Austrian Josef Winkler is one of the most interesting contemporary European writers, a winner of numerous awards including the Grand Austrian State Prize and prestigious Georg Buechner Prize. He is an honorary professor of the University of Klagenfurt. His unique style seamlessly combines visually rich, sometimes even surrealistic images with authenticity of characters and situations, existential tension with apt irony.
Mr. Winkler came to Kyiv in order to present at the Book Arsenal his by far the most unusual book, the novel Die Verschleppung: Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzaehlt ihre russische Kindheit (Abduction: Njetotschka Iljaschenko tells about her Russian childhood), whose heroine is a Ukrainian woman deported to Austria in 1943 for forced labor. In fact, the novel has two authors, Josef Winkler and Valentyna Illiashenko, a girl from a Naddniprianshchyna village, whom the author gave a fragile and tender name Njetotschka. The writer simply presents, with minimum interference, the confession of Njetotschka-Valentyna about her initial 14 years of life in Soviet Ukraine, recollections about her mother and father, the terrible deportation night, about her first year of life in a Carinthian village, to which she had been brought as a servant, and in which she eventually stayed for the rest of her life, acquiring a new homeland. This is a piece of grand literature and at the same time an impressive document worth of tens of historical studies.
The Ukrainian edition of Die Verschleppung was published by the Krytyka Publishing House with a traditionally flawless quality. I would like to make a special mention of the bright, rich, and practically perfect translation performed by Nelia Vakhovska.
Within the framework of the book launch Mr.Winkler met with journalists and readers.
CRIMINAL LITERATURE
How did you start to write?
“I was born in the south of Austria, in the Duchy of Carinthia, in a small village with a population of 200. I grew up in a village yard, so I know the life of villagers. Moreover, it included the Catholic life, for I became a church lay brother at age 6. At that time the services were conducted twice a day. I put on scarlet clothes and assisted the priest. That is the reason why village, including Catholic, narrow-mindedness is the most frequent topic of my books. Already as a child I felt the need to work with language.”
Did the school help in this?
“I have attended school classes for eight years. When my friends or foes in school joked, their jokes were often sexist, aimed against women, and frankly speaking, I could not always join them in their fun. I only laughed when the joke contained a word play. Sometimes I liked a not very nice joke namely for this reason.
“Our teacher sent his sons to a gymnasium, but kept me and other village boys with him because he was organizing a higher level of education, so he needed pupils for this purpose. I did not enter either the higher level, or the gymnasium, but it was no mischief, as I had taken a strong interest in literature by that time. There was no library in our school, and when I asked my mother when she would give me money to buy a book, she replied that we, poor peasants, had got no money for this. At that time I got very upset. I knew I had to find a way out, so I used criminal methods: I started to steal the money from my parents. For three consecutive years, at the age of 15 to 17, already being a student of a commerce college, I kept stealing money from my father, who was not a very good manager of his finances. I would not be sitting here right now, hadn’t I bought those books for stolen money.”
For what books did you take this risk?
“At the age of 14 I started to read great European authors: Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Handke, and Peter Weiss. I remember quite well that I said to myself: ‘One day you will write a book, too.’ My father always stayed in the way, my mother did not have the vote, and a dumb servant was the third person in this triangle. In this triangle I was looking for my own language and I found it when I was reading this high literature. There were no books in my village, only huge prayer books, which made me sick back in the time I was a child. I did not read trivial literature either. Later I read in Eugene Green’s diaries that entertainment literature is written by devil. I think we will never find out what this type of literature has done to humanity.”
When did you start writing?
“I was reading all the time. I took no interest in studying. When you read so much, sooner or later you come to writing. I wrote my first novel when I was 26. It was published in Frankfurt in 1979. After that I wrote very quickly three more novels, which made the trilogy Das wilde Kaernten (Wild Carinthia). And Die Verschleppung was the fourth one.”
NJETOTSCHKA
How did you meet the heroine?
“While I was working on my third novel, I noticed I was stumbling over, I could not proceed in writing and I could not stay in the city anymore. Someone advised me to go to the mountains, find a house and finish the novel in complete calmness. So I packed up my 20-kilogram printing machine, my clothes, and went to Carinthia, to the region where I had grown up. In the mountain village, where I used to come in summer, I was going from door to door, asking whether anyone would house me for a while with full board and lodging. I was told that either they have rented the rooms out, or they simply did not house strangers. It was important for me to be able to look from that mountain at the valley where my native village was located. After all, I met a 14-15-year boy and asked him whether he knew where I could lodge. He brought me to his house, to his mother, and I told her I was writing novels and needed calm atmosphere, and I asked her whether I could lodge a room in her house. That was an accident, but a necessary one. Next day I moved to her house, in the room she was settled when she was brought to Austria in 1943.”
How did relationships between you develop?
“For the first few months I kept working on my third novel. Every evening I came downstairs to her kitchen for supper and almost every evening she was telling me about her Ukrainian childhood. I understand that for the first time in her life she found a listener she needed, in me. None of her four sons took interest in her story. He husband was a drunkard, unwilling to hear anything about Russia whatsoever. He felt frequently ashamed of being married to a Russian woman. Many deported Ukrainians or Russians, as we called them, were living in that village, and the general attitude was that we had lost the war because of them. So we talked secretly, when her husband was already asleep. She was telling me the stories from her life for the seven-eight months of our communication. At times she forgot that she had told me one or another story, and repeated it for several times. Owing to those repetitions I could check whether the stories were true. When I published the novel, her two sons said they could have written the same novel too, but they were not interested. But I don’t have any conflict with the family, so when I return to Carinthia, I’ll present them with the Ukrainian translation of the book: they already have a German-language edition.”
Did she speak a good German?
“I have never met an elderly village woman who, having spoken a different language for a considerable part of her life, spoke better German than she. Besides, retelling these stories, she learnt to tell them. Namely owing to the fact that she acquired such a good command of German, developing also the skill of a good narrator, I could write the book.”
When did you start writing about her?
“It was spring after I finished my third novel. Njetotschka went to town to work and I followed her with a dictaphone. She told me the story of the 14 years she spent in Ukraine and the first year in Carinthia in a chronological order in a matter of two-three weeks, in a burst on inspiration. I recorded it and then put it down on paper. A year passed and I had to leave. I packed up my things, two manuscripts, which I had written by that time and moved to my home village, to the village, to my parents’ place. My father was still managing the household, although he was already 75. While I was staying with my parents, I was already on the finishing line with my manuscript about Njetotschka. After I finished the manuscript I came back to her place, spent there two weeks, during which I read her the whole book aloud. She listened and made corrections, so she took a direct part in creation of the novel. In this way we completed it.
“While the novel was being prepared for print, two big newspapers published it in parts. On the eve of Christmas, I received author’s copies from the publishing house, brought them to Njetotschka and put them under the New Year’s tree. And she gave me the letters of her mother who had sent them from the USSR. The letters are dated 1957 to 1974, they are written in a simple, melancholic, and beautiful manner. Unfortunately, it was too late when I understood that they could have been published as an appendix under a single cover with the novel, but it can still be done in a different edition. Njetotschka was very proud that this novel was to be published, she said it was sheer truth.”
How did the book change her life?
“She became famous overnight. Two or three months after the publication I visited her again, but I did not recognize her. She was very pale with shadows under her eyes. I asked what was wrong with her. She said she was living like in a shroud. It turned out that since the publication of the book German journalists kept visiting her very often, which made fellow villagers hate her. Apparently they thought she was earning money on this. White Mercedes cars came, TV crews came out, they installed cameras, interviewed her, while co-villagers were passing by on their tractors and cast jealous looks at this Russian woman. Besides, the story of her first year in Carinthia included many episodes the village would like to forget. That was a really difficult period for her, but several years later people calmed down. After all, she lived till the age of 85, died two years ago, and was buried on the village cemetery. Njetotschka’s husband did not allow her to go to Ukraine to see her mother, and she did not dare come back as a guest. She probably felt the same way I did, because I wrote acutely critical books about myself and my village Catholic world, and my fellow villagers came to hate me like plague. But unlike me, who became a writer, she stayed in that village till the end of her life. She had experienced and suffered much more than me.”
Why did you choose this name for her?
“I knew Njetotschka was not a Ukrainian name. The name Valentyna is widely spread in German-language space, so I found it too ordinary for such a heroine. I was a very naive young man at that time, and Dostoevsky is a very important author for me, therefore I chose the name Njetotschka from his novel Njetotschka Nezvanova. Today I would have named her Valentyna, it is just simply at that time a formal mistake occurred. But when the fellow villagers began to feel envious and isolated her from the community, she said, ‘You know, this name is true, it is working. Njetotschka is nothing. Njet menia, I don’t exist. I am nothing.’ Thus it does become her, and it does not at the same time. (There is a name Ania and Neta is a village form of this name. Ukrainian villagers indeed used to call girls Njetotschkas.)”
What was the reaction of the press?
“Die Verschleppung was published in 1983 and a reviewer in the Carinthian Communist newspaper Will of People mentioned that the novel was ‘anti-Communist.’ Those people were idealists who followed their directly beliefs, without looking left or right. They knew nothing of the reality of socialism. Certainly, this book became a denial of ideology they had been blindly following. But that did not really touch me, because I had a distinct feeling that what Njetotschka had said was authentic. But the fact that the book has been translated into Ukrainian and published here is a special event for me: this story has returned to its country.”
Did you check the events with professional historians?
“This is an individual’s destiny and many stories do confirm it. But what can one use as groundwork if not an individual story? Actually, historians, who don’t see real people and sit in their secluded corners, writing something, pose no interest to me. I was naive, like entire Austria, and did not know a thing about that life. But namely owing to the fact that for a year I had an opportunity to listen to this woman who was telling the same stories many times, I did not have the need to use the help of professional historians who would check the authenticity of her stories.
“I was also lucky that 20 kilometers away from my village, in the town of Villach, where all deported people brought on trains were left, a deported Ukrainian priest Heorh Sydorenko, a well-educated person, was living. I gave him the manuscript before the publication and he said, ‘This is the story I have experienced. This is the truth.’ Millions of people can tell the same. In literature I am foremost interested in emotional, rather than historical truth. As a writer, I cannot start anything with a historical material. I am telling about different things in my forms of narration.”
Speaking of form, are you satisfied with the manner Die Verschleppung is written?
“Honestly, when I leaf through the book these days, sometimes the simplicity with which I wrote it is disturbing me. After my visit to Ukraine I might find inspiration to retell this story on my behalf, bringing it to a totally different level of linguistic art. But for me the authenticity of the story was very much important, so that I could read it for that woman and she really wanted to have this book.”
LANGUAGE
Apparently, your personal stories are very authentic. You have already mentioned about your conflict with your fellow villagers.
“In fact I don’t care whether they despise me for my books or not. I have lived in Berlin, Paris, and Rome. I have lost any kind of dependency of my birthplace. Some time later I wrote a couple books more and lost the language. So I came back to the village and people who disdained me.”
Why?
“I knew that only my father, whom I had so strongly resisted in my books, would be able to help me. And he helped my language to get back on its feet. It was very important to come back to the hell I had been able to free myself by writing my books and finding my language.”
What tasks do you set before you as a writer?
“In fact Die Verschleppung is the only book I’ve written based on the so-called authentic material. Out of respect to the experience of my heroine I forced myself to write as simply as possible. As for the books I write based on the material from my childhood, they are really more about the language, the word, the way story should be told.”
Can you say the main hero of your works is language?
“If you like, you are free to assert this. Namely out of this thinking I read the books of other authors, their masterfully written phrases. In such a way you learn from one book to another. For if you don’t learn, you have no sense in leaving in reality what you have described. Of course, after writing 15 books you come to understand that only a couple of them are truly yours, the most intimate ones, and you really created them on your own and you like them the most.”
NOTEBOOKS
In one of your novels there is an impressive phrase: “Existence is a piece of flesh.” You travel much. What experience of learning the world is the most important for you? The narration or physical sensations?
“I am no traveler to Ukraine, however, I am a professional traveler to India. For 20 years I have been traveling there on a regular basis and I have got 30 notebooks I’ve written there. For my writing, the way I experience it, I also need to see. It is not interesting for me when someone tells me about India. I need to go there myself, see it, and write everything down on spot. On the whole, I can think in images and pictures. In my books there are few sentences which do not embody any lingual or reality image. I am a very slow man. I am a person going along the streets very slowly and time after time making notes in a similarly slow way. I always need to have a notebook and a pen with me to write on spot what I see. As soon as I go out of an Indian hotel I can stop after making the first step and write everything down. I am interested in details, small, even petty details. Actually, this is the way I work.”
What kind of notes have you made here?
“Today, as we were strolling across Kyiv, we entered a small cafe. Before the cafe was served, I had written that coffee beans have been laid out on the cafe’s stairs. It is not important whether I liked it or not. Later I saw on the wall a big hourglass, and in the upper part of it there were beans of coffee instead of sand. A kind of antiquary kitsch. But as you know, kitsch is a very important thing in our life, whether we want to have it or not. I put down this phrase as well.
“Death is one of the topics of my creative work. It was terribly interesting for me to visit the Kyiv Cave Monastery. There can be no precise parallels, but it reminded me a bit of the catacombs of Capuchins in Palermo, it was rather an association. There are hundreds of mummies, dried bodies. But here it is somewhat calmer, not so macabre. Dead bodies do not attract one’s eye so much, they are covered with beautiful coverlets. I was not even able to write it down the same minute I felt it, because it was impossible to hold the candle, the pen, and the notebook at the same time. But the feeling of going hand to hand with many people, when everyone is holding a lit candle, has remained. This is the way I gather all petty details that get into my visual field and develop a story out of them.”
A SPECIAL OBSERVER
“German-language newspapers write that I am a special observer. I reply that I cannot observe better than others. Other people see what I see. The thing is that I put down everything I notice and pin it to the reality. What I put down remains in me. Even if the notebook lies for 10 years and I never come back to it, when I open it, I return to the state of staying in that moment and that place up to recalling precisely what smell I was feeling. This is my method and this is how I live.”
