i decided to start a conversation with you about your first two or three months of the war, what did you read during that time, what did you read, could you have something on the bedside table, or did you pick up a book? i didn't read at all, for the first few months of the war i had a constant feeling that fiction had betrayed me, and everything i believed in, all those wonderful texts that were supposed to hold civilization, they were no longer valid... and the first few months , i couldn't pick up a single artist at all, and i returned to reading, if not strangely, through writing, when i realized that i could record stories as a journalist, tell about them, i gradually returned through nonfiction, through feature reporting, and only then very slowly, six months later, i returned to the artistic form, as an editor, i also couldn't work with the text for the first few months, it seemed to me that it didn't make sense, huh.

through my own personal experience, i realized that the literature of ideas, these metanarratives, i lived through does not work, it has no meaning, it betrayed me, and it was very bitter awareness, and many of my colleagues, professional readers, critics also talk about it, by the way, i saw what oleksandr mykhet said about this, about this betrayal of literature, and i heard exactly this from tetyana malyarchuk, who, who experienced all this in austria, and she says that... well, i felt that culture, literature in general, is a big tree that can bloom and can be beautiful, but under it someone can be raped, yes, or killed, that is, this it's a feeling many people have had, indeed. bagdan, how did you have it, what, could you read then and what? at first it seemed to me that i had lost this skill, but now, when i listen to bohdana, when i look back at my own memories, i realize that i returned to reading quite quickly, because after about two weeks. after

the start of the full-scale invasion, i picked up a very specific book, it was a volume of stories by mykola khvylovy, and i reread his blue sketches, and i realized that what had previously seemed to me to be an exclusive metaphor, some flight of figurative thinking, is now unfolding here, in the south of the country, in the east of the country, in the kyiv region, and in fact, it was some completely new depth of immersion in the text, and the wave helped me to return. and then it was quite easy, i started to read very different books, but i kept coming back to the texts that, as it seemed to me, explained to us the nature of the totalitarian system and thought about how i could do some reading projects around this, because i wanted more people to know about they also thought that, i had the only book that i could read, for some reason, it was serhiy osaka's book, three lines for maria, i didn't i understand, probably... it's because it's connected

with some kind of very deep, childlike peace, yes, and that's it, it's some kind of escapist thing, that i could once dive into these stories and disconnect from the networks and to spend some time there, rest and go for a walk, and this was already in the first weeks, that is, i took it like that and it was as if i switched off and returned to reality, that is, for me, for some reason, it was the only book and somehow it happened so and so. we have one study, all the time, i am very interested in the fact that ukrainians have started to read more during the war, and we have statistics provided by the ukrainian institute, it is a comparison of the 20th year and the 23rd year, if in the 20th year 8% of people read, and this is terrible, just a number, 8% of all read , then in the 23rd 19. and this is

a paper book in the ukrainian language, on the one hand i look at it 19 and, as if it is good, compared to eight, but they compare it with germany, i mean the ukrainian institute, they compare with germany, and in germany, 46% of the population reads, how do you perceive this jump, is it a jump, is it, how do you, how do you do you understand this figure, well, 20%, that is, it is quite small, but still there is... people began to read more, why, do you think, what is this connected with, why did ukrainians take paper ukrainian books, it seems to me , that a lot of people have felt that reading is actually a very affordable luxury in wartime, and you can ground yourself, and when we talk about this grounding and being in the moment, it's often such a rather inappropriate thing in wartime, that it's hard to talk about it, it's hard to talk about it publicly. at the same time, it is

is important for mental health, and people have felt this benefit of a book as a physical object , if it's good prose, you can . if it's a very complex piece of literature and it gives you excitement, but still, that's how the narrative works, it orders your thinking, and i think a lot of people have started to discover this very simple power of reading, and i think it's very important, first of all , escapism, is an opportunity to experience some others. because it makes us feel like that within the community, well , the fashion for reading has returned to a large extent, and now the fashion for

reading is growing, when opinion leaders started talking about what they read, when some reading projects started appearing in various formats, this definitely affects the broad circles of readers finally. and many simply discovered ukrainian culture for themselves, in my school years, it was rather a process of weaning ourselves from ukrainian literature, this ideological reading, it does not benefit anyone, while now, as people return and read books in a new way, it turns out that what you can freely talk about the book, interpret the book, see something very personal, very special in it, and there are no wrong opinions about literature, i think this freedom that reading gives and... freedom to talk about it, the opportunity to find like-minded people based on books, based on reading as a process, it attracted many people to reading, but we are only at the beginning, of course, in germany, cultural reading programs have existed since the 70s on a permanent basis, on the main channels, and

here everything is just beginning, so wait i wouldn't give a quick result, we have a survey, actually answers to why people read, we have... numbers, the ukrainian institute of the future also conducted such a study. so, look, 49%, that's almost half, say that reading is a way to keep yourself safe, especially during wartime. actually, this is the same, actually, what we are talking about. 42 percent say that reading teaches them to make better decisions, even in difficult circumstances. 24% say that reading ukrainian literature is a form of resistance, and 21% say that they support it. of ukrainian literature, you know, i am struck by one story, the ukrainian pen and i often visit different regions, near-front territories, and there where libraries were either destroyed, or

robbed by the russians, or some other kind of trouble happened, and we bring books there, and imagine that in kherson, in kherson, there is such a... district, an island in the middle of the dnieper, it is 2 km from the line of contact, that is, it is a red zone, there are people living on this island, and they, they make themselves a library in the basement, and they said one such phrase, this initiative is called books in the shelter, and they said that for them a book is a shelter, that's just right, it's such a metaphor , you brought books books to my father, he's fighting right there for 2 km. that's why he was happy to mention these books and it really helps the fighters in general fantastically, but simply that this is like a metaphor that becomes, what is this not a metaphor, this is reality, an absolutely real fact, and now about podcasts, about boom in fact book clubs,

literary podcasts, and not only with discussion of ukrainian literature, in general, you very rightly said that talking about... about books has become not scary, and these podcasts seem to have brought closer what seemed so unattainable to us, we gathered, thought with our editor kateryna danylovych, we danylovych, we mentioned what kind of podcasts or clubs are there in ukraine in general, we mentioned, first of all bohdana took the podcast and read it on radiopodil, it is a podcast that was... before, yes, there was station 451 of oleksandr mehed, there is a smell of the word that you now you see, stasinevich, evgeny, literary critic and serhiy cherkov, a stand-up artist, is ukrlit, actually, you see now ukrlit is comedians,

as i understand it, they talk about ukrainian literature, about literature in general, there is a book depository of olena huseynova, there is currently untitled bohdana neborak and anastasia yevdokymova. there is a cult podcast by volodya yermolenko and tetyana ogarkova, where they talk about culture and literature, in particular. here it is, you see, this is rosyslav semkiv talking to... vera ageeva about literature, a podcast by a crazy author, there is gogol's mustache, where stand-up artists vadym kyrylenko and nikita rybakov talk about books, there is a high shelf of bohdan bohdana romantsova, there are aesthetes, there is also a podcast that is on the ukrainian week, there is a repainted fox, where educator valentina merzheevska and psychologist maria didenko discuss. books from this point of view, it's not them, it's bohdana and anastasia, but there is such a psychological

context, a podcast about literature, what is the reason for this, well, it's impressive, in fact, it's impressive, if you keep in mind that this is from the last few years in fact, what is the reason for such a flourishing of these conversations about literature like you do you think i think i listen to almost all of these podcasts, but i'm surprised that i listen to almost half of them. was a guest, and it seems to me that first of all, they are quite different, and everyone can choose something of their own, you can listen to something relatively speaking, more complicated, you can listen to how they joke about literature, you can listen to how some specific optics are applied to literature, you can listen to professors, you can listen to people who deployed tag-hunters for the first time yesterday and it hurts them and they are ready to share, and such a variety, i think it is very a healthy story, a very healthy trend, a bunch of knives, and they will all be filled. and each niche has its own audience, larger or smaller, but everywhere the audience is quite active, and

it seems to me that all these absolutely podcasts are made by young people, and nustoslav senkiv is also young, they somehow bring this young audience closer, that is, they do not come to you some very clear teachers, they don't start teaching you to understand literature, but they talk to you and you can join the conversation, they will give you an answer in the comments, that is, it's some kind of... such a free conversation, it something very ancient, it seems to me, yes, but where did it begin, here is where it began , for me, i will tell you for me, where it began, for me it began with the club of bibliophages, which was organized by oksana zabushko at urban 500 , and it was during covid, during the epidemic, we gathered at the risk of everyone there, who were wearing masks, who were without masks and discussed books, for me it is... this is such a book club, this is how it started, how did it start for you, what do you remember as the beginning that

started it all? i have a very personal story with this, i remember such a project, which was actually called a podcast, but almost no one remembers it as a podcast, these are cultural meetings that took place in the dziga art center in lviv every thursday, yuriy kucheryav was engaged in this. both a poet and a philosopher, who is now at the front, and every thursday it was an incredible luxury to come and listen to an interesting person, andriy izdryk recorded it all, and thanks to dziza and kucheryavyo, we actually have a considerable archive of the voices of poets, whom we can only remember today, that's right in my head, let's say ihor remaruk or nazar gonchar, and i saw how this recording was made like this. here and now, at the same time, i understood that after the event i had the right to ask a question, even if i

did not have a specialized education or a certain aplomb that should allow me to speak, say, at the moment when the moderators took the microphone, but still my the thought is worth voicing, and it was terribly inspiring, as i understand it, today, and later formed such an ideological framework of how i imagined the potential. projects about literature, and that was it actually it started in the 2000s, yes in the 2000s, when it wasn't a podcast, when we didn't know the word podcast, americans knew, but we didn't even know, i remember, i remember having a conversation with taras porokhatsky, and i asked him what kind of podcasts do you listen to, he said yes, well, in his soft, very attentive manner, what is this, what is a podcast, that is, i understand that we have us. .. we knew about it four or five years ago, that's how it started to appear here, where did it

start for you, i also have badan, probably from personal history, we once had a literary and critical website lyakcent, where i wrote quite actively as a critic, at some point we decided to create a reading club of lytakcent, it was monthly and initially critics, lyakcent, people with specialized education, but gradually began to form some handful of readers, some... came for a specific book, for example, a detective book, some came for a certain author, sometimes authors came and presented their book and it was a conversation where we could see each other to tell myroslav laiuk what we liked about his book and what we didn't like, and then some fans came, or those who had something to say, and gradually a circle was formed, when the official part was over, we always went to the bar and we always it wasn't enough, and i remember how we sat right before closing time with yaroslava strykha, roksilana sviato and she talked about literature, and we couldn't

talk, and that's probably where this story began, how you can gather a circle and talk to people, which are... interesting, even if you're not agree somewhere, even if you fiercely argue, this does not make you enemies, it is , on the contrary, a very interesting synergistic exchange, but we are still talking about such a certain bubble, we seem to belong to this bubble, where it is natural, yes , what we, we discuss, we say, but it’s not enough for us, we want to communicate, discuss books, but i feel that it has now completely broken out of this bubble, as well as those people for whom... for whom, let’s say, here we are spoke last week with vakhtan kibuladze about the fact that people are so attached to, let's say , bulgakov and his myth of kyiv, it is because people simply did not read, do not know the myth of ukrainian kyiv, so at that time, they did not read the girl with the girl with the bear, they did not read , dr. serafikus, they did not read the city

of the graveyard, the clouds of nechoyalyvitsa, that is , people... uh, who grew up on a different cultural soil, yes, from a different cultural hummus, russian, soviet, yes, they suddenly, suddenly became interested in this, this ukrainian literature, yes, and the names that were once not spoken to them, this so the war did it, yes, that's how it works, how it is, i just i understand that it's the war that kind of brought people back. it's like it's ukrainian culture, but still, it's very difficult, because here i am, i always say that you love what you know, and what you don't know, you can't love, but suddenly they, and suddenly they loved it, suddenly they became interested in it, and suddenly it became for them as if it were part of their, their world, i

think that we also became open in our bubble, it is very nice to talk to each other with by people who understand you, to whom you do not need to explain anything, for example, to contextualize some names, it is very nice to sit down and talk as usual, but this change of conversation, change of the type of conversation, the tone, which requires effort and requires work on oneself, it is very important for in order for us to find new audiences, i know that now in kyiv there are more than 30 reading clubs operating only in libraries, these and these may be small reading clubs, i just have a friend who is interested. question, there can be five of them in the microdistrict, and ours come there authors, we, for example, at the temper publishing house , now constantly present books in libraries, before there was even no idea that this was important, but now we understand this need, and people come there, very often older women, and they are interested in listening, what this guy wrote there about the cyberpunk future, because it's real

contact with the author, and it's something new, and they 're open, actually, i think, i, for one, definitely underestimate it a lot. a wider audience, this desire to lock up their ivory towers is also very tempting, however, one should not succumb to this temptation. very interesting. bohdan, what do you think, how did it, how did it become, well, it became a menstruum, because i understand that i underestimated the scope of reading in reading clubs, now that i learned the number of reading clubs in... libraries in kyiv and it is probably not only kyiv, in fact there are even more of them, there is a separate channel that is managed by the bookstore sense, which simply collects information about book clubs in ukraine, and you can see what, for example, is read in clubs in odesa, in lviv, in kharkiv , in a word very much different places, and i think that when we

talk about this kind of self-discovery, there's such an important... there's a decolonial moment, and it's actually nice to find out that you have more than what you've been told all your life, i'm trying so hard to imagine , you learn that there are, for example, the same beautiful novels of the 20s that you mentioned, which show kyiv, that you can go for a walk through the city simply through these novels, and they will tell you about ukrainian and european culture in the ukrainian language, through some images of ukrainian and european culture. .. the capital of your country, and this is such a pleasant discovery, as it turned out for many. on the other hand, i always try to say that, in fact, even those people who, let's say, did not... gave and did not necessarily have to come, let's say, to reading from russian culture, they could simply not read, but they may well have a certain sensory experience, a certain type

of exposure that, say, travel or a love of the movies gives them, and that will allow them to be good readers, sometimes even immediately, and it also allows you to see new angles on texts that it would seem that we have already re-read dozens of times, and we are talking about this city... from mohylny, we speak as if, you know, such a puck goes along some kind of sharpened paths, in fact , you can see the first, second, fifth, and for this you just need reader perspectives, these reader perspectives are terribly interesting to me, because i understand that people with different educations, different backgrounds, simply different preferences than me and my rather narrow bubble, they can offer completely new perspectives that i will then use, say in my projects, and this will do the projects are only getting stronger, it is very interesting, here we are, i am now preparing a lot for a conversation with you, i listen to podcasts so much, but i started, i listened to

a lot of things that i have never heard, for example, i listened to gogol's mustache, where stand-up artists talk about books, i listened to ukrlit, yes, where comedians talk about literature, and i see that this is a new language, you. a new language was found in which to speak, this is what my generation had in general, because before us they talked about literature as something this is not given to everyone, it is very high and something that needs to be talked about a little quietly and very respectfully, here people just walk in, and they just open the door with their feet, so to hamlet, and they are just very... .they talk about literature in such a simple slang, how do you perceive it, how do you listen to it? i perceive it very positively, it

seems to me that this formula, which was imposed on us, is catastrophic, as soon as a conditional virtual chorus starts to sound from behind, you have to get out of it, then put on a very a long skirt, something is immediately wrong, and i think it's cool that... they find this new language, that this language is different, that it's accessible, i, as an editor, am constantly asked by young authors if it's possible to mumble in the texts , i say: yes, please give it, and i give several examples so that they understand that all this is possible, that we will have more registers, we will have even more opticians, we will have even more different views, then it will be a more interesting project, and i like it, i also really like when new people who are not professionals come in literary critics who are not mine. far, far, yes, yes, and they can give something completely new and interesting, and their speech is alive, and their mind is very inquisitive, and i am especially happy when some

very youthful initiatives appear, teenagers, when it flies in tiktok , when we have a desire not only to steal the rock scene as a star, but also as a tiktok star, and this seems incredibly valuable to me, because t-tok is now largely producing literature and can sell entire editions, and these are all very different methods , but... anything that works for good literature, i am for him with both hands, i think that podcasts are generally a very liberal genre, because even if we take our conversation with you here and now, we are sitting in a studio and the work of an incredibly large number of people behind the scenes is needed, so that our with you, the dialogue is embodied, and the viewer is not interested in it, he should not even think about it, he should be comfortable and interested, a debutant podcaster, he cannot give such a command to himself, but very often he has a smartphone, where he can experiment with recording, buy an inexpensive buttonhole, record a conversation on their own

or with a friend, edit it and pour it, try it, and how will it work, and you talked about gogol's mustache, i know that they started with two loops, and they themselves recorded the sound of turning the page, it was a very budget product, but later, if ... success comes if your language is read by your audience, of course you can afford more experiments, and i'm just very interested in watching those projects that grow, but they keep this very liberal spirit, sometimes they dive into the expert part , they add to theirs projects of literary experts, once again , such incredibly interesting interactions take place, but in this there remains some kind of ... slyness is very healthy. on the other hand, i really like volodymyr yarmolenko and tetyana ogarkova's cult podcast, and i think that the podcast medium allowed them to be more

liberal as well. in their conversation, that is , maybe those things that they can't afford in the framework of lecture courses or books, which they have quite formalized, it's a high shelf, definitely, but in the podcast they can afford a certain experimentation, which later may or may not be expressed in an academic form, but there is a thrill from this experiment, which we as listeners can simply perceive in our ears, and it will already move our thoughts, and that is why i am very impressed by this very freedom. bring such genres, by the way, gogol's mustache, i listened today, i continue to be under the impression of a conversation about shakespeare, about shakespeare and about hamlet, where they call hamlet, it seems, sanov beachch, and ophelia potaskukha, and this, well, this is actually , it's interesting to listen to it there is something, and they they mention you very often, bohdan, they say no, he's a smart guy, let's not be this

smart guy, because... and it deforms and that everyone can talk and i'm absolutely not a pore, but on the other hand sometimes i am. i dry it and think whether we are not simplifying in this way, whether it is possible, whether it is not possible for some young person to hear it in this way, and this, well , as if it could be a spoiling of taste and optics, when too much of it is driven into very simple forms like this, low, i think any good podcast, whether it's really smashing, or whether it's more like really high shelf.

it should encourage first of all to read, look at the source, that is the main purpose of the podcast, why does everyone make you go and form an opinion yourself, and i really like it when there is resistance in the audience, for example, to my words or to my position, because i know , that if there is opposition, it means that they will go and look and express their position, so they will argue, they will discuss, maybe they will write a comment that is not very pleasant to me on youtube, but they will go, think and... form their vision , so any is good history, any good podcast and conversations, they should encourage you to go and form your opinion, again, not to impose a ready-made matrix, but in school we were imposed one matrix, and now we will impose another matrix, of a different type, in other words, but as well as the matrix, and to go and look for good podcasts yourself, they cope with it, even if their position can be undermined, the very moment of undermining gives rise to an intellectual

discussion, but in order for there to be an intellectual discussion, and or, for example, to something triggered you, or you are not with something agreed or disagreed, yes, you must already know something, and if it is, for example, a very young person who has not read anything, and here she is being told in a very simplified form, and she seems to have the feeling that, well, i am already i know, i know it already, i know it can be such an effect, yes, when, when in such a banal plan some... things are retold, or reflected on some things, it can also be like that, it seems to me, now is such a time , when we feel very much the importance of curatorship and the importance of those people who they offer us the keys to different doors, such, let's call them, intellectual doors, for example, there are a number of series of classics, and these comments before or after the text are important, where we understand what vira ageev, rostislav

semkiv or yaryn tsimba will say... or other literary scholars whom we trust will tell us something about the author and the text. for example, i am thinking about the figure of lesya ukrainka and how a person forms a private relationship with her, not school, not because of the image on the banknote, but personal, and it is not always so easy to simply take oksana zabushko's tomishke about lesya ukrainka, immerse yourself and understand everything, and then really. and these promotional projects come to us, which can offer keys to understanding: you listen to one thing, another, you learn the history, the context, after that you come to the original text, and then it is quite possible that you can discover something more complex. at the same time, i do not want to completely devalue ukrainian readers, because i am convinced that many people, what i actually said, but i want to repeat,