A three-hour journey by local electric train, with all those Roma and their quiet whispering and “God bless you!”, grannies in multicoloured headscarves that have long since lost every trace of their Canadianness, granddads in boots caked with black earth and battered by bumpy asphalt, good-natured conductresses whose fingers smell of freshly cracked “semki” (sunflower seeds) and of cigarettes smoked in a hurry on the platform, conductors in threadbare uniforms as blue as the ocean depths who, swinging to the clatter of their ticket machines, so neatly — though without the faintest idea of it — accompany the electric rhythm of the electric trains... promised nothing more than a techno mix, preparations for the Hamselyt festival and simply a weekend in Ternopil. But, like all the best things in life, the Ї festival happened to me by chance.
Running into Dmytro Lazutkin in the doorway of one of Ternopil’s central clubs might have been pure chance (after all, I also bumped into a few acquaintances from Lviv there, as well as some Ternopil people I had expected to see), but finding him in the company of fans, fangirls, Taras Prokhasko and Andrii Liubka was quite another matter and did not look like chance at all. Of course, Liubka currently has a most honourable mission: “Sleeping with Women” in various cities of Ukraine... What? You didn’t know? That is the title (Spaty z zhinkamy) of the author’s latest collection of essays, brought out by the publishing house of the Meridian Czernowitz International Literary Festival. The title was chosen by readers themselves, men and women alike, from five that Liubka put forward: “Death and a Thousand Other Reasons for Love”, “Someone Lived Here Before Us”, “Heart, Heart”, “Love Me Even After Death” and “Sleeping with Women”.
But back to the festival. Dmytro Lazutkin let me in on the reason for their presence in Ukraine’s officially finest city: it was the arts festival “Ї – A Caustic Mix”. The festival had popped up spontaneously in Ternopil’s art scene the year before but never got the publicity it deserved. I talk about it with the festival’s organiser, Vasyl Tomchyshyn, head of the youth organisation Faine Misto (“Fine City”).
– “Last year we held the festival in February. There was no venue that suited the festival’s format, and we didn’t manage to invite the kind of participants who would really draw an audience. Back then it had no name — it was simply the Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Literature and Music — but this year the organisers came up with the idea of calling it Ї. In fact, the festival’s name has nothing to do with the Lviv journal Ї. What we wanted above all was to highlight the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian language: the alphabets of the other Slavic peoples don’t have the letter Ї, and that marks Ukrainian out as a distinctive, unique and independent language. So there’s no need — especially against the background of current events — to go on about how we’re supposedly such brothers with our eastern neighbours. We can stand on our own, and our art stands on its own too. That’s why we decided to put together a sort of ‘caustic mix’ of Ukrainian art: paintings and photographs, poetry and prose, and sets by bands. On top of everything else, there will also be a charity auction. We managed to bring together every art form we possibly could in such a short time, because we organised this festival over two months — there really wasn’t much time. Our organisation, Faine Misto, is fairly young, and we haven’t run projects on this scale before — not counting, of course, the Faine Misto festival, which is going to be held this year at the city airfield. So I think everything is still ahead of us, and this festival has a future in Ternopil. I wouldn’t say Ternopil is a powerful cultural centre, but it is a cultured city where you can feel the Galician Ukrainian spirit. I think we’ll manage to bring more people here. By the way, half the people at the festival weren’t from Ternopil.
“To be honest, the idea came up in 2012. In September a friend and I were at the Book Forum in Lviv, and a Night of Brutal Poetry happened to be on. It was Ihor Bilyk’s birthday, and we decided to celebrate at the Night of Erotic Poetry. We sat there all night, and out of the blue the thought came: ‘Why don’t we do something like this in Ternopil?’ The most important thing is that there’s a team of people with a spark in their eyes who want to do this kind of thing. The whole of Faine Misto got involved in the festival. It brought us very close together.”
– So what is going to be the festival’s “hook”, the thing that sets it apart from other literary festivals in Ukraine?
– Visitors have described the festival as “a breath of fresh air” in these difficult times of ours. Art never stands aloof from burning social issues, and yet there’s no politics to be heard at the festival. We’ve brought together lots of well-known people, and alongside them beginners who said they’d like to read their poetry can perform — that, I suppose, is the main hook.
– And what were the selection criteria?
– If someone registered, we gave them the chance to perform. We never turned anyone away or told them, “Your work isn’t suitable.”
– And what about the “stars”?
– We invited whoever we could get. Bohdana Matiiash, for example, came last year, but this year she couldn’t make it. We tried to invite everyone who is active in the arts movement right now. We hope there will be even more participants next year. Everyone is different, everyone’s work is different, everyone has their own views on art, everyone is special, and there can’t be anything along the lines of “this one’s better and that one’s worse”.
– Are you planning to work with other literary festivals?
– Definitely. Other festivals already have a certain experience, a certain standard, and we need advice and help. This festival was a big experiment which, thank God, came off, given that the organising committee was made up of first- to third-year students. We absolutely have to learn from others’ experience and break down stereotypes. So working with those festivals is something we’ll need, and I hope it will be of interest to them too.
– So are you planning to move the festival closer to the traditional September?
– I think the owners of the Maksym entertainment complex will want to hold the festival here, and if the audience keeps growing, we’ll think about having it in mid-May or April, so that we can do it on the lakeshore, on a steamboat, on the beach... There are lots of ideas; it all depends on what people want and what offers come in. But we have to live to see next year first, because the situation, you see, changes every day. Ternopil used to have a reputation as a festival city. There was the Nivroku festival. Now it’s time to win that reputation back — and not just with places where you can drink good Ternopil beer, but with settings where you can get to know people. People come here from Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk, from Lutsk and Luhansk, so they’re interested. In Lviv, for example, lots of good things happen, but Ternopil lacks that; Ternopil lacks tourists, even though there is plenty to see here and places to go, and there are many people who could help develop tourism — but sadly none of these organisations gets proper support.
The Ternopil crowd’s festival really did turn out to be packed. Proceedings opened with an exhibition of photographs from the Maidan and of paintings on burning socio-political themes at the Maksym entertainment complex. The bands Kimnata Grethen, Odyn v Kanoe, Medovyi Polyn, Fiolet and Kopas played. The last day of the festival saw no fewer than two grand concerts, by DramTYatr and QUARP. Besides that, there were not only poetry nights — revolutionary and brutal — but also a night of short films. And, of course, poetry... Apart from the poets already mentioned, the festival was visited by Yurii Andrukhovych, Oleksandr Irvanets, Yurii Izdryk and Hryhorii Semenchuk, as well as many young authors. And that is what it was like, this — second or perhaps first — Ї festival in Ternopil: an extraordinarily cosy, calm festival in the cosy, unhurried city of Ternopil.
Finally, a few overheard quotes from some of the festival’s guests:
Oleksandr Irvanets: “I’ve already told Vasyl, the chief organiser, that I understand him. I’ve worked at a great many festivals myself, starting with the first Chervona Ruta in ’89 in Chernivtsi; I headed the scriptwriting team of the Vyvykh festival in ’90 and ’92 in Lviv — you won’t even have heard of that sort of thing — and so on... A festival is very hard and very tedious work, and I’ve never come across any normal, well-oiled festivals in Ukraine — Izdryk will disagree — or only extremely rarely. Festivals in Poland are better organised; in Germany, on the whole, everything works flawlessly. And in Slovakia, say, or Slovenia, well... it’s almost the same, except that there they also give you a 100-euro fee, but the same absurdity, the same hitches happen there too. And so I welcome any new festival ventures like this one, where, as Yurko said, the organisers probably didn’t even know a magazine of that name existed... In other words, it’s all good, people — it’s all awful, terrible, but good.”
Yurii Izdryk: “I know absolutely nothing about organising festivals, so I’ll just say what I, as an invited guest, would fancy seeing: three meals a day, travel paid for, a bed for the night and — mentioned by Irvanets, and by no means in vain — a 100-euro fee. And all the rest can be... well, local colour, so to speak...”
Hryhorii Semenchuk: “As the current director of the Lviv International Literary Festival, I’m convinced that if a festival didn’t end with a broken leg, or with waking up in a place where you don’t know where you are or how to get home, then that festival is already a success, so long as some minimal needs have been met. In Ukraine — and I’m talking about myself too — festivals are organised by people who are far removed from any kind of management work, and everything comes with experience. So I think a few more years and things will only get better and better: Ukraine will flourish, there will be more and more festivals, every week we’ll go off somewhere ‘festivalling’ and get fees of 100, 200, 300, 400 euros.”
Dr. Myroslav Trofymuk
Born in Lviv. Designer, director, musician, researcher, founder of ZEMLA STUDIO. Master of classical philology and digital marketing, PhD in the history of Ukrainian literature. Member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Since 2022 he has authored the CENTRUM MUNDI audio show for Polish Radio for Ukraine, continuing the same research into the contemporary music scene in Ukraine and Poland.
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