VY: This is a very big and good question. And there is no response to this.

So in Ukraine we have a big debate. How far can literature go in talking about suffering of other people? How far can art go? I think there is no answer. How far can photography go? There is no answer to that.

Because if you don’t speak about that, that means all these things, all these horrible things or maybe beautiful things, go into oblivion. And this is what happened many times in Ukrainian history. But if we speak about that, if we relieve that, if we relieve suffering of other people, we are intruding in their lives, we are intruding in their privacy, in the intimacy of suffering or mourning, of d’oeil, as the French say.

So it’s always a question. And I think every artist will decide, and every journalist and every reporter needs to really decide on himself. And it’s a very, very, very difficult decision.

You evoke an afterlife of those who have lost everything. Is this a new existential condition?

VY: Yeah, I do think. It’s a concept that we borrow from a poetry of Yaryna Chornohus. And we apply this concept to the life of a man who lost seven members of his family after one airstrike in just one second.

And I think, indeed, many people in Ukraine, those who lost their beloved ones, those who lost their homes, those who lost part of their bodies, their health, we cannot describe their life in usual terms. And we cannot apply our usual concepts like happiness or pleasure or joy or comfort to them. They need to be addressed with a completely different set of concepts.

And only they can develop these concepts. Not therapists, not other people, not their friends, only they are able to do that. Because again, these concepts or metaphors will be very intimate.

And therefore, we say that the literature from the soldiers, the military literature is very, very important, because it’s a completely other and different set of feeling and experience.

Is Ukraine’s struggle mainly geopolitical, or does it carry a deeper philosophical meaning about freedom?

VY: Of course, it’s geopolitical.

And of course, it carries a deeper philosophical meaning about freedom. And I use the concept of freedom despite, meaning that there is this idea of freedom from and freedom to, which basically defines where to go, the direction of going. Freedom from says, we should go away from external obstacles.

We should go to ourselves. And freedom to says, no, we should go. It’s not enough to go towards ourselves from external obstacles.

It’s important to go from ourselves to something else, to some values that we want to implement. But freedom despite is not about this. Freedom despite can be both freedom from and freedom to.

But freedom despite tells you that wherever direction you choose, it’s a direction in which you need to overcome obstacles. And in our part of the world, in our geography, these obstacles are very, very strong. And basically, freedom is also about overcoming them.

Freedom is also about training the muscles to overcome these obstacles. So this is a big question about freedom and security or safety. Do we need safety to be free? Do we need the absolute security to be free? One of the schools will tell us, yes, we need to do that because otherwise we will not develop all our capacities.

Another school, which is mine, says, well, probably yes, but there is another part of the coin is that if you don’t have obstacles, the real obstacles of life, you will not train the muscle of freedom. And therefore the freedom that you will develop will probably be nice and rich and extensive and multiple, but it will not have enough muscles to implement it. It will not have enough muscles even to defend it when it’s needed.

So freedom, despite, is freedom where it is opposing not only obstacles, but also the idea that the freedom here is impossible. And this is what Ukrainians are trying to achieve. Russians are saying, you are not existing, you are impossible, there are no conditions for you to exist, you are not a nation, you don’t have a culture.

And against this imposed impossibility that we develop our freedom.

VY: Yes, it is, because it teaches us not only to believe in something, but to be that something. And I think this is very important because the problem of safe worlds, secure worlds, is that it turns into the discourse struggles.

So the concept of discourse, of course, very important for the 20th century, is an important concept. It tells you basically that our speech is a reality in itself. And what’s happening in our speech, and socially, politically, is important.

And therefore you can have the forms of power struggles, identity struggles in the speech itself. Well, it’s good, it’s okay, but sometimes we have the impression that in the safe world it turned into a game of discourses. Like as if people are completely like, the discourse exists by itself and has no connection to life, no connection to reality.

So it’s a fight of ideologies. And we can see that it’s not, because it always produces some reality, it always produces some violence. So discourse does not exist externally.

And therefore, I do think that it’s important not only to say something, but to live according to your convictions. And I think this is also what Lisière means.

We had many conversations, internal conversations. I’ve read his book Kolkhoz. I think it shows his deep transformation from a very pro-Russian family and from a very pro-Russian mother to kind of a more critical point of Russia.

Of course, on the part of Ukrainians, from the view of Ukrainians, maybe this critical attitude to Russians is not full. But it’s up to Carrère to decide what are the limits. I haven’t watched the Mage du Kremlin yet.

What I’ve heard shows that I might be skeptical about the film, but I haven’t watched the film yet. I think Kolkhoz is about this deep transformation and the controversy of this transformation because he loves his mother, but at the same time, he’s appalled by her views, sometimes very pro-Russian and very pro-Kremlin. And then the death of a mother, of course, brings to the forefront all this internal contradiction.

So maybe it’s again about this contradiction that always produces tragedy, as we discussed. Yeah, I think this is it.

*Dec 16, 2022 VY Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #199

*Feb 15, 2024, VY Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #239

*Feb 26, 2025 VY Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #266

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