Despite a long and complex history, Ukraine essentially became a new country in the years following its independence. It began to find its feet in the post-communist world much as an adolescent must when plunged into adulthood. This was a time of socio-economic growing pains. It is no coincidence, then, that Artem Chekh, one of Ukraine’s most prominent novelists (and a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine), has chosen a teenage protagonist in this provocative and moving exploration of his country’s coming of age.
Translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, Chekh’s portrait of Ukraine in the 1990s is unflinching. It is a place of alcoholism, violence and poverty. Yet Rock, Paper, Grenade is not without joy. “Those were times of innocence,” he writes, “Timofiy’s consciousness was captured by bright images and alluring scents. Around him, families were falling apart, the country was crumbling . . . Living on hope became the norm.” Timofiy’s childhood becomes at once more interesting and more troubled with the arrival of his grandmother’s new boyfriend, Felix, a veteran of the Soviet Union’s colonial war in Afghanistan who struggles with PTSD and alcoholism.
On the surface, Felix is not a pleasant man: in an early encounter, he spectacularly soils himself in the bathroom during a binge, leaving his new partner exasperated and his new grandson revolted. Yet, somehow, an oddly touching relationship develops. They walk the city, get into fights, sell Felix’s gun to mobsters, meet up with old comrades and get drunk on the sun-drenched banks of the Dnipro. When the boy gets entangled in his first relationships — episodes that Chekh handles with a disarming blend of warmth and bathos — Felix is there to offer useless advice.
There is a darker side to the friendship, too, and here Chekh’s writing is at its most poignant and most disturbing. Growing up, he shows us, means learning you will encounter cruelty and be cruel yourself. Timofiy reflects on childhood innocence — “your power over it is absolute, and it is up to you to decide whether to let it go or tear off its legs and wings”. At times he clings to innocence, but he increasingly opts for the latter approach, including with Felix, whose fits of drunken trauma he deliberately exacerbates with accusations about the old soldier’s murky past: “How deeply can you stick your finger into this wound? . . . What is a shell-shocked man capable of in his nightmares?”. “To hell with this war!” Felix shrieks, exhausted by the provocations, before descending into tears.
The original Ukrainian title of the novel translates as “who do you think you are?” — the central problem of any Bildungsroman. In the novel, the phrase belongs to Felix and is addressed, in moments of drunken frustration, to his new grandson. But Timofiy never answers. He leaves his provincial hometown to study in Kyiv. When he returns, he is estranged from the place, just as an adult is estranged from childhood. Felix barely recognises him during their last encounter. The old man’s daughter, mistakenly believing that Timofiy bought her father vodka, yells “who are you?” at him.
Chekh does not provide neat answers to this question, nor for his small-town protagonist or his country. But with a new generation plunged into the trauma of war, the question will only become more important. Russia’s invasion has created millions of individual traumas within a collective grief. When the war ends, society might move on but individual pain will remain. A boy who has not fought and a man who has will look at one another and wonder who the other is. The cross-generational friendship that Chekh portrays here is fleeting and dysfunctional, yet it shows that empathy is possible.
Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum Seven Stories Press £14.99, 208 pages
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