All of my childhood friends. Have been in one way or another impacted by the war, obviously, as everyone in Ukraine. But for me, what's important is that pretty much all my school friends who are men are currently serving on the front lines and have been there on since 2022, unlike myself who is involved in what you can call. Cultural resistance. They are resisting Russia's occupation with arms and these are people to whom I turn when I feel like in in the darker days. And these are the people to who I turn when I need to remind myself that we will win this war because for them to fight is not a choice. They're all fighters and they are very generous in sharing this fighting spirit with me for which I'm always grateful.

00:27:04: You mentioned that you have like two pictures you're now looking at for us who are not seeing the pictures. Could you describe them of the landscape you received?

00:27:13: Yeah, of course. It's basically just the line of the horizon, and it's the sky above the fields. So, Zaporizhzhia, if you imagine the Ukrainian map, it's in the southeast and it is in the heartlets of the Ukrainian steppes. What you get there is these broad spaces with a lot of... Emptiness and a lot of freedom. There was dry wind in the summer that smells of dry grass and flowers and with, you know, this hot and scorching sun that is quite typical of the of the south of Ukraine. And it's very funny that here at Index we often organize exhibitions of people of culture who were killed by Russia since the full-scale invasion. And one of the exhibitions that we did put on was a photography by documentary photographer Roman Chornomaz, who at the beginning of the full-scale invasion enlisted in the army and became a sniper. He didn't have much time or opportunity to shoot as a photographer, he was shot as a person with a rifle, but the pictures that we have from his wartime years from the Zaporizhzhia region, and I didn't know that when I saw them for the first time. I was just looking at the picture which captured a field, the line of the horizon, and sky above it. I was like, hmm, something in the color scheme, something in the line of horizon looks so familiar to me. Is there any chance that this is a picture from Zaporizhzhia? And Roman Chornomaz's sister noted and said that this was actually the Zaporizhzhia front. So somehow it's in your bones that you're going to recognize and justify by looking at the sky above the field.

00:29:07: You mentioned a photographer that unfortunately, if I understood you correctly, was killed in action as a soldier of the Ukrainian army. You were born in the year 1988. People of your age in peaceful countries, people who have the privilege to live in peaceful countries are normally at your age not confronted so often with death, right? So like with people who were killed, people they know who were killed, you know, or thinking about death in general. How did that shape you personally, you know, that death is so much more present at your age than it actually is normal in the 21st century for people living in peaceful countries?

00:29:44: Thank you, thank you. It's a very profound question and a deep one. So, I think what witnessing so much death of people whom you know personally, or who are from your social circle, or who are from you environment basically, for me it instills in me a sense of responsibility because the death of the people who are involved in the work that I am also doing means that there is a little bit more unfinished projects, unwritten books, unspoken work, unpainted pictures, there are causes that have been left unfinished and there are less and less people who can finish them, who can complete them and I'm privileged to be one of the people who is there and who can and will continue doing this work and who will continue preserving the memory of those who have been lost. So, for me this life amidst loss means responsibility. Responsibility to persevere, to persist and to go on and to continue telling the story of Ukrainian resistance.

00:31:00: Does that feel like, you know, like a greater goal for you personally, or does it more feel sometimes like a burden, I assume, you know, when very talented people are not there anymore, that it could feel like a burden, but how does it actually feel for you?

00:31:14: I think both. All of the things simultaneously. It's devastating and it's infuriating and it's something that will fuel me and people around me for as long as we are alive.

00:31:35: You already mentioned briefly that when you're having a more of a, not such a good mood as you described in the beginning, when you have more of the darker day that you think about the soldiers, people who are currently in the trenches defending Ukrainian freedom. Is there something that gives you also personally strength or is there something else that gives you strength to continue your resistance and fighting on in this field you are working.

00:32:04: Thinking about people who have put their life on the line, but literally it's always a good exercise. It's always good exercise because you realize that you are in a privileged position and you are not in a position to drop what you are doing. You must continue as long as there are people who are fighting and who are risking their health and for dying for you. So for me, like it's always a good reminder of why we should persevere. We must never break the trust, betray the trust. People who put themselves on the line and shielded us so that we can continue doing this kind of work while they're resisting Russia with arms.

00:32:58: For people who are not yet so familiar with Ukrainian literature or more in general, with Ukrainian culture. If you could recommend three pieces of literature, of culture in general. It could also be like a song, a Ukrainian song. What would be three pieces you would recommend to people to get familiar with, to get more of an impression of Ukrainian culture? If three pieces come to your mind, please take as much time as you need to think about it.

00:33:26: It's always a great pleasure and a great honor to recommend something from Ukrainian culture because you know that for some people this will be the shaping experience, this will be their first encounter. So, the first author I would like to recommend is the one I have already mentioned, it’s Lesia Ukrainka and her drama Cassandra has been translated by Nina Murray and published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. This is a fresh and vibrant translation of the turn of the century text that today I think it's still very important for all of us to read. It's a drama about the Trojan prophetess who was cursed to see the future and and never to be believed by her countrymen and since the full-scale invasion it has already become a bit of a belief to say that Ukrainians warned the world about the upcoming escalation in the Russian aggression and they were not believed. So, I think going back to the roots and going back Lesia Ukrainka's text will be rewarding and it's a wonderful work of literature and many other things. I think that Olena Styazhkina is another brilliant, brilliant Ukrainian writer. She's from Donetsk and she writes about Donetsk in her works quite a lot. And the one I want to recommend is Cecil the Lion Had to Die. It's a novel which is a cross-generational story of people who are from Donetsk who encounter Russia's invasion in 2014 and have... Different life choices and different journeys through these early years of Russia's war against Ukraine. And the third book I want to mention is again the one that I talked about in this conversation. It's Victoria Amelina’s, Looking at Women, Looking at War, a war justice diary. It captures the first year, I would say, of Russia full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And it's a beautiful, beautiful book written in lucid prose that starts disintegrating before your eyes because the author became the victim of the crime, of one of the crimes that she was investigating and describing in this land of reportage, memoir, literary history, cultural history. So Victoria Amelina, Looking at women Looking at war.

00:36:01: Thank you so much for sharing all these great insights today with us and sharing these three tips on Ukrainian literature. We for sure will mention all of them in the show notes so that people can take a look at it and order it and read it and hopefully get a deeper sense of Ukrainian culture and also like what Ukraine is going through at the very moment. Thank you for sharing so much time with us today. Thank you very much for your insights and I truly agree with you, that what you once mentioned in an article: ”Fight and you shall prevail.” That is a lesson the Ukrainians have learned, you mentioned in the article back then, from Ukrainian literature. And yeah, I would say we can learn so much from you personally and from all Ukrainians who are still fighting in this war. Thank you so much for being with us today, Sasha.

00:36:46: Thank you so much, Luzia. It was a great pleasure and a great privilege. Thank you for the thoughtful and wonderful questions. I really enjoyed. Thank you.

00:36:56: You're so welcome.

00:36:58: Bye, bye.