Literary Focus: Ukraine

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More than a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we took stock with authors Stanislav Aseyev (Ukraine), Tanja Maljartschuk (Austria), Sasha Marianna Salzmann (Germany) and Aleksandr Skorobogatov (Belgium). Journalists Franka Hummels and Simone Peek talked to them about the role of writing and poetry in times of war. Virtuoso accordionist Oleg Lysenko played some musical contributions.

Writer Lisa Weeda, compiler of the programme, opened Literary Focus: Ukraine from 19:30 in the foyer of Theater aan het Spui with a conversation with journalists Floris Akkerman and Geert Jan Hahn. Based on books about Ukraine, they talked about their impressions. Hahn reports for Dutch media on Eastern Europe. Among other things, Akkerman is editor-in-chief and reporter at NRC on the war in Ukraine. They have been presenting BNR Perestrojkast, their podcast on current topics from Eastern and Central Europe, since 2019.

The programme continued in Zaal 1 with a first performance by accordionist Oleg Lysenko playing two movements from Victor Vlasov's suite Five Views on Gulag State. In collaboration with writers' organisation PEN Netherlands, an empty chair was visible on stage symbolising journalists who cannot speak out or publish because they have been imprisoned.

Franka Hummels then spoke with writers Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Aleksandr Skorobogatov, both of whom also read from their work. Simone Peek talked to writers Tanja Malyartschuk and Stanislav Aseyev. Malyartschuk also recited from her work. Aseyev requested Nina Targan Mouravi, who translated his book The Torture Camp on Paradise Street from Russian into Dutch,to recite an excerpt from it.

Accordionist Oleg Lysenko then performed two more movements from Vlasov's suite. The programme will conclude with the short film Monument for murdered writers and journalists 2022, a project by Theatre of Wrong Decisions, Committee To Project Journalists and writers' organisation PEN International.

How do you report on an invasion that is not yet over? What can fiction and poetry mean for a nation whose sovereignty is threatened?

Long a blind spot in our Western European minds, Ukraine is now in the full spotlight. At lightning speed, we learn all kinds of things about the country. What do authors who have known, described or travelled the area all their lives actually say about Ukraine? What does literature and poetry add to the story about Ukraine and the surrounding countries?

Bookstore De Vries van Stockum was present in the lobby with a stand offering books by participating authors of this programme, among others — including signing opportunities!

Literary Focus: Ukraine was developed by writer Lisa Weeda, who wrote a portrait of her Ukrainian family in her debut novel Aleksandra.

Day ticket: also visit the afternoon programme The World According to Cusk featuring Rachel Cusk!
Literary Focus: Ukraine was preceded Sunday 12 March from 14:30 hours in Theater aan het Spui by the, also English spoken, festival programme The World According to Cusk (with top author Rachel Cusk). 
A reduced price day ticket for both festival programmes on 12 March was available.

Information

Date and time Sunday 12 March 2023 from 19:30 to 22:00 hrs
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1
Price €15
DenHaagPas €12,50
Up to 30 years / Ooievaarspas: €7,50.

Line-up

Lisa Weeda

(Rotterdam, 1989) is a Dutch-Ukrainian writer, literary programme maker, theatre maker and VR director. Her debut novel Aleksandra was published in 2021. Her grandmother is the central character in the story. She sends the main character Lisa to the Donbas to bring a cloth to the grave of her murdered uncle Kolya. In 2024, Dans Dans Revolutie (Dance Dance Revolution) was published, a novel in which Weeda tackles the issue of looking away from and looking at war in four storylines. The immersive theatre installation of the same name, Dans Dans Revolutie, won the Designers' Prize at the Dutch Theatre Festival in 2025. In Het archief Jilles - brief aan mijn grootvader (The Jilles Archive - Letter to My Grandfather, 2025), she describes how an archive discovery brings a loved one closer. Together with Teddy Tops, she compiled J'accuse (2025), a collection of texts by forty Dutch, Flemish and international writers who speak out against the erasure of the Palestinians. Lisa's work has been translated in eight countries.

Go to the website of Lisa Weeda here
Instagram: @lisa_weeda
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Sasha Marianna Salzmann

(Russia, 1985) is a playwright, essayist, dramaturge and novelist with Russian, Jewish and Ukrainian roots. They live and work in Germany, where they are connected with the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin. Their brilliant debut novel Außer sich (Beside Myself, 2017) was translated into 16 languages and won multiple awards. Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (Everything Must Be Lovely about a Person, 2021) was recently awarded the Preis der Literaturhäuser; it is a sobering portrait of a period of upheaval, from perestroika to present-day Germany, and at the same time a family novel about loss in the lives of powerful female figures.
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Aleksandr Skorobogatov

(Belarus, 1963) lives and works since the nineties in Antwerp. He studied in Minsk, Paris and Moscow. At 18, he decided to devote himself fully to writing; however, in the late Soviet era, Belarus had only one (state) publishing house and one literary magazine. The editor informed him that his texts were too "different," ideologically unacceptable and politically incorrect. His high-profile debut novel Sergeant Bertrand (1991) has since become a classic and reached millions of readers worldwide. In addition to stories, essays, a play, and more texts, Skorobogatov has published six novels: the already mentioned Sergeant Bertrand (two versions, 1991 and 2004), Audiëntie bij de vorst (Audience with the Monarch, 1994), Aarde zonder water (Earth Without Water; 2002), Cocaïne (2017), Portret van een onbekend meisje (Portrait of an Unknown Girl, 2015) and De wasbeer (The Raccoon, 2020).
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Stanislav Aseyev

(Ukraine, 1989) is a writer, poet and journalist. He has published the autobiographical novel The Melchior Elephant, or The Man Who Thought (2016), a poetry collection and a play. For two years, he wrote reports for the Ukrainian media from Donetsk under the pseudonym Stanislav Vasin about the situation in the occupied Donbas region. In May 2017, separatist rebels discovered his identity, and he was arrested for "extremism" and "espionage." After a month and a half in the basement of the "Ministry of State Security," he was transferred to a penal camp. Aseyev was released in December 2019 in a prisoner exchange. In 2020 he published The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, a confrontational account of tortures and mistreatments he and others suffered in the Russian-run prison camp. A collection from his reports from Donetsk were published as In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (2021).
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Franka Hummels

(Netherlands, 1978) is a journalist. She works for several programmes on Dutch national broadcaster Radio 1 and writes; for example, she is author of the book De Generatorgeneratie, leven na Tsjernobyl (The Generator Generation, life after Chernobyl). As a Belarus expert, she regularly appears in the media.
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Simone Peek

is a journalist (working for NRC and Investico), writer, interviewer, presenter and translator. She has been reporting for NRC on Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022. She has previously written news articles on Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, among others. For Investico, she wrote about labour exploitation and modern slavery in the Netherlands and Europe, among other topics. Together with fellow Investico editor Sylvana Verbraak, Peek creates and presents the podcast Speurwerk (Research) on investigative journalism, in which they highlight Investico's latest publications and show how journalists work. Peek studied Modern History and Russian. She translated Alejandra Ortiz's De waarheid zal me bevrijden (The Truth Will Set Me Free. 2022) from English into Dutch, an account from an asylum centre in The Netherlands and also a diary of a Mexican trans woman.
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Oleg Lysenko

(Ukraine, 1974) studied at the music academies in Poltava, Kiew and Enschede. In 1999 he released his first CD, Awakening featuring works by a.o. Vivaldi, Bach, Pachelbel and Piazolla. He specialized in Argentine tango on bayan and bandoneon at Codarts Rotterdam. As a soloist, he won the 2005 National Accordion Competition in The Netherlands with his rendition of Victor Vlasov's "Five Views of the Land of the Gulag Archipelago", also the title piece of his 2012 CD Gulag. He prefers genre-transcending projects in which visual art, literature and music enhance and flow into one another. He developed such projects with writer and visual artist Armando, sculptor and illustrator Koenraad Tinel, and with writers, journalists and filmmakers, including Stefan Hertmans, Cherry Duyns and Peter d'Hamecourt, among others. For his double-CD De sneeuwstorm (The Snowstorm, 2022), Lysenko arranged and played on bayan Georgi Sviridov's music to Alexander Pushkin's story of the same name, recited by Martinus Nijhoff Prize-winning Pushkin translator Hans Boland. With fundraising events and benefit performances, Oleg raises money to pay for an ambulance for the Ukrainian region of Poltava, where his family comes from.
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Tanja Maljartschuk

(Ukraine, 1983) is a writer, essayist and journalist. Her work has been published in several languages. She has lived in Vienna since 2011 and has been writing in German since 2014, including columns for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and news magazine Zeit Online. Her novel Zabuttya (Oblivion, 2016) was awarded as Book of Year by BBC Ukraine. After publication in autumn 2022 in Dutch translation by Tobias Wals and Marina Snoek, Dutch national newspaper NRC wrote: "Then again, the novel breathes the typical, early-twentieth-century Thomas Mann atmosphere, then again it jumps to the love life of a modern young woman. It works really beautifully (...) Ultimately, this incredibly rich, lyrical and melancholic novel wants to tell something about generational trauma. And even more than about the history of Ukraine, Maljartschuk's book is about forgetting." Her debut novel Biografie eines zufälligen Wunders (A Biography of a Chance Miracle) was published in 2012 and the collection of essays Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus (In a moment, the story continues, we just exhale) in 2022, in which she describes what Russia's bellicose expansionist policy is doing to Ukraine from the Maidan protests in 2014 onwards. In 2018, she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her short story Frösche im Meer (Frogs in the Sea).
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Geert Jan Hahn

is Europe reporter for Dutch national broadcaster BNR News Radio. He is also a graduate Slavist. He studied, lived and worked in St Petersburg, Kiev and Warsaw - and travelled throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. As a Europe reporter and former Ukraine correspondent, he closely follows the Russian war in Ukraine, as well as its consequences. Geert Jan has also just returned from Ukraine, where he travelled and reported for 2 weeks. Together with Floris Akkerman, he has been making the podcast BNR Perestrojkast since 2019, 'BNR's one and only podcast on Central and Eastern Europe', with national and international guests such as Vitaliy Klichchko, Svetlana Tichanovskaya, Edi Rama, Nino Haaratischwili and Sasha Marianna Salzmann.
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Floris Akkerman

followed East European Studies at the UvA after his journalism studies, and specialised in Russian language, economy, politics, history and culture. He worked from 2009 to 2013 as a correspondent in Russia for Dutch and Belgian media, travelling throughout the country and writing about politics, economy, culture and daily life. As a former Soviet Union reporter based in the Netherlands, he worked for VPRO's Bureau Buitenland, De Correspondent and Wordt Vervolgd, among others, and currently for the Reformatorisch Dagblad. For Trouw he is North Holland correspondent, and at NRC editor and reporter from Ukraine on the war against Russia. From 2019, Floris presents Perestrojkast with Geert Jan Hahn for radio station BNR, 'the only real podcast about Central and Eastern Europe. Because there are still many stories to write and tell about the former Soviet Union.'
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