Scribo, Ergo Sum by Umberto Tosi

I had just read Death and the Penguin, a surreal mystery novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, when Russian despot Vladimir Putin stepped up his Big Lie that Ukraine doesn't exist as a country or culture outside of Mother Russia.  He might as well have said that Ireland doesn't exist because the Emerald Isle spent so much of its history under British rule.

No surprise here: Lies are the mother's milk of tyrants, actual and would-be. This long-of-tooth American, for example, has oft lowered a Quixotic lance at waves self-serving, authoritarian lies washing over so-called land of the free incessantly as polluted tides. Meanwhile, inconvenient truths are gagged and spirited away. The Russian bombing of Mariupol differs little in its mass-murdering savagery from those of  Guernica, Rotterdam, London, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiorshima, or more recently, Aleppo. 

George Orwell's rule holds true: "The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate how they understand their own history," he said.

Oksana Zabuzhko

Whatever we of good will are doing doesn't seem to be working. That, or we overestimate ourselves and underestimate the chicanery and resourcefulness of our enemies. Denial is human. We keep serving tea to zombies and avoid calling them out lest we face the onerous tasks of recognizing and dealing with them. When will things return to normal, we ask, ignoring that ignorance, pestilence and war are parts of normality not so easy to change.

Putin's forces could be losing ground in Ukraine for the moment, but his ilk seems to be thriving worldwide. The kleptocrats, oligarchs and bloody apologists of Southern slavery who remain with us, reincarnated as ex-Liar-in-Chief, Putin-stooge Donald Trump and his cult. I number among the dwindling generation who remember World War 2 vividly as a child - at least during its final three years from a home front perspective. Even with that and all the conflicts that have followed, I've never seen democracy and truth under such ravaging attack worldwide as we see today.

Halyna Hryn

The Borg tell us that resistance is futile, but we fight in the thousand ways of wild beasts you can't fool,  What's a writer to do? Despite scant evidence of nobility in actual warfare, many artist and writers will shoulder arms for their cause - as did Orwell, John Dos Passos, Emma Goldman, Hemingway, Andre Malraux and Lorca during the Spanish Civil War with all of its contradictions, less clear than the current struggle in Ukraine. The rest stick to pen and ink or the sidelines of apathy and depression. I'm too old for the battlefield, which I studiously avoided all my adult life to be sure. But I find inspiration among Ukrainian writers themselves.

Yes, Virginia, there is Ukrainian literature, albeit little known to most English language readers. Yes, Putin, there is a Ukrainian culture with a long history distinct from Russian despite their shared Slavic lingual roots. That culture defines the new Ukrainian nation that you send your tanks, rockets and legions to crush. 

Ukraine's cultural identity is nowhere more vividly demonstrated than in its literature (much of it written in Russian, Yiddish as well as in Ukrainian). This literature is little known by Americans, but has a long history going back to Nikolai Gogol and beyond, nonetheless. Its reputation has been growing since the breakup of the Soviet Union, including through outstanding English translations of late. 

Contemporary post-Soviet, Ukrainian writers like Kurkov are noted for irony and surrealism. Also like Kurkov, many "wrote for the drawer" during the decades of Kremlin censorship, to emerge prolific since the end of Russian rule. They resist returning to that rule as fiercely the rest of their comrades. 

Kurkov's latest novel, Grey Bees, is off to a successful start in English translation. Prophetically, he wrote it in 2018 about ordinary people struggling to save lives amid conflict with Russian occupiers of the Ukraine's Donbas region leading up to the current invasion.

Others among this company, spread over several generations are: Irina Chernova, a former journalist. She writes under the pseudonym Lyuko Dashvar. Her novels are extremely popular at home. Her Milk With Blood sold 100,000 copies from its first release. 

Ilina Kostenko is another of Ukraine's best known poets and storytellers, with work that explores the mystery of being in everyday circumstances.

We write, therefore we are. Also we paint, we dance, we walk down our streets, we change diapers and we daydream, but you get the point. Nothing defines a culture more distinctively than its art. And there's artistry aplenty in Ukraine, Mr. Putin.

Such ruminations set me off on a mission to do at least what I know how to do -- editorial pencil in hand -- compile an anthology of new Ukrainian English writing to offer readers of Chicago Quarterly Review -- a literary journal to which I've contributed for the past eight years. 

CQR has been noted for publishing special anthologies over its 25 years in print. Among recent ones: our prize-winning, Anthology of Black American Literature, edited by Charles Johnson, and our South Asian American Issue, edited by Moazzam Sheikh. Other noted CQR Special editions include our Australian, Italian, Chicago, and 25th Anniversary Issues. 

Moreover, Chicago has a large, active Ukrainian American community, with a grand, Cultural Center where we could host a reading events, hopefully.

I was fortunate to find an ideal guest editor interested in curating the Ukrainian issue for us. Halyna Hryn is Editor of Ukrainian Studies at Harvard University, a writer, and an English-language translator of noted Ukrainian works.  She is the English-language translator of Fieldwork-Ukrainian-Sex and Your Ad Could Go Here both satirical novels by Ukrainian author Oksana Zabuzhko. for which Halyna co-won an American Association of Ukrainian Studies 2021 Translation prize. 

We've scheduled our CQR Ukrainian issue for November -- a tight and of necessity flexible deadline that takes timeliness into account. Wish us luck and stay tuned.  

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Umberto Tosi's recently published books include the highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mystery The Phantom Eye, plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published most recently in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. He went on to become  editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.

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Enjoy my Hollywood noir detective thriller: The Phantom Eye (a Frank Ritz Mystery)  - soon to be followed by Oddly Dead and Death and the Droid.
 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen.