“More out of books than out of real life” - Lily Hyde

This quote, from Russian Menshevik Lydia Dan, is one of the epigraphs to my work in progress (one of them), a novel about Russian and Ukrainian revolutionaries.

Lydia Dan, a nice girl from a nice upper middle class family of Russian Jewish intellectuals, ended up touring Moscow factories agitating for workers rights among people she had barely a common language with, staying the night with prostitutes to avoid being picked up by the secret police, marrying not just one but two revolutionaries, losing her child, choosing the wrong side (Trotsky’s Mensheviks over Lenin’s Bolsheviks), and living long enough to see a revolution she dedicated her life to, turn distinctly sour and bitter.

“As people we were much more out of books than out of real life,” Dan says, in an extended interview with Leopold Haimson published in The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries. She means that in her young days, she and her fellow idealists who sat up or walked the streets all night discussing the revolution to come, had seen nothing of ‘real life’. They got their world view from reading Marx and Chernyshevsky and Gorky; the first time Dan actually met a real-life prostitute all she could think about were scenes she had read in Maupassant. They were so busy theorizing about the revolution, and inhabiting its weird, underground, anti-social existence of ideas, that they did not know how to hold down a job, pay a bill, mend a coat, look after a baby…

For me, writing about such people a century later, the quote has a second meaning. Dan and her fellow revolutionaries seem to me like characters out of books: utterly recognisable in their loves and hates and idiocies and heroics, but larger than life, more vivid and interesting, coming from a complete and absorbing world that exists safely between the pages. In other words, fictional.

These last few months in Ukraine, I’ve met the contemporary reincarnation of Dan and her fellow revolutionaries. They are here in all their guises: the ones who make bombs and pick up guns, the ones who write heartfelt tracts or disseminate poisonously attractive lies, the ones who look after the poor and the dispossessed, the ones who spy and betray, the ones who are ready to die for ‘the people’ and the ones who kill, rob and torture people in the name of making a profit. 

Again and again, I keep coming across characters who are straight from 1917.

It’s all amazing, amazing material for my novel, of course. But I realise that maybe I am more like Dan than I thought. My ideas for that novel came more out of reading than from experience: I thought those revolutionaries were safely between the pages.

It is terrifying to realise that the people who are tearing a country I love to pieces, or trying desperately to hold it together, are in fact, much more out of real life than out of books. 

www.lilyhyde.com

Dream Land - A novel about the Crimean Tatars' deportation and return to Crimea

A letter to Morozko -Lily Hyde

In a shabby, tree-shaded playground on the outskirts of Simferopol, Crimea,  two three-year-old boys are playing on a see-saw.

“Ukraine!” shouts Sayid, as his side of the see-saw goes up.

“Russia!” shouts Sergey, as Sayid comes down and Sergey’s side goes up.

“Ukraine!”

“Russia!”

It’s a cute scene, and the mums in the playground are laughing. The two boys live in the same block of flats, and have known each other since they were born. For them, these names of countries are just another game, like the different-coloured flags they’ve both waved sitting on their dads’ shoulders at opposing demonstrations; like the plastic guns they point at each other.

But when Sayid shouts “Ukraine!” and “Down with Putin!” on the bus into town, his mum hushes him up hurriedly, because who knows how people will react, in this town that used to be part of Ukraine two months ago until armed men appeared everywhere and it apparently became part of Russia. She doesn’t want to expose her son to hostile attention. And whatever she thinks about current events, she doesn’t want to teach her child to hate.

But all over Ukraine and Crimea, children are listening to their parents talk about politics and conflict and this side versus that side. They are learning to shout slogans and wave flags. If this society is not very, very careful, they will learn how to hate.       

What has this got to do with children’s books? Everything. This last few months in Ukraine and Russia have shown the incredible power of words to persuade people to hate each other. The words come from the media and enter conversation in every home where children pick them up and imitate them, because that’s what children do.

But there has to be another side. Children’s authors have a incredible opportunity to use words and images to challenge stereotypes and encourage empathy and understanding in children like Sergey and Sayid. In children everywhere, because if the Russia-Ukraine conflict seems far away, Sunday’s Euro-parliament elections show that xenophobic and homophobic attitudes are gaining popularity a lot closer to home.

It’s a scary responsibility for authors, but a very positive one too.  

Here’s another cute scene: my Ukrainian friend’s daughter Sonya, five, watched a well-known Russian cartoon called Morozko recently. She loves writing, and decided to write the main characters a letter. 

She puts the letter in a envelope and asks “Where do they live?”

“In Russia.”

A long pause, while Sonya thinks. “Where the bad people live?”

My friend tries to explain that no, of course not; not all people in Russia are bad… But Sonya’s letter does not get sent.

That little story is a children’s book in itself. Maybe Sonya or Sonya’s mum will write it. In the book I hope the letter would be sent; maybe first we would see how sad Morozko and his friends are not to get their letter after all…   

Meanwhile, tired of the see-saw, Sergey and Sayid in Simferopol go off in search of a new game, hand-in-hand – for now.

www.lilyhyde.com

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