Yana Kane interviews
Olga Zvyeryeva
Interview for Solastalgia
Poet: Olga Zvyeryeva,
Translator: Yana Kane
(Interview conducted in English, via videoconference)
Background
Kopilka[1] is a volunteer-run project that chronicles the war and its historical context through Russophone poetry of witness and protest from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russophone diaspora. The Kopilka preserves this poetry and makes it accessible to readers in other languages (so far, English and French) through the work of an international team of literary translators.
So far, theKopilka project has resulted in two bilingual Russian–English anthologies: Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2023) and Dislocation (Slavica Publishers / Three String Books, 2024), as well as a collection of French translations: Non à la guerre! (Éditions Caractères, 2022).
Currently, the Kopilka team is working on a new anthology of English translations, titled Solastalgia[2]. The new book will include dialogues between some of the poets and their translators. Below is one of such dialogues. Olga Zvyeryeva, who is both a poet whose work is included in the Kopilka archive and a translator volunteering for the project, was interviewed by Yana Kane who has translated some of Zvyeryeva’s poetry. The conversation took place over Zoom, in English. The text has been line-edited slightly for readability.
[1]Kopilka means “coin bank” in Russian
[2]Solastalgia is a term coined in 2005 by philosopher Glenn Albrecht. He defined solastalgia as “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” Unlike nostalgia—the longing for a place from which one is separated—Albrecht gave a name to the grief of watching one's homeland transform into something unrecognizable, the homesickness without a sense of distance. The term was introduced to Slavic Studies by José Vergara. The anthology extends Albrecht's concept from the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe to the aftermath of war.
Interview
Yana Kane: You are a sociolinguist by training, right? And you are a technical writer by trade—you write in English [for work]. You live in the Netherlands. I assume that at least in your everyday life, you speak and read Dutch. And you grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine. I know, obviously, that you write poetry in Russian. And you also use Surzhyk[1] in your poetry.
Olga Zvyeryeva: Yes, I use Surzhyk to combine Ukrainian lines and Russian lines.
Y: And you translate, from Russian into English. I'm curious to hear how, for you, how do these different languages integrate or not integrate? How does Olga live across and within these different languages?
O: Yes. First of all, as a sociolinguist, I know that this is called language compartmentalization. It's absolutely normal for multilinguals that each language has its own compartment. You know that at work you'll speak this language, at home you'll speak that language. And language is really connected with the settings.
Y: But you write poetry in this language or that language, so it's not just purely functional.
O: Yeah, sometimes I just know, especially when I write some parts of the poem in Ukrainian and some in Russian or in English. I just know that it should be like this. Sometimes it happens that I write a poem in just one language, and then look at it and say, no, no, this line should be different. Or I need to add this phrase in another language to serve the purpose of the poem.
Y: I find it hard to try to translate my own poems from one language into the other. Sometimes my poems are born in two languages in parallel. I call them bilingual twins. But if this [twin birth] doesn’t happen, then I find it harder to later translate my own poem as compared to translating somebody else's.
O: Exactly. That's why I sent [to the Kopilka e-mail workshop discussion] an auto-translation a couple of days ago. Because this poem existed [in Russian] already, and a backbone for the poem existed in English as well. Several people, including, probably, you, told me that you should understand whether you want to translate the original poem or you want to create something [anew]. Then I stopped myself and thought, yes, if I'm translating, then I need to mirror the structure and the imagery that I used in Russian. But my English-speaking part, if it’s the author, would probably need another set of images, another set of metaphors. It's like two parts of me were competing.
Y: The writer and the translator?
O: The writer and the translator.
Y: Yeah, I understand that feeling. When you select poems to translate, or the poems select you—whichever way you want to put it—how does this matching happen between you as a translator and a poem that somebody else has written, where you say, okay, THIS one?
O: Sometimes it's the poet I want to translate because of the background. For example, this is the case with [Irina] Yevsa. She was my mentor in Kharkiv. I have known her since I was a child. From our literary studio. And it was quite interesting for me to translate her and then to talk to her about this translation, this shared history. Yevsa's poetry is very historical: she always speaks about specific people, about specific times. It was really interesting to me to match these figures in her poems to people that we both know. The poem becomes a way to explore something from a totally different side, like from the dark side of the moon, right? With [Stanislav] Belskiy, you read his poems, and you do not understand a thing. And then it becomes a challenge to try to make sense of his labyrinth of metaphors, to understand what in his poetry is about his computer science experience, what comes from his philosophical reading, how these two themes intertwine in his imagery. And that is a very different thing. It's closer to the work of a detective. Sometimes, like with E. V.’s poems, I just read them, and then I cannot forget them. I come back to them more than once, and then I think that maybe they need to also be integrated into me in this quite intimate way.
Y: Translation is a very intimate thing. You let another person's voice take over some of the controls that you usually use for your own voice.
O: It is, I agree with you.
Y: My understanding is that Kharkiv still has a very active poetry community. I don't know if you were part of it when you lived there, if you feel part of it now. How does this work for you both as a poet and as a translator?
O: Yes, absolutely. I think that since the 90s Kharkiv became very prominent in poetic landscape of the ex-USSR, which started with Chichibabin, and then Yevsa came, Minakov came. [There were] workshops for talented youth. Everyone that you see in Kopilka as poets [from Kharkiv] were part of this. Kostinsky, Blizniuk, Maksakowa, and a lot of others. We still know each other, we still talk, we are still Facebook friends and send comments to each other. And during the COVID times, before Russia's invasion, we had a regular Zoom reading meeting, which was called Nebesnyy Kharkiv. Celestial Kharkiv. It's still a community.
Y: I'm guessing that you learned about Kopilka through Yevsa. You decided to entrust us with your poetry. And then you decided to join us.
O: Alena Maksakowa said that I shouldn't be too shy and to just talk to Yulia [Julia Nemirovskaya] because Alena saw some of my translations, she saw some of my poems. And she said that maybe I could be a fit.
Y: And what were you interested in? What did you think before you joined and now that you're part of the Kopilka?
O: I think that it is very important work to show that the wartime reality can be different for different people, both in Russia and Ukraine and in diaspora; to give voices to different sides. Not different sides per se, but different [points of view] of the same side that cannot communicate directly in many cases. But [Kopilka] can be an indirect way to bring them into a dialogue.
Y: I see what you're saying: bring them into a dialogue through individuals, through the poetry of individuals.
O: And through the third language.
Y: And through the third language, which becomes more of a neutral ground. Yes. Now that you're an insider, is Kopilka similar to what you expected?
O: It's much more than what I expected. I never saw a community like this before, the community of professionals who really hold each other accountable for the quality. I haven't seen such battles over a single word before.
Y: Yes. I just have to say that these battles are not in the sense that we are trying to hurt each other, but in the sense of: “No, I understand this differently.”
O: Yes. And it creates a sense of connection, because giving birth to a translation isn't individual work any longer; it is communal work. And then each translation feels like your translation is your child, but it's also a village child.
Y: I understand what you're saying. It takes a village...
O: You feel like you're in a tribe, and this is your tribe, this is your folk.
Y: So we are. I was working on my translation of your poem, which starts with:
В детстве я любила термины
советской ботаники –
как назывались детками отростки кактусов
и тюльпанов.
[As a child, I loved the terminology
of Soviet botany—
“babies” was the word used for offset shoots on cactuses
and tulips.]
I grew up far north, in St. Petersburg. I remember the house plants, which were usually scraggly because they didn't get enough sunlight, especially in winter. And there would be very few of them, because the amount of space on the windowsill that could be devoted to them was very small. [Due to the cramped Soviet-era living spaces.] But they were tended carefully, they were a center for inward-directed focus. They were an escape into the world of greenery through that very narrow opening of that one plant. And I was thinking and experiencing that when I was translating; that's what attracted me immediately to that poem. But I realized that the person who writes the poem may be experiencing something different. Maybe in Kharkiv there was more sunlight. And for one thing, I don’t think you grew up in the Soviet Union.
O: I was born in the Soviet Union, yeah, still born there. I was thinking of the 90s and the famous dachas, where people would escape from the city to have their small kitchen garden, their small flower bed. About how important it became for them, so that they would spend every free hour there. And how tulips were the sort of plant they grew because it was different from just planting potatoes to eat. They were a symbol of something beautiful, something sunny and more vacation-like, instead of the grim reality of the 90s.
Y: Okay, so I think that we grew up in very different places and at different times.
O: In Ukraine, in Kharkiv, we still had sun.
Y: Yeah, but I think that I hear in your description something akin to what I'm saying—that these green plants served as a way of escaping into a different dimension.
O: That was what my father did. He tried to escape into his world of beautiful plants. Yes.
Y: Now I want to talk about Solastalgia. We're working together on this concept of solastalgia, thinking about what's going to go in the book. I'm thinking that it's about change and about disconnects of various kinds, but also about connection to what was before and maybe to what is possible [in the future]. How are you experiencing and navigating this [concept]? It sounds like your childhood was at a time of a lot of transition, and now you're living as an adult in a very disrupted transitional time. What is your relationship with language? It seems to me that it's very multi-layered, right? It's the subject of your academic study, it's your trade for earning your keep, but it's also your self-expression tool and your social engagement tool. What is the role of language, and of poetry in particular? How does it all play out as a way of navigating, or maybe sometimes sinking into, this flood of change?
O: When I started thinking about the whole concept of solastalgia, I thought that for me it is because I'm a diaspora poet, and I already had one layer of nostalgia, and regret, and homesickness. And now it's doubled. It has a second layer, because I still remember my city. When you just move to another country, you still have, even if not a hope, but you have a thought that you can go back. And in my case, there is no such thing. It’s a place where I can never again go back. I will never see my old school again because my school is destroyed. I will never see my playground where I grew up because it's destroyed. I will never go to the literary workshop studio because it’s destroyed. It makes the homesickness definite. It's like when you just leave the country, you feel like you have a disease. And now you feel that it's death. You feel that you are becoming more and more dead to people that remain there. This is shown by the language, because [at the time] when I left Kharkiv, we used to speak Russian with my friends. Or we tried to speak Ukrainian, but it became more Surzhyk. And now you would never speak Russian in Ukraine. And I would never speak Russian to my friends. This is okay, but this is not the language we used to speak, which means that the whole friendship has changed. Because all our mutual history, all our jokes, all our internal language are damaged.
Y: Yes, I understand. And how does writing your own poetry, translating poetry, reading poetry, how does that interplay with what you are describing, that layer upon layer of solastalgia, and that relationship with time? Like you said, you have that past with your friends, and it's no longer part of your present. And I don't know if you are thinking about the future of some possibilities.
O: It probably helps me to reclaim that history. When my friends see my poems, they say: “Yeah, we recognize it, we still can remember, we still think in this language, we still understand this type of Surzhyk, we still can connect to those times.” And those were happy times. They were hard times, but they were happy times as compared to now. So, it becomes the tool to reclaim the place of the [Russian] language in our common history, to reclaim the place of the [Russian] language in my personality. It is not defined only by the external events; it is not defined by the Russians; it is not defined by Putin; it is much deeper.
Y: I don't know if saying “I understand” is correct, but I think I have something [in my own life that is] not the same, but corresponding. I left the Soviet Union when I was almost 16. Until then, I grew up in what was then Leningrad and now St. Petersburg. And until 2022, I had this feeling that there was another person, my double, who lived in the city where I grew up. As if I had split into two, but there was some strange entanglement, some strange connection with that other version of what I could have been. I had a complicated relationship with that imaginary person. My actual life was much, much easier and better in many ways. I felt a certain kind of guilt in front of that imaginary person, but I also had a certain kind of mutual understanding with her. I used to have dreams where I would be in Leningrad, and I was more and more confused, like I couldn't find the right tram, but at least the city was recognizable. After 2022, all this vanished. I felt like my whole childhood vanished. I still have some friends with whom I maintain a relationship. I have my literary mentor with whom I maintain a relationship. Although by now it's getting harder and harder to do [due to suppression of communications]. I can't even send a card. There is that sense of the whole of my childhood just having vanished. I unfortunately lost my ability to write poetry in Russian, pretty much. But when you're writing poetry in that language, that part—you're reclaiming it. It exists on its own terms. It's one of the languages of your childhood, and you still inhabit it.
O: Yes, actually, it was quite a funny thing. Both Alena Maksakowa and I joined a Russian-speaking poetry workshop. And our mentor said that [the language] that was common to my poems and to hers, that it was not really Russian. It was syntactically incorrect. And we both said that we're not going to pretend to be Russians. Just take it, it's not Russian grammar, it's our Ukrainian-Russian grammar. And furthermore, it was not just [a matter of] diaspora-Ukrainian-Russian grammar. We would not pretend to be [part of] the pure Russian poetic tradition. It was never our objective.
Y: Interesting. A language is like a river delta. It splits into many, many streams. Maybe [this is also what happens to English] even in America. I think that the language of the North is quite different from the language of Southern states. Certainly, in pronunciation. And I think the literary traditions are different.
O: Yes, I think so. From what I can read, I think that they are quite different.
Y: I'm thinking about your language, and I'm thinking about Maksakowa's language. I also translate her poems, as you know. I didn't experience any sense of: “Well, this is a different linguistic layer from the one I'm used to.” But, of course, I have been in diaspora for more than 40 years now. My language is probably different from what people speak, let's say, in St. Petersburg today. Maybe it’s like different versions of British English, of American English and of English in India. I remember that when we first spoke, I said, “Oh, you're from Kharkiv. I translate a lot of people from Kharkiv.” [And we talked about] this strange mental connection between St. Petersburg and Kharkiv. As I listened to you about having had a poet [Yevsa] as your mentor and then translating this poet, I was thinking about interconnections. I've translated poems by my poetry mentor [Vyacheslav Leikin]. After I left the Soviet Union, left Leningrad, that’s one of the things I missed very intensely, missed fiercely—the friends, that sense of belonging to a group of people who were connected to each other through poetry, through creativity. I had deliberately moved out of that group for about a year or more before we left, because I think I was preparing myself for that loss. But still, I missed it a lot. And I missed that cosmopolitan city. I get a sense from the poetry from the city of Kharkiv that I translate that it is a similar kind of cosmopolitan city. So, I think it may be—and you would know, you're a sociolinguist—[that this is the nature of kinship between Kharkiv and St Petersburg, rather than] because the cities are architecturally similar or similar in terms of their ecology.
O: They are surprisingly similar. When I went to Petersburg when I was still a teenager, it was difficult for me to [navigate]. I could get lost in metro stations just because I knew that the university would be at this station and it was at another.
Y: Oh, I see. That's interesting. Unfortunately, I have never been to Kharkiv. So, you're telling me that it's not just that there was something similar between my situation, and your situation, and these other poets' situations socially, but that the cities really are similar.
O: Yeah, they are similar. I think that both our universities were built in the same year. And they are much more connected than you would think.
Y: That's interesting. Yes, they historically came of age at the same time. I think they were both cosmopolitan, industrial, and intellectual cities. They were the science centers. Yeah, so it may be that this is why I gravitate towards Kharkiv poets. I mean, obviously, Kharkiv has a [large] Russian-language literary scene or dual-language literary scene. But I think I probably gravitate [to it so much] because I feel that the city I grew up in has, in many ways, formed me aesthetically. Even though I left it voluntarily and was very grateful that I got out of the Soviet Union, until 2022, I had this sense of part of me still residing there. Maybe that part of me moved into Kharkiv.
O: From what I hear from people, they already think of you as part of their community.
Y: Oh, I'm so honored and I'm so relieved. Thank you.
O: I think that for them it's like, oh yeah, this is Yana, we know Yana.
Y: I hope, for many, many reasons, but also for that small selfish reason, to go to Kharkiv. I'm sure that Kharkiv will go through tremendous rebirth. It will not negate in any way what is lost, the sense of solastalgia, the sense of tremendous loss of, first of all, lives and the fates of people that were supposed to go one way and then got so brutally changed. And the loss of cultural institutions and everything else that has been destroyed. But I expect that there will be a tremendous kind of good explosion of rebirth. I certainly hope to go there and witness it. You've really given me a sense of that I will have a connection to something [there].
O: Oh, you absolutely will.
Y: Thank you. That's a great gift.
O: Maybe you will feel at home.
Y: The part of me that right now is just frozen in limbo, maybe it will have a home there. I guess Kopilka as a whole is well known to people in Kharkiv as a community because [Kopilka] people are translating Kostinsky, and Blizniuk, and Yevsa[2]. Richard [Coombes] is now translating Kostinsky from the Ukrainian. In the midst of such destruction, it's almost like a new species [of living beings] is emerging, like after a meteorite strike.
O: Yes, it is.
[1]Surzhyk refers to a mixture between Ukrainian and Russian languages, used in certain regions of Ukraine and the neighboring regions of Russia and Moldova. The word historically referred to a mixture of different grains (such as wheat and rye) or the bread produced from such a blend.
[2] This is a partial list. Yana has also translated Oleg Ladyzhensky and Alena Maksakowa. Other Kopilka translators have translated these and, most likely, other Kharkiv poets.
Yana Kane (USA) is a member of Kopilka, an international poetry translation collective. Her translations appeared in Deep Vellum's 2025 Best Literary Translations anthology and are longlisted for their 2026 anthology. She won the 2024 RHINO Poetry Translation Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Gabo Prize. Her translation of Ukrainian poet Dmitry Blizniuk, My Fish Will Stay Alive, is forthcoming from Serving House Books.
She came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union. She holds a BSE from Princeton University, a PhD in Statistics from Cornell University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Yana is grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing her English-language texts.
Olga Zvyeryeva (Netherlands) was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She is a sociolinguist by training, holding a PhD in Germanic Languages from Kharkiv National University. She is the author of two poetry collections and has won awards at Ukrainian and international poetry festivals. Her poems have been published in anthologies and on platforms in Ukraine, Russia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Israel, and the United States. She is an editor of the literary platform Tochka Zreniya and a member of Kopilka, an international poetry translation group..