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WORK TITLE: Black Square
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.sophiepinkham.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://slavic.columbia.edu/people/profile/1462 * http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Black-Square/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.A. (regional studies), M.A. (Slavic languages and literatures), M.Phil.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Columbia University, New York, NY, faculty. Also co-producer of the documentary, Balka: Women, Drugs, and HIV in Ukraine.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, New York Times, n+1, London Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs.
SIDELIGHTS
Sophie Pinkham’s first book, Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine combines memoir and cultural analysis to present a portrait of the contemporary Ukraine. As Ukraine attempted to escape the imposition of Russia, Pinkham was working in harm reduction in both countries, and she witnessed growing civil unrest. The Maiden protests erupted shortly after Pinkham left Ukraine, and she relies on the reports of friends to portray the violence that occurred in her absence. In this manner, Pinkham draws on eyewitness accounts, often taken from others, but just as often her own. Pinkham writes of her experience of Ukraine as an outsider, a Westerner with different ideals than those who live there. Yet, she also turns to the opinions of the artists and musicians she befriended while working there. Their insights about the devastation in their own country are entirely personal.
Praising the volume in Kirkus Reviews, a critic stated that Pinkham presents “a graceful mix of personal memoir and political research.” The result is “first-rate reporting, research, and writing in a debut that will make readers care as much as the author does.” Zebulin Evelhoch, writing in Library Journal, was also impressed, asserting that “the discussion of the Maiden protests will draw in everyone from casual readers to news junkies and beyond.” While New York Times Online correspondent Andrew Meier felt that “Pinkham has an eye for the elegiac, and captures the grim pall of the Ukrainian hinterlands,” he also felt that, “too often, the metaphors are left unpacked, and evocative questions unanswered. A glibness, too, can crop up.” Still, Meier stated that “Pinkham captures the kinetic turmoil — the fear, violence, blood lust — made visceral by live feeds from helmet cameras and dashcam video,” and she also “conveys a hard-earned truth: Ukraine’s victims of substance abuse and civil war inhabit common ground, perhaps too much of it.”
In the words of Natalia Antonova on the openDemocracy website, “Pinkham’s approach both humanises and demystifies Ukraine, but there is one mystery in the narrative that’s constantly present, and that’s Pinkham herself. To quote Zelda Fitzgerald, ‘You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone.’ A careful, conscientious observer does well to blend into the scenery, but Pinkham is the kind of narrator who inevitably leaves you wanting more personal details and observations.” Nevertheless, she added: “For now, Black Square emerges as essential reading for anyone who cares about Ukraine, anyone who’s wondering if they should care about Ukraine, and anyone who happens to like nonfiction narratives told in a human voice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine.
Library Journal, September 1, 2016, Evelhoch, Zebulin, review of Black Square.
ONLINE
Columbia University, Department of Slavic Languages Website, http://slavic.columbia.edu/ (July 20, 2017), author profile.
Culture Trip, https://theculturetrip.com/ (February 14, 2017), review of Black Square.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (November 25, 2016), Andrew Meier, review of Black Square.
openDemocracy, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ (September 21, 2016), Natalia Antonova, review of Black Square.
Sophie Pinkham Website, http://www.sophiepinkham.com (July 20, 2017).*
Sophie Pinkham’s writing on Russia and Ukraine has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, n+1, the London Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. She lives in New York.
Sophie Charlotte Pinkham
Biography
Areas of interest:
-The Pushkin cult (especially in its later iterations)
-Writer cults and nationalism
-Poetics and politics of censorship (mainly in the Soviet and post-Soviet period)
-The Soviet avant-garde
-Politics and pop culture, especially music
-Ukrainian politics and culture
Education:
-MPhil and MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University
-MA in Regional Studies--Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe, Harriman Institute, Columbia University
-BA in English, Yale University, magna cum laude with distinction in the major
Languages: Russian, French; basic Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Ukrainian
Dissertation: "Sanctuaries, Strolls, and Slander: The Pushkin Myth after the Thaw"
MA Thesis: "Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair" (Spring 2014)
Publications:
Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, W.W. Norton, 2016.
Essays and book reviews on Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics for Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, n+1, The Sixties, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, BOMB.
"Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair," Ulbandus 17, 2016.
"Making Deals in the Paradise of Thieves: Leonid Utesov, Arkadii Severnyi, and blatnaia pesnia," Ulbandus 16, 2014.
Conference Presentations:
"Hybrid genres, Balkan balagan, and post-Soviet reunion in a Ukrainian band," at Columbia conference "Utopias and Dystopias in Music and Media of East Central Europe Circum 1989," May 2014.
"Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair," at Columbia-Princeton graduate student conference, April 2014.
Courses Taught: Censorship After the Thaw RUSSV3305 (instructor), First-Year Russian (instructor), Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the English Novel, RUSSW4011 (teaching assistant),
I am a writer specializing in Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics. My book BLACK SQUARE: ADVENTURES IN POST-SOVIET UKRAINE is out with Norton (US) and Heinemann (UK). Hear me discuss it with WNYC's John Hockenberry here. You can read excerpts about Crimean Crusoes in n+1, the early days of Ukraine's Maidan revolution on Lithub, and post-revolutionary Maidan in Dissent. And here I am on C-SPAN talking about BLACK SQUARE, fake news, and the post-Trump world order.
My articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Nation, n+1, and The Paris Review, among other places. Topics include revolutionaries, oligarchs, and graphomaniacs; Tolstoy's wife's revenge; an afternoon with a Cossack bear trainer; and the history of the show trial.
Make me very happy by ordering BLACK SQUARE online. Make me truly ecstatic by buying it in an independent bookstore.
Balka: Women, Drugs, and HIV in Ukraine, a short documentary I made with Anya Meksin and Leeza Meksin, is available on YouTube.
Information about my academic work is here.
Sophie Pinkham: BLACK SQUARE
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Sophie Pinkham BLACK SQUARE Norton (Adult Nonfiction) 26.95 ISBN: 978-0-393-24797-8
A journalists first book, a graceful mix of personal memoir and political research, illuminates the complexities of Ukraine culture.The political upheavals of post-Soviet Ukraine can confound and confuse even Ukrainians, so its quite an achievement for Pinkham to untangle these strands with such style and insight. Whether through happenstance or fate, she found her idealism and longing for adventure paired with a beginners study of the Russian language and a fascination with the country and surrounding region. She served as a Red Cross volunteer in Siberia before graduate school and subsequently made a series of visits to Ukraine, working on an oral history project and helping with resources for HIV/AIDS, an epidemic in a country where hard drugs and shared needles were rampant. Pinkhams experiences with that countrys equivalents of punk rockers and communal hippies would be engaging enough on their own, but her account of how an initially nonviolent protest in the town square of Kiev turned deadly over a three-month span provides a perspective at odds with the black-and-white account one was more likely to read in Western mediaother than the articles she published in the likes of the New Yorker and the New York Times, which became the foundation of this book. Cold warriors lurched up out of their coffins, yelling about freedom, democracy, and the right side of history, she writes, while refusing to succumb to oversimplification about freedom-loving insurgents (who might also be homophobic, misogynist and anti-Semitic) or oppressive Russia (who may well have been conducting campaigns of false information). It was difficult to tell which of many sides were to blame when Molotov cocktails were flying from different directions, and nobody could figure out whose side the deadly snipers were killing for. Pinkham humanizes the people she met and befriended, and she recognizes that, if anything, a protest that led to warlike conditions has left the future even murkier than before. First-rate reporting, research, and writing in a debut that will make readers care as much as the author does.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sophie Pinkham: BLACK SQUARE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181806&it=r&asid=881fb08f79e0b6059fb69befa7d5c227. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181806
Pinkham, Sophie. Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine
Zebulin Evelhoch
141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p129.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Pinkham, Sophie. Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Norton. Nov. 2016. 320p. ISBN 9780393247978. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393247985. TRAV
Columbia University grad student Pinkham's title is part memoir and part thoughtful analysis of Ukraine's current crisis that curiously begins and ends in Russia. The author attempts to combine the two divergent sections at the start, but the book's heart covers the recent Maiden protests and tragic aftermath. The first section concentrates on Pinkham's accounts of harm reduction work as a Westerner traveling in Russia and Ukraine. While she's enamored with the country, she also begrudges its lack of Western ways and ideals. Once the focus turns to the recent uprisings and ensuing change of power, a more thorough investigation examines the faults, excesses, and accomplishments on both sides. Even then, the narrative remains centered on a specific subset of the population--artists, musicians, friends--and though not a wide cross section of society, their viewpoints are incredibly diverse and well depicted in both current and historical context. VERDICT The two sections will draw different readers. The first half will hold those interested in travel, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), and a glimpse at their oft-ignored underbelly while the discussion of the Maiden protests will draw in everyone from casual readers to news junkies and beyond.--Zebulin Evelhoch, Central Washington Univ. Lib., Ellensburg, WA
Evelhoch, Zebulin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Evelhoch, Zebulin. "Pinkham, Sophie. Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 129. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044964&it=r&asid=9fa98368b1cd63c7ac45c6b40ae8e67b. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462044964
A 20-Something American Falls in Love With Ukraine
By ANDREW MEIERNOV. 25, 2016
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BLACK SQUARE
Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine
By Sophie Pinkham
288 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
In the decades since the Soviet fall, Ukraine has vexed many — most of all, its own people. A vast borderland at the crossroads of Europe, it was hailed a nation reborn, only to reveal an inexorable weakness — fear of its Big Brother to the north and an inability to escape it. The country has moved forward (and backward) not by design but in tumult. Yet in the heady winter of 2014, a change seemed to arrive: People power swelled in Kiev and toppled a corrupt regime. Vladimir Putin, of course, cut the party short. After the occupation of Crimea came civil war, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the rise of the Donetsk People’s Republic — an unraveling that has led to a return to the vitriol of the Cold War.
Against this backdrop comes Sophie Pinkham’s “Black Square,” billed as a portrait of Ukraine “under the shadow of Putin.” If Kiev was at war, Pinkham writes, the battle was over “Europe,” which was a metaphor. “Europe meant freedom, fairness and transparency. . . . It meant an escape from the past, an alternate reality in which Ukraine was never subjugated by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union but instead became a ‘normal’ European country like Germany or France.” Pinkham, who first visited Kiev in 2007, a few years out of Yale, for “a workshop I’d organized on health problems for women drug users,” seems to have written two books: one, a memoir of her time in the “harm reduction” world, the other, a chronicle of the recent turmoil.
Not until the midpoint of this volume do readers arrive at the Ukraine of the headlines, with the protests that began in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square — the Black Square of the title. Until then, readers may feel what they have in their hands is an affecting exposé of the nonprofit, do-gooder orbit. Pinkham, whose travels span seven years, offers backstage glimpses that bite: “I was just another girl in a cubicle, doing the usual two years before leaving for graduate school, the standard trajectory for administrative assistants at O.S.I.” — George Soros’s Open Society Institute. “I had the feeling that I was a mass-produced good. My row of cubicles was almost entirely female, dark-haired and petite. We all wore colorful pashmina shawls to protect us against the air-conditioning, and we got our periods at the same time.”
Pinkham has an eye for the elegiac, and captures the grim pall of the Ukrainian hinterlands: “There were balconies without railings, windows without glass, doorways without doors.” “There were a couple of lonely bus stops, and I wondered what sort of people waited at them: Were they living in huts, in the forests?” Yet too often, the metaphors are left unpacked, and evocative questions unanswered.
A glibness, too, can crop up. Pinkham dispenses with the natural-gas wars that have dominated Russo-Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet era in a half-paragraph — and, within it, glosses the Holodomor, the murder of untold millions of Ukrainians during the collectivization of the 1930s. What’s more, the prose occasionally suffers from an academic tilt (“folklore” is “employed . . . as a signifier of its post-Soviet identity”) and betrays a reliance on facile physical descriptions (subjects are “cute,” “pretty,” “gorgeous,” “beautiful,” “very beautiful,” “angelically beautiful”). The generalizations can also sweep wildly: “People in Belgorod seemed to devote most of their energy to interior decoration and child rearing.”
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Oddly, the drama that Pinkham did not witness, the months of protest and the crackdown that followed, makes up the more vivid narrative. Writing from afar (by then, she is a graduate student in Slavic studies in New York), Pinkham captures the kinetic turmoil — the fear, violence, blood lust — made visceral by live feeds from helmet cameras and dashcam video. She does not shy from the questions that swirled in the wake of Maidan. “Who were the mysterious snipers on the rooftops?” she asks. Yet here as elsewhere, she settles for ambiguity: “Some evidence suggested that there had been antigovernment as well as government snipers.”
An annotated scholarly bibliography runs seven pages, but her best sources are Twitter, Facebook, Skype, blogs and emails, which offer a poignant immediacy to the revolution’s actors. Her friend “Julia Y.” writes of the Maidan: “After being there your clothes, hair and skin smell of fire, the smell you remember from childhood — just plain burning wood.” Two years on, Laima, a “lesbian activist,” says of the square, “It’s like a corpse — the body is there, but the soul is gone.”
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In the end, Pinkham’s two narratives blend into one. “Many of the separatists I saw in pictures and videos looked familiar,” she writes. “These were the same sullen, sunken-eyed young men I’d encountered at harm reduction centers. . . . But now they had guns; now they were heroes.” In such moments, she conveys a hard-earned truth: Ukraine’s victims of substance abuse and civil war inhabit common ground, perhaps too much of it.
Andrew Meier, the author of “Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall,” is working on a biography of Robert M. Morgenthau and four generations of his family.
Quiet American: Sophie Pinkham in Ukraine
Natalia Antonova 21 September 2016
Black Square is essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the instability on the edge of Europe — with a dizzyingly colourful cast of characters who never come across like clichés.
Kyiv, March 2014: Sophie Pinkham's new book on Ukraine retells the events of the past three years from the ground up. CC BY-ND 2.0 streetwrk / Flickr. Some rights reserved. Sophie Pinkham’s Black Square starts out seeming like a slow and leisurely book — until it causes you to have a crying fit in a fast food place selling chebureki at 1am.
That isn’t to say that the book, which interweaves analysis of modern history with intimate portraits of contemporary Ukrainians (and some Russians), ups the drama quotient halfway through. Pinkham’s calm, wry tone stays consistent throughout, even while she describes Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and the war in the east of the country that erupted later that year.
There is a saying in Russian, “It is the quiet depths that hold the devils.” As a writer, Pinkham, who first came to the post-Soviet world as a Red Cross volunteer and went on to write about the region for the New York Times and the London Review of Books, illustrates this saying well.
The “quiet depths” here are the casual stories featuring everyone from musicians who sleep on the floor in Pinkham’s apartment to earnest and not-so-earnest harm reduction NGO workers. From this mosaic of lives a disturbing portrait of Ukraine’s political and social fracturing eventually emerges.
It’s not just lands that are contested in Ukraine nowadays. Take the fact that Pinkham spells the Ukrainian capital’s name as “Kiev”, the more commonly accepted and Russian-sounding spelling, whereas this publication’s style guide demands the Ukrainian-sounding “Kyiv”. As a native of the city, I tend to use both spellings interchangeably and get angry when anyone tells me to stick to one version.
War and politics, however, dictate that such choices are no longer neutral — a shame for those of us who, like Pinkham, remember a more peaceful and occasionally even hopeful time.
Pinkham explains competing historical narratives and clashing interests that have factored into Ukraine’s current predicaments: dependence on foreign money, the loss of Crimea and a shadow war
In a manner that seems effortless but involves a lot of research, Pinkham explains competing historical narratives and clashing interests that have factored into Ukraine’s current predicaments: dependence on foreign money, the loss of Crimea and a shadow war with rebels and Russian volunteers and regulars in the east of the country.
One of her important observations is made on a trip to Rakhiv, a town located between the beautiful mountains of western Ukraine: “Many of its inhabitants spoke three or more languages,” Pinkham writes of Rakhiv. “Its small population was Ukrainian, Hungrarian, Romanian, Russian, Hutsul, Rusyn… In the mountain air Ukrainianness became particularly fragile, crumbling at the touch.”
As Pinkham reminds us, national identity is a relatively new invention, and “largely the product of nineteenth-century nationalist movements that created ‘imagined communities,’ a sense of blood relation between people who had never met and who had dramatically different ways of life.”
Still, it was the last line about fragility that made me cry as I was eating my chebureki (a food Pinkham describes as “large dumplings”), in case you are wondering.
Like many people born in Ukraine, and in a family of competing identities, I am intimately aware of the fragility of Ukrainianness. The fact that current instability might mean that Ukraine as a concept could be “disappeared” keeps me up at night.
Many factors conspire against modern Ukraine – Pinkham cites everything from a lack of effective governance to how the steppe (which played a crucial role in the thirteenth century sacking of Kyiv) now serves as the home for Russia-backed breakaway “republics,” like an ancient curse roaring back again.
Of course, Pinkham doesn’t use phrases like “ancient curse.” In fact, one of the book’s greatest virtues is its frequent hilariousness.
“The cold-water tap still didn’t work, the babushka next door was still insane,” Pinkham writes of her old apartment in the Ukrainian capital.
“One of the great moments of the Pushkin Klezmer Band was when, with Seryozha the Gypsy, they performed the song ‘Tutti-Frutti’ at a Jewish-Muslim friendship conference in Kiev (Don’t ask me why they were having a Jewish-Muslims friendship conference in Kiev.),” she writes in one of her typical observations of Ukraine’s beautifully weird music scene.
“The last Jew in Stalindorf was lying in bed in his underwear. He wore thick bifocals and looked grumpy”
Even a trip to a village that was the site of a horrifying WWII-era massacre has a passage that is bound to make you laugh out loud: “The last Jew in Stalindorf was lying in bed in his underwear. He wore thick bifocals and looked grumpy.”
The lack of drama makes the tragedies contained in Black Square all of the more obvious.
The rising tide of violence in Ukraine and what Pinkham describes as Moscow's “bloodthirsty and cheerful” attitude to it are two tragedies that have now become intertwined. This is a book about Ukraine that’s bookended by two sections about grim realities in Russia, and it’s easy to see why Pinkham made the choice to tell the story this way.
The two countries are linked by history and colonial aggression – as well as by millions of people who have families and friends on both sides of the border and are now being twisted this way and that.
It’s a credit to Pinkham that she tells the story of a region through ordinary people – not politicians, not famous dissidents, not oligarchs, not journalists, not anyone you normally hear from, basically. This becomes especially important in how Pinkham approaches Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, which she relates through the eyes of regular participants, and neither romanticizes nor demonises.
Pinkham’s approach to the ensuing war in the Donbas is equally cool and even-handed – and equally prioritises narratives of ordinary people caught up in big events.
“Sveta looked anxious and happy, her eyes open as fresh wounds,” Pinkham writes of a refugee from the war in the Donbas, part of a group of people who have been demonised as pro-Russian collaborators and/or stupid thugs.
“To many, the draft seemed like a form of human sacrifice,” Pinkham writes about young Ukrainian men eager to escape going to a war that nobody can call a war.
Pinkham’s approach both humanises and demystifies Ukraine, but there is one mystery in the narrative that’s constantly present, and that’s Pinkham herself. To quote Zelda Fitzgerald, “You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone.” A careful, conscientious observer does well to blend into the scenery, but Pinkham is the kind of narrator who inevitably leaves you wanting more personal details and observations.
Did Pinkham think she was going to die when she flew on a rickety, old plane to Irkutsk? Why did Pinkham and the golden-haired guitarist named Kotik (literally: Little Cat) break up? Are the musician Topor and Pinkham still friends even though he accused her of writing her book to make money from Ukraine’s suffering one time?
Throughout the book, Pinkham stresses her status as an American outsider, “an improvident alien”
Throughout the book, Pinkham stresses her status as an American outsider, “an improvident alien,” a person behind a barrier — behind which there is, presumably, the American life she doesn’t really speak of, there is normalcy, and what she describes as her status as a “respectable, educated person.” On the other side, there are naked rastas, stars falling over the sea, heroin addicts, and being the potential subject of a Roma bridenapping.
Is the barrier the function of national identity, does it go deeper, or is it more of a storytelling device? Has the barrier grown thicker or thinner over the long years she has spent in this part of the world? These lingering questions are my unsubtle way of demanding a companion volume, of course.
For now, Black Square emerges as essential reading for anyone who cares about Ukraine, anyone who’s wondering if they should care about Ukraine, and anyone who happens to like nonfiction narratives told in a human voice.
Sophie Pinkham’s Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine was published by WW Norton in August 2016.
'Black Square' Offers an Intimate and Genuine Portrait of Post-Soviet Ukraine
Michael Barron
US Literary Editor
Updated: 14 February 2017
In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution next year, Culture Trip will be showcasing a number of works tied to the events that led to the creation and dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as its enduring influence. This week we look at American writer Sophie Pinkham’s debut Black Square, which highlights her personal relationship with a country caught in the flux of modernity and political upheaval.
Cover courtesy of W.W. Norton
Cover courtesy of W.W. Norton
On Christmas Day, December 25, 1991, the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned as the Secretary of the Soviet Party and officially dissolved the Soviet Union. In his resignation speech, Gorbachev noted: “I have firmly stood for independence, self-rule of nations, for the sovereignty of the republics, but at the same time for preservation of the union state, the unity of the country. Events went a different way.”
Gorbachev was referring to the instability and conflicts that had rocked the Union in its last years. “The old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin working, and the crisis in the society became even more acute,” he said. “Many things could have been done better, but I am convinced that sooner or later our common efforts will bear fruit, our nations will live in a prosperous and democratic society.” A few days later, George H.W. Bush would formally acknowledge the newly formed Russian Republic as well as the 11 nations that were now independent of its rule. Among them was the Ukraine, a country with a rich history and culture that had all been made indistinct under the sickle and hammer.
Now, nearly 25 years after the collapse of the U.S.S.R, the Ukraine’s reclamation of its identity lies at the heart of writer and scholar Sophie Pinkham’s engrossing debut Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. The title is taken after the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich’s iconic and eponymous painting, which depicts a single geometric block totally absent of light. “For Malevich,” writes Pinkham, “Black Square represented the end of time, the culmination of history…for him, truth began at zero.” Its relevance rings for true for the Soviet Union. After its collapse, time had reset to zero for these former states, once independent, then dependent, only to find themselves at a loss in freedom. In the ensuing years, Pinkham notes how these states “struggled to establish their places in the world, to define their identities,” having been “forced to reinvent and rebuild yet again.”
Black Square spans Pinkham’s experiences of the Ukraine from 2004-2005 to around 2014. Though written as personal narrative, the book is divided into four distinct parts that allow Pinkham to pivot her focus: the HIV-Crisis rampaging throughout the post-Soviet states, a portrait of Ukraine and the diversity of its people, its conflict with Russia, and that conflict’s aftermath.
Pinkham recounts how the region experienced one of the world’s highest spikes in drug use soon after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. She begins not in the Ukraine, but nearly 4,000 miles away in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. Sent by a Red Cross exchange program, Pinkham discovers an underfunded HIV-clinic that is staffed by ignorant doctors and unprincipled administrators. Only the outreach workers, “poor, HIV-positive former drug users themselves,” provide any worthwhile assistance.
Photo © Deborah Feingold
Photo © Deborah Feingold
There is a delicate shift in the book’s subjectivity when Pinkham, attending a palliative care conference in Budapest, meets a tall and gaunt Ukrainian man named Alik. Though a doctor by trade, Alik himself struggled with drug abuse, but he impresses Pinkham by dismissing the state’s current outreach efforts as a joke. After she wins a Fulbright to study the HIV-crisis in the Ukraine, it is Alik who plays a key role in introducing her to the bohemians of Kiev. It is this turn of events that allow Pinkham to enmesh herself in its community and participate in the events that will endanger its identity.
Pinkham has a gift for bringing the people she encounters into colorful focus: batty artists and idealist musicians; Crimean hippies and political activists; Ukrainian nationalists and non-Ukrainian Ukrainians. She accompanies a friend to a small town home to several ethnic groups, including Hutsuls and Rusyns (not to be confused with Russians) that is “sometimes, but not always, considered a subethnicity of Ukrainians”. Under a statue of a Hutsel in the town is a plaque that reads: “We know who we are.”
Through them, Pinkham provides a portrayal of the tug-of-war of what it means to be Ukrainian, where its language is source of pride, and its nationalism is a source of capriciousness. During the Maidan revolution, Pinkham once again steps into a more journalistic role, interviewing friends and participants alike, and deftly showing the complexity of the clash: “I’m against Maidan,” says her friend Topor, a musician. “Why should I die for a nationalist idea.” Only a couple of paragraphs later he flips: “But on the other hand,” he says, “I’m for Maidan! Now the police are afraid of the people.”
By the end of Black Square, Pinkham has undergone a chameleonic change. Even as the events of the conflict settle, she has not just the perspicacity but the ability to get a read on Ukraine’s future through a wide-range of people. In this, she follows in the footsteps of Svetlana Alexievich. But by allowing herself into the story, Pinkham adds a layer of intimacy to Black Square—humility.
BLACK SQUARE: ADVENTURES IN POST-SOVIET UKRAINE
by Sophie Pinkham
W.W. Norton (US) | William Heinemann (UK)
304 pp. | $26.95 | £20.00