4/28/2023
Meet a writer on the street? That rarely happens to me in everyday life. But in Leipzig, during the book fair, the chances increase significantly.
Directly in front of the hotel entrance, I bump into Max Czollek, who has also just arrived and has to continue straight away, as his first event starts in an hour. Barely a hundred meters further on, as I walk to the tram stop, I think I recognize a Ukrainian author – until now I only knew her from Facebook. I don’t dare to speak to her, but I’m sure there will be more opportunities in the coming days.
Future Sound Of Ukraine
On the tram, I’m sure I won’t miss my stop because all the cosplayers with their elaborate costumes and colorful wigs sitting on the right, left and behind me also get off there. It’s not my first time at the Leipzig Book Fair, there was a time when I came here annually with my son. He was interested in comics, children’s books and robots, and I looked forward to the opportunity to see old friends again – for example the Munich record company Trikont or the publishing house Meridian Czernowitz.
When Trikont released my compilation “Borsh Division – Future Sound Of Ukraine” in 2016, I met Serhij Zhadan, who presented his new book in German translation at the fair, at the music label’s stand; we had a short but warm conversation with the two bosses, Achim Bergmann and Eva Mair-Holmes.
I wasn’t writing any books back then, and Meridian Czernowitz’s people were the only Ukrainians with their own stand. Today everything is different: Boris is no longer there, I’ve become an author, unfortunately Trikont is no longer there, and Ukraine has a great national estate. I definitely want to go there, but first I have to go to Hall 5. There I look up Ariella Verlag, which published “Richard Wagner und die Klezmerband” by me last year.
On the way there, I notice the cover of a book I see daily on my shelf at home: the German edition of The Journey of the Learned Doctor Leonardo by Mike Johansen, the great Ukrainian writer who wrote a hundred years ago in my hometown of Kharkiv lived. The book was published in Ukrainian as early as 1932, so it took almost ninety years for it to be published in Germany by Secession Verlag.
Mike Johansen will not be able to promote his novel at the fair, he fell victim to Stalinist repression in 1937 and was shot two days before his 42nd birthday. If he were here he would be very surprised, I think as I walk past the stalls decorated with posters with Lenin’s face on them. One of them announces a special May Day offer – a bottle of wine and Karl Marx’s Communist Party Manifesto for only ten euros.
At the “Taz” stand I can see Max Czollek’s sparkling baseball cap in the distance, his reading, to which he hurried earlier, draws a large audience. It’s really crowded, so I can hardly understand anything from my position. I move on – and a few meters further I come across the presentation of a book about the counterculture in Russia. The author says she had planned a trip to Russia, but then decided against it in February 2022. She says she met the protagonists of her book in Zoom.
Before the annexation of Crimea, before the start of the Russian war in Donbass, I was also occasionally interested in the Russian counterculture. I’m no longer interested at all because I don’t believe in their existence. If it did exist anyway, one would have to admit that it failed. Maybe this book is about that?
