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Anastasia Levkova (1986), writer, journalist, editor, cultural manager. Author of a young-adult novel Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman, a kid book Ashyk Omer about the eminent Crimean-Tatar poet, and a youngadult non-fiction book Common Language. How Words Are Born and Live. In 2017, she was appointed as a deputy director of Ukrainian Book Institute. From 2010 through 2018, she was working as an editor of the Cultural Review department at the Ukrainian Journal (Prague). In 2018, she was a program director of the Zaporizhya Book Festival. In 2019, she was a coordinator of PEN Ukraine’s Merezhyvo Project: Literary Readings in Towns of Ukraine. She elaborated the principles for Crimean Fig, the contest of writers and translators founded in 2018. Anastasia has been a coordinator and a jury member of Crimean Fig since 2018.
BOOKS. TO LOVE, TO HATE,
TO LOVE AGAIN
(excerpt)
And what about from 18-20 February 2014 and with what was then? (This date splashes in you like sea water; as soon as you speak or hear about it, the sea begins to storm and salt water seeps through your eyes). How to deal with that pain, with that shrugging: there they shoot, and here they flip through books, run away from reality, betraying all those who have the strength not to run away, understand that running away is not a way? Only when time passes you admit that if there were no books - at least only those published in the last 23 years, at least only those published in Ukraine, there would be no Revolution of Dignity. Because solidarity with one’s people, a sense of the longevity of history, a common destiny, or even such things as humanity and empathy, are nurtured, in particular, by books. Especially in a country where there has been a lack of its own cinema for many years. You come to the conclusion that everything that was good in this revolution was, in part, due to books, and everything that was evil was, in particular, due to their lack. You assume: many years will pass, and those who haven’t been there that year will read in books about 2014. And the sea water will splash in them just like in you at the moment when you read about the tragedy near Kruty or about Mykhailo Soroka - about the time when you were not there yet. You understand: if there is no way not to “fight”, then it is better to do it on the pages than in real cities and villages. And it is better to read and write about cruelty, if it impossible to avoid it, than to create and experience it.
Translated from Ukrainian by Marta Hosovska