Greek language original interview published by Lucas Velidakis in Kithamerini on 16/11/2025. Translation from Italian by Pina Piccolo. Cover image: photo by Pina Piccolo of the Gavioli fairground organ that was part of the Hervé Di Rosa display at the Mucem exhibit.
Tanya Maliarchuk has been one of the most important contemporary Ukrainian voices, linking her writing to memory, trauma and the identity of a country learning to survive throughout history.
Born in Ivano-Frankivsk and settled in Vienna since 2011, in 2018 she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize – the most important literary prize for German language literature. On the occasion of the publishing of the Greek translation of her book Η ιστορία συνεχίζεται, κάνουμε διάλειμμα για μιαν ανάσα (“History Goes On, Let’s Stop and Breathe”, translated by Elena Stagouraki, Estia Publications), she speaks with “K” about life between two homelands, resistance in Ukraine and memory as a battlefield, with literature as a way to stay human in the absurdity of war.
How did the experience of migration affect your voice and topics?
Emigration is always traumatic. Although, unlike millions of Ukrainians today, I did not leave because of war, but of my own volition in 2011, my life has also been also divided into a “before” and an “after”. It is a deep cut, following which a person is confronted with the fear of losing their roots, language and identity. And, add to that Ukrainian identity is complicated anyway. Ukraine’s history is a story of prolonged ungovernability, wars, genocides, political persecution and mass displacement. Moving to Vienna, which became my second home, has led me to turn to the past, especially to 20th century Ukrainian history. That’s where many personal and collective wounds of mine originate. Someone once said that “homeland is the place where your dead are buried.” I say: home is the place where your wounds come from.
What does Ukrainian identity mean to you today and how do you convey it in your writing?
Before the Russian invasion in 2022, I would not been able to give a concise answer. Ukrainian identity has always been complex. I was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city that before World War II was mainly Jewish and Polish. The Jews were exterminated, the Poles were deported and the city was born anew as Ukrainian. But can nationality alone determine who you are? The long coexistence of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles – and in other regions with Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians – became part of our DNA. Ukraine is a borderland area and diversity has always been a foundation of its identity. After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and, much more so, after 2022, these “fragmented” identities began to form a common political Ukrainian identity. It is not just related to national origin, it is a matter of choice, worldview, democratic values and vision for the future. It is a form of resistance to Russian aggression. People consciously choose freedom instead of the prison and violence that Russia brings with it. And people are ready to die for this choice. For over three and a half years now, Ukraine has resisted the world’s second-strongest, most powerful military – it seems like a miracle. The philosopher VolodymyrYermolenko rightly said: “Being a Ukrainian today means to be capable of the impossible.”
Once someone said “homeland is the place where your dead are buried.” I say: home is the place where your wounds come from.
The concept of memory is central to your work. What’s your understanding of the role of collective memory in Ukraine?
Collective memory is something fragile, yet absolutely necessary. It unites the community providing a space for common values. The historical dimension of collective memory is important, but it is not the only factor. It’s not a history textbook, it’s about a collective narrative. Societies usually remember tragedies, defeats or bright victories. In Ukraine the victories were late to come – they started essentially with independence in 1991. Since then, generations of people have grown up with the values of dignity and human rights. The two revolutions of 2004 and 2014 were civil society’s steps towards taking responsibility for the country and, by extension, for its memory.
Previous generations lived in the shadow of the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union and were afraid to remember. Remembering could cost you your work, freedom, life. The Soviet system systematically destroyed any kind of memory: it built apartment buildings on top of cemeteries, renamed cities, destroyed monuments, exterminated or crushed the cultural elite. Ukrainian collective memory resembles a mass grave, where events that can no longer be retrieved are buried, because those who remembered the murdered were themselves murdered. Crimes like the 1933 famine went unpunished.
I have no illusions that literature can restore memory or bring justice. But it can draw attention to events and people who should not be forgotten. We can choose what we will remember and at the same time deconstruct memory where it is toxic or false. Memory is always a battlefield. What we remember determines our future. That is why authoritarians always try to alter it: to steal it, to reduce it to some falsehoods, to impose their own version. Whoever controls memory controls the future.
How do you strike a balance between literary narrative and the political reality your country is experiencing?
I can’t strike a balance between the two and I’m not even sure there is one. I can’t write fiction; I write essays, articles, speeches. I write every day, but not the novels I dreamed of. Many of my colleagues – and women from the cultural field– are currently serving in the army. Some have already been killed. More than a hundred Ukrainian writers lost their lives in the war. Neighbors, friends, young people are dying. In Ukraine, reality defeated literature. What is written today in Ukrainian is mainly poetry – the kind that can accurately capture emotion and does not require much time. There is also a lot of reportage, essays, testimonies. Literature has become a way of documenting crimes and reflect on the human condition while in a state of existential terror. Maybe that’s literature’s mission today. And yet, books have never been as important in Ukraine as they are today. Despite the war, bookstores are full of new publications and translations, new publishing houses are founded, people buy books, go to festivals and meetings. Not long ago, after such an event, students came up to me and told me that a book I had written before they were born had really affected them. This offers a feeling of normalcy, albeit a fragile one, that not even war can destroy.
What we remember determines our future. That’s why authoritarians try to distort memory. Whoever controls memory controls the future.
What’s hardest for you, in writing about Ukraine while you’re far from your country?
The hardest thing is to allow myself to write about it. To be freed from guilt. There is what we call “survivor syndrome.” After the Holocaust, many surviving Jews took their lives. Before, I could not understand this psychology, but now I can. Guilt is deeply rooted in Ukrainians living abroad, and me with them. Ukrainians living in the west feel guilty towards those living in the east, whose cities are being destroyed. The civilians feel guilty vis-à-vis the soldiers, the soldiers feel guilty about their fallen comrades. It’s a vicious circle of guilt, one which everyone has to fight alone, by themselves. For a writer, there are also additional questions: do I have the right to write? And if so,for what reason? What are my moral limits?
What motivates you personally to continue writing in wartime?
I have lost the idealistic belief that literature can change the world for the better. War is greater and older than any literature. It destroys people and everything human, it destroys privacy – and that is precisely the space of literature, where the “ordinary people” gain the right to their life and feelings. And yet, stopping to write would mean stopping to exist. My motivation every morning sitting at the office is rather selfish: I refuse to allow myself to be extinguished as a human being.
What topics would you like to explore in the future?
I am afraid that by the end of my life – however long or short – the only topic that will concern me as a Ukrainian writer will be Russian war crimes and resistance to the Russian imperial narrative. The pain and trauma that Ukraine has suffered transcend the life of single individuals. The next generations are doomed to face them, whether they like it or not. Nevertheless, I hope to keep a little room to myself for pleasure and disorder, and despite all the responsibility, to remain internally free and unpredictable.
Tanja Maljartschuk is a Ukrainian writer born in Ivano-Frankivsk, often and rightly associated with the younger generation of the Stanislaviv phenomenon, who currently lives and works in Austria. Tanja is well known in Ukraine: among her literary achievements are the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and the BBC Book of the Year. She is also known in the German-speaking world: Tanja is the recipient of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Usedom Literary Prize. To date, she has published seven prose “adult” books, one book for teenagers, a poetry book and an essay collection. With the outbreak of a full-scale war, Tanja’s novel “Forgottenness” became significantly relevant, echoing the biography of historian Viacheslav Lypynskyi and the story of a young woman on the cusp of a great change. This is a kind of reflection on History that echoes in biographies – an exploration of the noise of time. Again, this book has become a subject of discussion. And today we, who are lost within a moment of History, have turned to Tanja’s prose for solace.
