The New York Literary Festival welcomed authors, journalists, musicians, and other artists from all over Ukraine. The festival continues a trend of cultural revival in the precariously situated city. Oh, and it now has a New Yorker magazine, too.
“You know, there are no absolutely safe places in the world – this is just an illusion that we humans sometimes cherish. There are just places where they will cover you or forgive you if something happens. This is called Home. In this sense, in New York I am at home. In both New Yorks,” author Viktoria Amelina told Channel 24, commenting on security concerns.
The local online magazine NewYorker.City points that the core group of the participants of the fest arrived by bus from Lviv across almost all of Ukraine to read lectures, carry out discussions, present their projects, perform songs, and hold exhibitions and competitions for two days on 2-3 October 2021.
New York of Donetsk
[boxright][/boxright]Ukraine’s New York: child of a tragic love story of European industrialists and Donbas
The town chosen as the location to hold the literary festival has a rich and rather tragic history. Unlike its overseas American metropolitan namesake, the Ukrainian town of New York is now home to only about 10,000 people and is administratively subordinated to the larger city of Toretsk.
It is believed that its unordinary name comes from German Mennonite settlers who had bought the settlement named Oleksandrivske in the mid 19th century from the authorities and by the end of the century formed their colony of New York from seven nearby settlements. However, local historians argue that the American-flavored naming had several mentions in documents dated back to the years before the Germans arrived.
The town flourished through its industry until Soviet rule was established in the region in the fall of 1917, which marked the imminent decline of Ukrainian New York.
With Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941, the last ethnic Germans who managed to endure the Soviet-induced perils of the 1920-1930s – – blanket seizures of properties and requisitions of food stocks of the war communism, collectivization, and industrialization years — were deported by the Soviet authorities to Kazakhstan to never return.
The Soviets feared that German-speaking locals would easily collaborate with the invading army. At least, the genocidal famine of the Holodomor didn’t hit the town hard in 1932-1933 as it was largely industrial with a large part of its population being not Ukrainian, while the Soviet authorities targeted chiefly rural Ukrainian communities.
New York’s “new city’s” past
The venue of the festival — the local House of Culture or the community center — was built in 1950 to host culture-related events for workers of local phenol-producing chemical-factory and their families.
The town still bore its original name of New York at the time, and it was not until a year later when the Soviet authorities amid the then-unfolding Soviet cold war against the US and the rest of the civilized world renamed the town, whose name sounded too American, as Novhorodske, which literally means “the new city’s.”
The town carried the made-up Soviet name for 70 years up until 2021, when the Ukrainian Parliament greenlit the proposal to restore the historical name of New York — something local activists strived for since at least 2016. Then, under the Decommunization Laws, many settlements in Ukraine got rid of the mentions of Soviet-regime leaders and celebrities in their names.
Being only a devised name, the toponym Novhorodske wasn’t related to any Soviet-celebrated personality, so it lingered for several more years since.
The festival
The first New York Literary Festival which promises to become an annual event took place only three months after the return of the town’s historic name. The subject of this year’s event was “Real names. Real stories.” Participants and visitors of the event were looking for the true history of Donetsk Oblast with its stories of European emigrants, entrepreneurs, farmers, dissidents, poets, and musicians.
The festival’s founder is author Victoria Amelina, whose husband is originally from New York, so the place for the festival wasn’t chosen by mere chance. Ms. Amelina said in her interview with NewYorker City that she got acquainted with the local community back in May, a month before the city got its historic name back as she and other future organizers of NLF met with local activists and authorities.
A number of celebrated Ukrainian cultural figures were reading lectures and holding discussions on various cultural issues, among whom were writers and poets — Victoria Amelina, Serhiy Zhadan, Olena Styazhkina, Tamara Orikha Zernya, Halyna Vdovychenko, Olha Herasimyuk — a well-known TV journalist who had published her debut book a couple of years ago, and several more authors. Video addresses came to the festival participants from several Ukrainian authors living abroad.
“New Yorkers are cool and open-minded. I heard them sing along ‘We are the Champions’ to the performance of the Colors Trio. They did applaud Olena Styazhkina, Halyna Kruk, Serhiy Zhadan, and others. And they asked whether the authors had their books for sale,” the festival’s organizer Viktoria Amelina shared her impressions with NewYorker.City.
“For some reason, I was afraid that New Yorkers might not like the brilliant jazz performance by Mark Tokar. I now want to apologize for this fear. Because everyone I talked to was delighted. So, jazz is there to stay in New York. People here have both style and taste — I promise never to doubt in them again. And how great high school students are in New York – all cities need such ones!” said Ms. Amelina.
Writer and historian Olena Styazhkina, the former lecturer of Donetsk National University who now works at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, gave a lecture “History of Donetsk: Lost or Stolen?” in which she argued about historical issues of the region.
Meanwhile, Olha Herasimyuk, during the discussion on local media and the launch of the NewYorker.City online magazine mentioned that as a student she had an internship at the newspaper Kocheharka in the now occupied Horlivka.
Various popular musicians gave their live performances and presented their video clips.
Head of Donetsk Oblast Military and Civil Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko welcomed the festival and noted that the return of the historic name to New York is a success story of many,
“The community, as well as local, regional, and state authorities, public activists, Parliament, and President, – all put their efforts to [make this happen]. In our joint effort, we are regaining what is ours. The settlement of New York in Donetsk Oblast is a living testimony that our region was formed as a European one. At some point, its history was stolen and distorted. But not destroyed,” Kyrylenko wrote on Facebook.
Further reading:
- Are Ukraine’s war weary pensioners lost and forgotten?
- Donbas on the brink of environmental catastrophe
- The rise and decline of Donbas
- Futurofolk opera to honor baritone who left Paris Opera for Ukraine war
- How the UNR Army liberated the Donbas in 1918
- Dreaming up a future for teens in war-torn Donbas
- How a girl from industrial Donbas went against the flow and became a camerawoman
- Ukraine’s First Lady partook in opening communist film festival in China
- State support for grassroots projects triggers tectonic changes in Ukrainian culture
- Donbas Lost Generation: a journey among the victims of the Russo-Ukrainian War
- Displaced art. The IZOLYATSIA art center, having fled occupied Donetsk, flourishes in Kyiv
