The Transformation

Pasha, the protagonist of Internat, is an ostensibly meek schoolteacher in his mid-thirties. His story takes place in the course of three arduous days in the warzone that is today's easternmost Ukraine. These three days commence when he sets out one early morning to bring his nephew home from a boarding school. The school is located across town, in an area that has become increasingly dangerous as Ukraine's armed forces retreat: “It was clear that the town would be surrendered, that government troops would be forced to leave, carrying off the flags of Pasha's country, and the front line would shift northward, so that death will draw some ten kilometers nearer.”Footnote ¹⁶

That morning, as the narrative commences, Pasha leaves the house more at the urging of his elderly father than of his own accord. He is remarkably timid, slightly overweight, and endlessly doubtful. He wears glasses, adjusting them regularly with an instinctive gesture he hates. He hates, too, his defective hand with its lifeless fingers, which render him an invalid.Footnote ¹⁷ The unsightly deformity has earned him an exemption from serving in the army. In sum, in the beginning of the novel we encounter a fairly bleak portrait of its protagonist. Glancing into a mirror on the first day of the storyline, he catches himself thinking just how much he dislikes himself. Throughout that eventful Day One he is accompanied by the distressed inner mantra of iak zhe tak?, which in English might sound like a helpless “how can this be?”

In the course of the next couple of days, however, Pasha's long and dangerous journey across town literally under fire—first to the boarding school to fetch his nephew, then back home together with the boy—gradually transforms him into a person who stands taller, speaks clearer, and knows what matters most. At first, he defines his profession succinctly as “a teacher” whenever asked; by the end of Internat he is, explicitly, a teacher of the Ukrainian language. In the beginning, he uneasily recalls his passivity in his own classroom, his inability to command respect from the students, which leads them to despise him; by the end, he is a determined and strong adult fully responsible for the child he is bringing home.

The thirteen-year-old nephew, Sasha, confirms this transformation when he steps into the narrative on its very last pages. His intervention shifts the storyline from third to first person, possibly revealing the narrator all along, as he reflects on his uncle's emerging personality: “He used to speak as if apologizing for something. It was uncomfortable, for him and for me. But now—now he speaks calmly.”Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, by the third day of his journey Pasha abandons his voiceless iak zhe tak in favor of some direct and unhesitant words. An eccentric foreign journalist serves as a mirror for these changes: Pasha follows him like a lost puppy in the beginning, yet assertively gives him a piece of his mind when they meet on the last pages of the novel.

Pasha's rise as a man who “speaks calmly” and begins to recognize what he stands for, having rediscovered the values he is prepared to defend with his life, echoes the main character's experience in Zhadan's earlier novel, Voroshylovhrad (2010). Those familiar with Herman's ordeal will recall his gradual growth in confidence and sense of purpose as he begins to articulate the principles that render his existence meaningful. Herman had started off as someone who “had enough money for what [he] was used to. It was too late for new habits to appear. Everything was acceptable.”Footnote ¹⁹ Compare Pasha's musings, which only seem to refer to his second-hand wardrobe: he “didn't need anything more than that, by and large.”Footnote ²⁰ This evolution of the protagonist's initial inner displacement—a shedding of chronic lostness—evokes trauma theory as a productive lens through which to view his journey and its relevance to Slavic studies. Through the character of Pasha, Zhadan provides us with a thoughtful and nuanced way to view persons traditionally dismissed by the advocates of the Two Ukraines formula.Footnote ²¹

In Internat, Pasha is thirty-five years old. Herman in Voroshylovhrad was thirty-three. The two-year difference, despite its apparent insignificance, entails some major changes to the world around the two protagonists. Herman's main challenge was reidertsvo—the criminal raider culture that set its greedy sights on his brother's gas station, turning it into the ultimate barricade to be defended. Meanwhile, Pasha's challenge is a violent, bloody armed conflict, which fills Internat with intensely dark and poignant moments. At times, as in the case of an abandoned and devastated kindergarten with something wholly indescribable locked away in a refrigerator, such moments barely fall short of a nightmare. Zhadan's masterful storytelling takes on the rhythm of a warzone: Pasha's trip across town—punctuated by explosions and ominous silences—speeds up as he runs under gunfire, only to slow down again for joyless recollections as he drops onto a dark floor for brief and restless sleep. What is the significance of these recurrent tortured moments?

They illuminate a personal turbulence that reaches far beyond warfare itself. Carolyn Holbrook notes in her work on Anzac mythology that war is an event upon which observers transfer “their own psychological and moral dilemmas.”Footnote ²² Indeed, Pasha's journey in Internat is physical only in part; the rest of it is internal. In the course of three trying days, he begins to recognize and articulate what is under attack in this conflict—a contemplation he previously managed to avoid. Right before leaving home for the boarding school, for instance, he glances into the living room, where his father is asleep in front of the television. Someone covered in blood is shouting from the screen, as if trying to reach the slumbering old man, but in vain: the sound had been muted for the night. And when the bloodied person appears to meet Pasha's eyes and seems to address him directly—“listen, this is important, this concerns you too”—Pasha switches the television off and leaves in haste.Footnote ²³

By the time he returns, however, having grown close to his nephew during their shared journey, he identifies exactly what is being threatened around him. That first morning's inaudible and desperate “this concerns you too” ultimately hits home, as reflected in a distraught internal dialogue: “[The war] is not against me. What do I have to do with it? Right, not against you,—he disagrees with himself,—of course it's against you, it's specifically against you. Against everything you stand for. … Your subject, your school, the flag that hangs above it.”Footnote ²⁴ Coming to identify with entities that are under attack helps Pasha finally situate and root himself in volatile surroundings after a lifetime of agonized inner displacement (the next section of this article explores his internal void in more detail). Echoing Herman's experience in Voroshylovhrad, he registers some level of inner peace for the first time in years on Day Two, when he helps one of the remaining teachers at the boarding school fetch water from a nearby well. A confrontation with a gang of locals ensues, ultimately sealing the fate of the school and its remaining inhabitants. Yet at that moment, returning with full buckets, Pasha realizes unexpectedly that he had not felt so good for a long time. Not good per se, he quickly corrects himself; what can be good about walking through a park likely full of dead bodies? And yet: “You move through this fog, and it's something to do, it brings some sense into all of this. As long as you walk, you doubt nothing: you know you must deliver this water.”Footnote ²⁵

This newfound possibility of consequential action, no matter how small or local, is key to understanding the concept behind Internat. It breaks the spell of the void that has kept Pasha figuratively paralyzed for his entire adult life. If trauma theorists are right in arguing that “grief that cannot be expressed builds a secret vault within the subject,” then having to open up to the possibility of conscious action, and thus becoming a subject of one's own will, is among the few rectifying things that can begin to fill this vault.Footnote ²⁶ The next section explores this peculiar phenomenon in Pasha's case.

The Void

Pasha's rediscovery of purpose and belonging after a long period of inner homelessness, coupled with his newly registered connection to “your subject, your school, the flag that hangs above it,” echoes the processes in Ukraine today, insofar as it fills the space left by a country that collapsed a quarter of a century ago, the USSR. In my study of Kharkiv-based writers of Zhadan's generation, I call them the doubletake generation due to their coming of age, or entering historical consciousness, when the Soviet Union fell apart: “Upon reaching adulthood, they revisit the intense historical experience that coincided with their childhood or adolescence—a time when external changes fuse with internal ones, and are therefore not immediately accessible to articulation; at least not to the extent allowed by a subsequent backward glance.”Footnote ²⁷ In trauma scholarship, such intense experiences have been described as a “radical and shocking interruption of the universe, but not its total destruction.”Footnote ²⁸ How can this framework enrich our reading of Internat?

More than twenty years ago, Geoffrey Hartman proposed that trauma consists of two main elements: the distressing event itself, recorded by the psyche rather than fully experienced, and its incessantly recurring memory.Footnote ²⁹ This continued return of a decisive breaking point from the past resurfaces in Zhadan's latest novel. Glancing back at his own coming of age, Pasha recalls how he was yanked out of the safe cocoon of his previous universe with its familiar borders. This was “the first catastrophe,” explicitly signals the narrator, a traumatic experience that would haunt Pasha for years: suddenly, he found himself “in the middle of an empty and foreign country, unable to figure out what to do next, how to resist this invisible pressure that squeezes him out of reality.”Footnote ³⁰ As a result of this experience, which occurred when he was his nephew's age, around thirteen or fourteen, his “shell was irreparably broken, the world [itself] was broken, and putting it back together again was simply impossible.”Footnote ³¹ Pasha's sense of a rapidly disintegrating country echoes that of his creator, who mused at a recent book launch: “The world around us shattered just as we were growing up.”Footnote ³²

One of the least productive ways of dealing with such shattering events, according to existing theory, is to preserve them within oneself. Writing in the context of Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham's work, Jacques Derrida describes this process—which they term incorporation—as keeping the dead alive and intact inside a self, while refusing to love it as a part of that self.Footnote ³³ As a result, the loss becomes enclosed in a secluded part of the ego, forming an inner tomb, or crypt. This process of incorporation roughly parallels Sigmund Freud's notion of melancholia, as opposed to healthy mourning. Dominick LaCapra proposes a similar opposition: melancholy as a form of acting-out, and mourning as a form of working-through.Footnote ³⁴ The distinction between the circularity of the former and the potency of the latter illuminates a void inside the struggling protagonist of Internat—a loss, incorporated, that feeds his initial dejection.

This reading fits with LaCapra's suggestion that melancholic paralysis may set in when absence and loss are fused.Footnote ³⁵ Scholars of post-Soviet memory studies, too, have argued that if trauma is not worked through, it can lead to a state of melancholy.Footnote ³⁶ We have seen manifestations of these processes in influential works of literature from other countries. In Toni Morrison's award-winning novel Beloved, for instance, the heroine's two daughters—Beloved (who, as readers will recall, is dead) and Denver (who is alive, but barely)—embody a similar pair of ways of dealing with loss.Footnote ³⁷ Roger Luckhurst describes these two ways as, respectively, “a melancholia that perpetuates encryption” and “a mourning that eventually decrypts occluded violent history.”Footnote ³⁸ Viewed through this lens of literary continuity, Internat is a tale of one man's leaving the former path in favor of the latter.

Pasha's dejected, mechanized progress through life after “the world was broken” lasts until war explodes around him. His pained melancholy, along with the forlorn mantra of iak zhe tak, is then slowly but surely replaced by an increasingly active struggle for survival. Importantly—and we will return to this point in the next section—this survival is not his own. Threats to his own safety would not have been enough to elicit changes in his behavior, as we see plainly during the first day. The wellbeing that truly pushes him onward is that of his young nephew. On Day Three, he ruminates as he surveys the people around him:

This passage echoes Zhadan's comments on his novel's title in an interview. The boarding school, he confirms, serves as a metaphor for being rootless, lost, unsettled, and displaced: “This concerns many of us and the country as a whole, because our society is terribly unrooted. One often feels that this non-perception of the country [nevidchuttia kraїny] is a kind of symptom of a boarding school. We are all, to various degrees, graduates of a large Ukrainian internat.”Footnote ⁴⁰

In line with this metaphor, we may conclude that even though it is young Sasha who regains a physical home by the end of the novel, his uncle Pasha is the one who breaks out of inner homelessness, rising above his own internal boarding school. Despite the horrors of active warfare—or perhaps precisely because of them and the processes they trigger within him—he works through old trauma, through that “first catastrophe” identified earlier in this article, as he makes his way onward, newly focused on survival and on bringing “some sense into all of this” at last.

This shift does not come easily, and Sasha is the trigger that sets it off. From the moment Pasha comes upon his nephew—resentful and cocky, confined to the abandoned school run by two brave remaining teachers—a new urge to protect and defend slowly forms within him. Pasha confesses that the kid ended up at the boarding school because no one protested when his mother, Pasha's sister, decided to send him away. The family “surrendered him, didn't defend him.”Footnote ⁴¹ Sasha, who appears to share his uncle's affliction with strange seizures, knows this; he knows better than to trust anyone at first.Footnote ⁴² But in the course of the novel, by taking responsibility for both of their lives, Pasha wins him back. By reclaiming his own (country and family alike), he manages to prevail over the lingering melancholy of iak zhe tak. The aforementioned joyless recollections that fill the novel thus acquire a new framework: they reflect the active work of mourning.

The traumas behind this mourning may well be chronic and cumulative, “woven into the fabric of our societies,” rather than sudden and shocking.Footnote ⁴³ One of such chronic and cumulative themes in Internat is abandonment, and not just in connection with Sasha's forced placement away from home. As a small child, Pasha himself was forsaken by his mother, about whom we know only that illness had claimed her life. Motherlessness is, of course, a fruitful topic in postcolonial writing: the wound left by the absent maternal figure is frequently integral to postcolonial texts. In its twin theme, lovelessness, Pasha is also deserted by his partner, Marina, who leaves him when the war begins.

But as with the struggle for survival, it takes an encounter with someone else's suffering, not just his own, for Pasha to discover a powerful new readiness to offer protection to those who need it. This shift is illustrated by the famished feral dogs that approach the school at the end of the first day, after he has arrived and settled in for the night:

Dogs, in fact, play an illuminating role in Internat, not unlike the odd lantern-headed animals that roam the eerie landscapes of Voroshylovhrad. They are the revealers of truth who never fail to sense the inner state of the character.Footnote ⁴⁵ On the first day, for instance, a terrified mutt finds its way to Pasha's side through a crowd of people hiding inside a train station. Our miserable and maimed schoolteacher cannot help wishing that he, too, could thrust his head under someone's elbow amidst all this fear. But when a foreign tank arrives and its soldiers call to the dog, Pasha's thoughts acquire a very different tune: “I won't give him away. No way.” This shift of stance forecasts the transformation within him. When his scent from beyond the broken walls of the school fends off a pack of wild and hungry hounds, something important has already emerged within him. Strangely enough, its roots may be traced to his handicap—in other words, to his ostensibly flawed incompleteness.

The Defect

We, the readers of Internat, know that the hostilities it describes are real and ongoing. We can imagine a Pasha crawling under gunfire in eastern Ukraine as we turn the pages. Zhadan's narrative voice relies incessantly on present-tense verbs—Pasha goes, thinks, falls—to convey the temporal proximity and urgency of these events. Internat is, essentially, a synchronous war novel—a creative text that emerges parallel to, and closely entwined with, unfolding warfare. This merciless synchronicity chips away at the “post” in “post-traumatic”—a characteristic commonly attributed to contemporary Ukrainian literature by its analysts.

Trauma is a concept that—like the similarly vast concept of identity—can serve as an umbrella term for many things at once. The notion itself has become a paradigm, having been “turned into a repertoire of compelling stories about the enigmas of identity, memory, and selfhood that have saturated Western cultural life.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In their anthropological analysis, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue that “trauma obliterates experience” by gathering varied phenomena under a general label, which reduces a mosaic of occurrences to one predefined classification.Footnote ⁴⁷ Challenging the use of this word from yet another angle in his study of Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love, Dave Gunning emphasizes the difficulty of applying western notions to an African setting: “When an entire population is traumatized, a model developed to identify and treat trauma as an abnormality seems to have little use.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In Europe, trauma studies have had to accommodate the colossal scope of the Holocaust—an event “traumatic enough to shatter the frame of historiography or representation itself.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In Ukraine's case, the dilemmas of employing this concept are further complicated by the newly emerged synchronicity of warfare in fiction and in reality.

In light of this difficulty, Pasha's defective hand becomes a productive symbol for damage that can otherwise be too elusive to tackle—an external badge of internal wounds. Such a “relationship of words and trauma” that allows us to “read the wound” through literature is not a new notion.Footnote ⁵⁰ The ailing body is a common sign in Ukrainian fiction of the 1990s and 2000s, where the recurrent sickness of protagonists has been interpreted as stigmata hailing from a traumatic past. Even though most characters in this fiction were not directly involved with the fallen Soviet regime, they are entangled in it symbolically, through illness, which turns their bodies into a “battlefield of the wars between the past and the future.”Footnote ⁵¹ Mark Andryczyk has demonstrated that intellectual protagonists are often unwell in the prose of Ukraine's eighties writers, too, and that “repeated references to the … sickness of these intellectuals show them to be maladjusted, mad, and dysfunctional.”Footnote ⁵² Texts by contemporary authors like Irena Karpa and Liubko Deresh feature ailing bodies that appear to be preparing to change, but never do: the condition lingers, and the shift does not take place.Footnote ⁵³

Unsurprisingly, Pasha's defective hand remains listless as well. Internat succeeds in reframing it in a significant way, however: as a vital part of life. The improving relationship between uncle and nephew explicitly involves an affirmation of closeness that embraces the handicap: at some point, amidst danger, “the kid grabs [Pasha's] palm, gripping his dead fingers like the only thing in life that can be trusted.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In response, Pasha brings him safely through all peril.

As with Ukraine, whose birth has been suggested in connection to its civil unrest and then to war, some may attribute a kind of personal birth to Pasha. As with Ukraine, however, the transformation in question is not so much a birth as a surfacing of one's true essence—the unveiling of the kind of fundamental nature that, at least in Zhadan's writing, children and feral dogs sense instinctively. This is a key point in contemplating Internat: Pasha, the allegedly incomplete east Ukrainian, was not magically turned into a new man by warfare in three days. His strength was originally in him, lying dormant under the crushing weight of melancholy ever since that “first catastrophe” of finding himself in an unfamiliar country, attacked by an inexplicable force. We witness this strength on Day One, when he grabs an ailing old man and carries him to safety under fire, only to return to his previous role of “the Idiot” in a brilliant scene evocative of Dostoevskii's novel: he awakens on the floor as a young woman kicks him and calls him an idiot for leaving her (empty) suitcase outside when he opted to save the old man instead. As might be expected from the gentle Prince Myshkin, Pasha's reaction is anything but defensive. He meekly prepares to go out in search of the suitcase, and only another character's intervention stops and possibly saves him.

The unnerving idiot scene serves a noteworthy role as far as reader reactions are concerned. As we shudder at the woman's furious assault on the quiet and timid Pasha, our indignation gives rise to a natural urge reminiscent of protective feelings. This reaction to mistreatment mirrors his own character-changing impulse towards his young nephew—and his nation as a whole. This way, albeit fleetingly, the protagonist's path is illuminated for us in the most direct way: through parallel emotions.

Recall the last section's promise to revisit the significance of Pasha's heightened attention to other people's suffering. Passages like the idiot scene testify that, despite his apparent general meekness, Pasha is a man of bravery, a modern Ukrainian hero of sorts: a visibly flawed figure of doubt who lacks neither courage nor decisiveness when they matter most. He is just too maimed to act at first. His nephew's testimony at the end of the novel speaks to this continuum of inner value: “Marina left him; his sister, my mom, doesn't care for him; the old man clashes with him. And me, I love him. I knew he would come for me, I never had any doubt.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Something vital carries Zhadan's tormented protagonist through his grueling journey—an inner essence that becomes activated and gives off a powerful vibe that alarms feral dogs. The narrative identifies this phenomenon as a coiled steel spring inside Pasha. This cryptic spring surfaces on Day Two, just as the situation becomes unbearable:

that's it–

“Quick,” he tells the kid. “Quick, let's go.”Footnote ⁵⁶

This nameless inner spring is a recurrent notion throughout the second part of the novel. When we hear of its metal coils for the final time, they come married to another potent symbol that weaves through much of Zhadan's writing: the telephone, an emblem of connection, or the lack thereof. Pasha stands in a hospital over a fatally wounded young soldier whose throat has been slit, trying to dial a family member at the dying man's desperate request. The spring attacks his heart when no one answers the call. Death approaches the two men, negotiates with them, and ends up taking the soldier, while Pasha evidently suffers a seizure. Sasha shares his impressions from seeing his uncle shortly after that: it looked as if “he had just talked to his death. And was able to persuade her about something. Or not. But she didn't manage to persuade him, either.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Just as Pasha's fingers are reaffirmed as a natural and vital part of him when his nephew grabs them like the only trustworthy thing in the world, so too are his life-long seizures substantially reframed. By the end of the novel, his illness takes on a whole new shade: the shade of lightness. When a spasm hits him in the hospital near the dying soldier, he counts again—this time from one to ten—and “the light grows stronger, saturating the surrounding space, so much of it that it fills everything. As if life consists only of light; as if this light leaves no room for death.”Footnote ⁵⁸

By refusing death any room, the seizure essentially saves Pasha. His unsightly physical defect and his purported Dostoevskiian “idiocy” are upheld by the last day of his voyage if not as likeable traits, then at least as organic ones. When the spring uncoils within him and fills the void inside, giving him a new direction, he succeeds in shedding his melancholy. This feat of strength does not fix his sorrows, but it does unveil a throbbing antidote to pensiveness: the need for and the possibility of action, particularly on behalf of a loved one.

The Antidote

The hospital is not the first place where the telephone figures prominently in Internat. In a disheartening earlier scene, uncle and nephew hear the unanswered ringing of a mobile phone belonging to a minesweeper who was blown to pieces near the boarding school. Such desolate ringtones of the dead constitute a mournful soundtrack to modern-day war. Witnesses have described these harrowing reverberations in the Ukrainian steppe after combat.Footnote ⁵⁹

In Zhadan's work, the telephone frequently serves as a link to strange and otherwise inaccessible worlds. Pasha receives a call from his father at one point during his journey, but hears only “a mechanical noise, some crackling, then a cold echo, as if the call is coming from a tightly sealed barrel.” This happens in a zone with no coverage: “who knows how the old man had managed to reach them.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Compare this scene with Herman's experience in Voroshylovhrad: towards the end of the novel, he dials the number of his murdered companion, and someone or something picks up on the other end. He hears a mild breeze that grows stronger and becomes a wind that tosses and howls, “pouring in from the emptiness,” as voices begin to arise out of its roar.Footnote ⁶¹

The importance of this kind of inexplicable boundary crossing to the general theme of Internat becomes clear when we consider that by reaching something inaccessible, we render it accessible at least in part. If death can be phoned, it is no longer a subject that comes out of nowhere to claim us; it becomes an object of our decisions as well. This possibility of action is the rare antidote to the stigmata of a traumatic past. The ongoing drama of war renders the difficult experience direct, and this forced involvement, paradoxically, can provide a new chance of release. The key to filling Pasha's inner void and activating the strong and resilient coiled spring lies with the possibility of participation in traumatic events that are no longer removed from him by the layers of time, and thus no longer entirely inaccessible. Synchronicity turns stigmata into real, bleeding wounds. Wounds, of course, can kill, but they can also have a chance of healing—unlike the stigmata, whose enigmatic origins keep them beyond our reach, and whose sole function is to keep returning.

“It took coming here, into the midst of hell, to feel how much you had, and how much you have lost,” laments Pasha amidst destruction, as Zhadan weaves glimmers of hope through a narrative of loss and despair.Footnote ⁶² This triggered mourning, a vital part of recovery, is the very process capable of decrypting the occluded past. In the context of Beloved, Luckhurst has discussed the idea of spurning melancholia for mourning after years spent “sealed in the melancholic world [until] a malign aspect to the haunting begins.”Footnote ⁶³ In Pasha's case, the malignancy that unseals his paralysis is none other than war.

Without a doubt, violence itself is cardinally incapable of healing. Rather, my argument is that direct danger, particularly to loved ones, combined with the pressing need to address it, can be pitted against “melancholia that perpetuates encryption,” and that this constitutes a phenomenon fundamental to the storyline of Internat. It also sheds light on present-day Ukraine. In another reference to the inner void, scholars have argued that “the buried speech of the parent becomes (a) dead (gap), without a burial place, in the child.”Footnote ⁶⁴ When unforgiving layers of time are penetrated and lifted by direct urgency, however, engagement with an offensive force is made possible, and even inevitable. This engagement may well turn out to be deadly, but it ceases to be pensive and melancholic. Such shedding of melancholy has the potential to disrupt what Gabriele Schwab calls, quoting Sigmund Freud, Schicksalsneurose, or fate neurosis that causes people like Pasha to live “under a bad spell, haunted by a curse that often preceded their lives, … hidden and intangible, relegated to secrecy and silence.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Before concluding, it would make sense to attend to the role of the fallen country, the USSR, in the proposed framework. Its shadow overtakes even the television screen in Pasha's house: it burns “like an eternal flame, not so much for the living as in memory of the dead”—an allusion to the commemorative fires that lit up around the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War. Haunting imprints are sown all around Internat: the old Soviet signs with civil defense information lining the walls of the boarding school's basement; the oddly numerous children's drawings of nuclear explosions; Pasha's interminable recollections of his own childhood and youth. He “immediately wants to hang himself” in response to some of those memories. But others he treasures: “Aimless talk, senseless laughter, happiness without a cause—this is exactly how things should be in the springtime when you are fourteen; this is exactly how they were.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Pasha's official, institutional role as an educator, too, lies close to the roots of his struggle.Footnote ⁶⁷

Recalling the extensive history of discussions among scholars and artists about how the African American experience should be represented—as a suffering world of pained displacement or as a functioning culture with strong adaptive capabilities—we may propose a parallel with the post-Soviet experience by arguing that Ukrainians today are wounded, but not bound, by the complicated past (and present) of their country.Footnote ⁶⁸ As far as the past is concerned, Internat succeeds in combining the different and, at times, opposing aspects of Pasha's many memories into a single flow of recollections. As for the present, the novel meticulously balances Pasha's personal difficulties with his individual triumphs. He may be handicapped, but he is not fundamentally sick—and this constitutes a crucial jump forward from the doomed protagonists of the previous generation's writings.

A direct comparison of the Soviet experience in Ukraine with America's legacy of slavery, or with the Holocaust in Europe, would be an overly ambiguous step in examining these vast historical developments, with relevant arguments best left to trained historians. Yet the link provided by trauma theory remains a viable one: those who live through catastrophic events may carry trauma within, but it does not have to define them without their consent. This is what happens to Pasha: at one point, having seen enough, he stops consenting. “Sometimes you are forced to make a choice you don't want to make,” observes Zhadan in his reflections on Internat and its protagonist's initial state of mind. “This is not always comfortable, and not always constructive, but sometimes, not making a choice is simply unfair [inodi ne robyty vybir—prosto nechesno].”Footnote ⁶⁹ In line with these thoughts, Pasha makes choices in response to the dramatic events he observes over the three days of the narrative, showing that “the local population,” which Zhadan devotes his novel to, does have a voice—and this voice, when not “voluntarily relinquished,” is a weighty one.

Tracing the theme of voices back to the role of phone calls in Zhadan's writing, one other observation is worth making as part of this analysis. Throughout the narrative of Voroshylovhrad, Herman repeatedly dials a western telephone number in an attempt to reach his brother, who is presumed to have fled westwards. There is no reply; a stranger who at last appears on the other end of the line proceeds to offer her own story instead of answering him. If we consider this parable as commentary on Ukraine's searching for solutions in the west after the decline of Russia's influence, we may conclude that—at least as far as Zhadan's narratives are concerned—there is no ready answer from either one of those sides.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Pasha's case, too, it is a sibling (his sister) who has moved elsewhere. He overcomes his innate wariness of her and dials her number before picking Sasha up from the boarding school, but this call also fails to provide a coherent response. After hanging up, Pasha finally accepts and shoulders the responsibility of making a decision about his nephew. This saves the boy's life: the gang of locals makes good on its earlier threat and attacks the school right after Pasha and Sasha depart.Footnote ⁷¹ Once again, an answer sought but not received elsewhere arises from within.

How do we transcribe Internat, as a synchronous war text, into the landscape of existing literary scholarship on Ukraine? The tendency of the seminal works of trauma theory to overlook the nuances of colonialism and postcolonialism has been discussed at length.Footnote ⁷² According to Marko Pavlyshyn, postcolonial literary analyses are works that “give attention to the flows of the power of empire and state through the institutions, conventions, canons and hierarchies of the literary sphere,” but at the same time endeavor to “transcend both colonial arrogance and anti-colonial rancour.”Footnote ⁷³ Examined from this angle, Internat does an impressive job in avoiding the pitfalls of said rancor, which might have provided an easier way to transcribe the ongoing suffering. Despite the challenging circumstances of its emergence, the novel eschews a collapse back into anticolonial discourse.

For instance, in a move new to his repertoire, Zhadan methodically clarifies the languages spoken by his characters as they interact with Pasha. Only a couple of these tongues are pure—most are a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian in various proportions—but they do not consistently indicate their carriers' ethical qualities in ways that could be expected within an anticolonial framework. For example, Valera, one of the two courageous teachers who refuse to abandon the school after devastation engulfs it, speaks Russian. It was his bullet-ridden coat that we glimpse hanging motionlessly amidst the emptiness after our protagonists depart.

Another seemingly minor but vital character not to be overlooked in the overall scheme of things is a nameless soldier speaking surzhyk, a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian. Pasha and Sasha come across him towards the end of their journey. Shell-shocked, he shouts rather than talks, and must read their lips to communicate. It is through this battered older surzhyk-speaker, however, that the value of Pasha's role as a teacher is reasserted and affirmed at last. As soon as Pasha answers the usual question about who he is (a teacher, he tells the soldier, and then has to repeat slowly: “tea-cher”), the man's aggrieved gaze hardens, and he invites Pasha into his war-ravaged, windowless car. There, he hands over something that looks like a stone caked with mud, or a piece of coal. The ensuing interaction is worth a closer look.

This apparently inconsequential scene is, in fact, laden with meaning. The biggest favor a shell-shocked person traumatized by recent combat asks of our protagonist is to take a fossil for safe-keeping, so that a razed museum would keep on living in Pasha's school. An educated schoolteacher fails to see the significance of this strange object, while a military man, with his background as a blue-collar worker and a former miner, senses it intrinsically. This fossil—with its remarkable resemblance to coal, the hallmark of the Donbas region—is what he has preserved from the horrors of battle. For a rootless land that the miner-inhabited Donbas is often made out to be in the blueprint of Two Ukraines, this is a remarkably aware and rooted gesture.Footnote ⁷⁵

In Slavic pagan mythology, the fern—in Ukrainian, paporot΄—is a powerful symbol. Said to bloom only one night a year, the proverbial fern flower is a protective charm so important to traditional cultural folklore that it is also known as the flower of one of the strongest Slavic gods, Perun (Peruniv tsvit). In reality, of course, the fern does not bloom; it is a cryptogam that reproduces by spores. The folklore lives on, however: those who dare to walk through the darkness of forests to find this rare blossom, despite all the evil forces conspiring to stop them, attain happiness. That an older, wounded soldier finds a fossilized fern, preserved by time and nature, overlooked by war and violence, and hands it to Pasha as the latter makes his way home, serves as a reminder that not everything is lost in the shell-shocked hell of warfare. The oldest roots are saved by our own hands, and they live on.

Despite its successful circumvention of rudimentary anti-colonial bitterness in favor of more complex questions of trauma and national belonging, several passages in Internat can be said to contain didactic writing. But the author readily confesses: “I have a lot of conflict points [with Pasha], because the views of the protagonist of this novel are often not close to mine, even alien.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In light of this, the affection entailed in the otherwise uneven author-character relationship is evident. “I do not operate within the categories of sympathizing or condemning. I accompany him,” says Zhadan of Pasha, adding that the two of them spend the entire length of the novel trying to work out their differences. No matter how considerable these differences are, Zhadan maintains, “when there is no empathy for the protagonist, one is unlikely to write something really worthwhile.”Footnote ⁷⁷

That he has written something worthwhile is evident. Now, the novel's place in Ukraine's literary arena, postcolonial or not, is up for discussion. Asserting the inability of trauma theorists to cope with multiplicity in a postcolonial context, Stocks has argued that “their insistence on a return to an original state of psychic unity is at odds with the realisation and acceptance of duality that emerges as a result of liberation.”Footnote ⁷⁸ A similar debate may take place over Pasha and his apparent nevidchuttia kraїny when we first meet him, propelling and continuing the exchange on the (post)colonial in literary analysis and beyond.

Internat and its author may take some criticism from more categorically-inclined readers, who are likely to see the protagonist's initial inner displacement as symbolic of what is wrong with Ukraine today, while overlooking the merits that underlie his victorious voyage of character. In this regard, perhaps the most illuminating quote forecasting this novel can be found in its author's earlier work, Mesopotamia (2014), where a character maintains: “We are destroyed by the weakness we carry inside, which we cannot bear to get rid of. It consumes us from within, like a virus, it prevents us from making the right decisions, from hanging on to those we hold dear. It renders us doomed, although in reality that's not what we are.”Footnote ⁷⁹ By the end of Internat, its protagonist is no longer doomed. Yet blaming those in the Ukrainian warzone for bringing invasion and war upon themselves, the way women are blamed for getting themselves raped, remains an active notion in discussions surrounding Ukraine today. Days after the novel was published, a review already purported: “Is it possible to cause war, at least to some extent, without wanting to? Yes, it is,” followed by a list of wrongful behaviors by means of which a victim invites violence.Footnote ⁸⁰

Due to this charged discursive setting, Internat has an important role to play in conversations surrounding the country and its literature. That Pasha's internal rise was triggered by his concern for others, coupled with the traumatic aspects of his background, may help redeem him from the possible accusations of detached selfishness. Regardless of the range of reactions the novel is set to elicit from the reading public, it has already fulfilled its author's promise from nearly a decade ago. “Ukrainian literature needs new heroes,” said Serhiy Zhadan in a 2011 interview, reiterating his intention to continue writing about eastern Ukraine.Footnote ⁸¹ In synchronous war novels such as this one, Ukrainian literature now has its new heroes. What we learn from their ordeal is up to us.