The Ukrainian Optimists
April 2, 2026
Host: Andrew Kushnir
Guests: Adrian Lysenko and Ivanka Galadza
INTRODUCTION
ANDREW KUSHNIR: I’ve started reading Traitors Among Us. Two sisters, accused of supporting the Nazis. Can they prove their innocence?
It’s one of over a dozen novels for young readers by author Marsha Skrypuch. She isn’t my guest today – but she’s definitely “guest adjacent”. And she’s among a growing number of artists in this country making the complex and twisted stuff of Ukrainian history compelling to all ages.
Her titles include Making Bombs for Hitler, Don’t Tell the Nazis, and a more recent trilogy by the name of Kidnapped From Ukraine which chronicles children who’ve been abducted and forced into adoption by Russia in this current war. By the way, if one can say “by the way” about these sorts of things, The Guardian, in the summer of 2025, estimated up to 35,000 kids have been subjected to this war crime.
Marsha’s books appear in the Scholastic catalogue. Aahh! Scholastic! For me, as a Canadian kid, there was no greater joy than getting the flyer in class, going home, making some tough choices (“what do you mean, mama, that I only get to pick three?!”), coming into class with a cheque from my parents and then some weeks later, felt like forever, getting a little shiny pile of new books.
It’s hard for me to conceive of, in the 1980s, works that would deepen my understanding of my grandparents, my community, and their history. But Skrypuch is doing it. And what’s more, she’s credited as being a literary godmother to my two guests today: writer Adrian Lysenko and illustrator Ivanka Galadza.
Adrian and Ivanka are the collaborators behind Five Stalks of Grain, an acclaimed graphic novel that pulls the reader into the horrific tension of the Holodomor, as faced by two orphan siblings.
[theme music playing]
The word Holodomor is tough to translate perfectly into English, but “terror-famine” gets close. Between 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians died of starvation as a result of Stalin’s collectivization policy, unattainable grain quotas and something called “The Law of Five Stalks of Grain” – a draconian policy that landed people (including children) in either 10 years of imprisonment or a death sentence if they were caught with even a handful of now state-owned grain.
And as much as all of this was designed to advance the Soviet Union’s misguided economic policies, it had a second intention: it was a way to starve out Ukrainian culture, language, and concepts of Ukrainian statehood. To starve out the Ukrainian spirit.
I mean, how do you look at this kind of history – the history of genocide – and not just turn around, and run in the other direction.
This is where Ivanka and Adrian make an ingenious and sly contribution. And they’ve helped folks of all ages come to understand a bit more about Ukraine’s shadowy history: which is to understand its present.
Five Stalks of Grain, in creepy ways, confirms Mark Twain’s famous quote: “History never repeats itself. But it often rhymes.”
This graphic novel follows two young people, siblings, who have witnessed the execution of their mother and are now orphaned. This sets them on a treacherous journey, and a series of trials and tribulations, as they try to do the seemingly impossible: survive.
Here are Adrian Lysenko and Ivanka Galadza, the creators of Five Stalks of Grain.
THE CONVERSATION
ANDREW: I got to say, I’m a newbie to graphic novels. And so, I didn’t foresee what my experience was going to be. I didn’t have a preconception. But what I will offer is that something that blew my mind, actually, is the extent to which I opened the package this came in and I felt this rush of childhood come through me, this feeling of, oh, this is like almost the scale of my Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books, you know, like back when I was a kid or, you know, of course, like most boys then liked DC comics, Marvel comics, like there was this sense of child-like wonder that was my gateway into opening something that became very eerie, very fast, and you took me somewhere that I didn’t know I was going, even knowing that this would be about the Holodomor, a very dark era in Ukrainian history. And, I suppose I want to ask you both how you came about the story and the way you told that story. So, when somebody asks you, what’s the story of Five Stalks of Grain, what do you say?
ADRIAN LYSENKO: I guess to give a log line, it would be about a young girl Nadia and her younger brother Taras who kind of, um, go on this horrific odyssey for lack of a better term, during the Holodomor. I was kind of going down a research rabbit hole and I stumbled upon the concept of toll houses, where, you know, some, you know, eastern orthodox believe that once someone dies, the soul journeys to heaven and on their way, kind of in this purgatory state, it goes through these different toll houses and different challenges. And I just thought framing, especially with the Holodomor in the background, and framing the two of that together, especially with two protagonists, would work well, and kind of, maybe as a gateway to kind of draw readers in if they weren’t familiar about the terror famine. So, it was a very organic process of me writing some scenes, Ivanka was sending some sketches and some ideas, and we just kind of built, uh, built things from there.
ANDREW: So you walked alongside each other in this process. It wasn’t, um, the text wasn’t a done deal. And then Ivanka, you responded with image. It, it was more hand in hand, would you say?
IVANKA: Yeah, I felt really honored as the illustrator being part of this project, really having a say in how the story was developed. I think it was, it was wonderful working with Adrian, who’s very gracious, even when I was like running up against deadlines or sending things in like really late. I always felt like it was a partnership, like an artistic partnership, and was very grateful for that. and yeah, even, even though story, the title of the book started out, I think it started as Toll House. Um, we, we wanted to have that as, as the title of the book, even that kind of shapeshifted and changed when we were talking to the publishers so…
ANDREW: Did the process feel like a series of Tollhouses? I mean, you’re engaging with this, again, very painful history, you know? I bet it drummed up a lot inside of you as you were working on it and as you were researching it, probably having to look at images from that time and, and the few images I’ve seen of the Holodomor are chilling. We know of, you know, uh, reports of cannibalism. We know about, um, just, just horrific oppression and suppression. There are also stories of resistance, and I do think you activate that in this book. But as you were working, because it wasn’t a given where you were headed, did you feel like there were multiple crossroads, yourselves as artists going, do we go this way, or do we go this way? How do we get through this hard part of the story?
IVANKA: To be honest, I struggled a lot. I don’t know that I was aware always at the time of how heavy it was. I think, I think when you’re exposed to more and more tragedy in your personal life, it becomes more real. Even now, looking back at the book, I have a new perspective on it.
ANDREW: How so?
IVANKA: Post full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it’s like, it has a whole new meaning to me now. And so, looking back at the images that I’ve made, I’m like, yeah, this is, there’s something, unfortunately timeless to this just given where we are historically now. Like it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s all, it’s happening again and it’s surfacing all of these emotions that I think we’re all collectively feeling right now.
ANDREW: It’s hard to look at slumped-over bodies in your graphic novel and not see the photographs of Bucha, the Bucha massacre in our mind’s eye, right? And it’s hard to be with kids in a story knowing that thousands and thousands of kids are being kidnapped from Ukraina and taken across the border and indoctrinated and erased of their upbringings to whatever extent that’s possible. You did start this project before that full-scale invasion, but you know, that was my experience going through it, going, wow, there are so many echoes. And, um, you know, this idea of never again, you know, we don’t want the horrors of our past to be repeated. I couldn’t help but think that this, sadly, was reminding me that that forms of history do repeat themselves. And that this has been a very long agenda to erase Ukrainian personhood. This is not a new phenomenon, even though so many people in the world are suddenly waking up to it.
ADRIAN: Yeah. No, that’s absolutely right. And, um, I think we started working on the project in 2013, but when the invasion started in 2014, it felt to me at least like you were seeing the past and the present kind of collide. I remember specifically sending Ivanka images of a statue of Lenin and just kind of as a reference for one scene in the book. And then the next day it would be toppled over in the capital. So, you know, I think for both of us we really felt that urgency to tell that story more than ever. And you know, our book came out after the full-scale invasion and yeah, definitely seeing the past and present collide was also kind of lighting the fire for us to tell the story.
ANDREW: I want to talk about bearing witness. Because I think this is something that the book, I think that’s the invitation of the book, this invitation to bear witness around what the Holodomor might have felt like or looked like. But I don’t think you finish the sentence for us. The both of you, like, in be it the text or be it the illustrations, I always feel like you’re trusting my intelligence as a reader to fill in a lot of the gaps. Was that part of your mission?
ADRIAN: I think so, and Ivanka could speak to this as well, obviously, but as a writer myself, I’m always walking the tight rope of too much exposition or being too ambiguous. And I’m always on the side of being too ambiguous, which, you know, you can alienate a lot of readers and like you know, I think early drafts of the story, maybe originally, were talking about having some narration, voice over or something like that. But especially with the graphic novel, and this goes back to what you’re saying, I think, is that we didn’t want to be didactic. We didn’t want to hit the reader over the head. Like. you can say, you know, the baseline for a lot people says four million people, four million victims. And that’s a figure. But, you know, having this story told through the lens of a young boy and a young girl, I think and, you know, that was a very hard task for Ivanka for her illustrations to convey so much emotion and historical significance. And I’m very grateful for her because she made very amazing and talented illustrations. So that was, that was very hard on Ivanka and made my job kind of easy in some ways because I didn’t have that narration. We kind of knew much later on, the point A to the point B, but we didn’t want to be didactic and we wanted to invite the reader in. And just feel.
IVANKA: Yeah, and I think, I mean, you can get that feeling from all sorts of different art forms, but the beauty of telling this story through graphic novel form is that you can receive the information at your own pace. So you can spend 30 seconds on a page or you can spend five minutes, you know, it’s like you are invited to immerse yourself for however long, you know, you, you the reader can or want to, or have the capacity for.
ANDREW: I was going to say how long, you know, how long you can bear it in some cases
IVANKA: Right.
ANDREW: You know, and you give us a lot of agency as an audience, because we can look away if we want, or we can look more deeply if we want. And as you say, the time we spend with it. I’ve read the book twice. The duration of those readings was so different. Yeah. But I want to ask you, Ivanka, around this notion of allowing me as an audience member or witness to fill in the gaps, how do you arrive at that aesthetically as an illustrator?
IVANKA: That’s a good question. I think when we were working on the initial drafts, there were even more gaps than you see right now. I was adding panels to sort of allow for a little bit more continuity, a transition image that would explain a little bit of what was going on narratively. But I didn’t take it all the way, because you obviously see there’s still some, there’s still a lot left to the imagination. If you’re coming to this as someone who has never heard of the Holodomor before, there is an explanation at the back of the book. But you can fill in that gap of information through other sources, right? And this is more of a personal story, I would say. And Adrian, you can speak to this as well. But I would say that we all have sort of a collective memory of this. You can call it collective trauma, even collective memory. As Ukrainians, you grow up hearing at least vaguely about this thing. And we often forget, and hopefully not anymore, hopefully, we’re filling that gap as well, and other artists as well. But we often forget that there were personal stories within that collective narrative. So, there’s always a personal note to every kind of major historical event. And I hope that we captured that through these characters in this book.
[theme music playing]
ANDREW: You wrote an article, Ivanka, and there was a quote that, I think really, um, it, it connects with the work the both of you are doing. And this is, you’re quoting from a book called Disarming Beauty: Essays on Faith, Truth, and Freedom. And it’s Father Julian Caron, I think I’m pronouncing that right. His quote is “helping each other to have a true gaze on reality on the circumstances we are living in is the first gesture of friendship we can offer each other for living like human beings in the presence of the needs of the world.” And I’m curious about you both feeling drawn to history. And Adrian, we’ll talk about other projects that you’re working on; Ivanka, the work that you’re venturing into; but I want to sort of get you both responding to this idea of helping people to gaze on the reality. And to use illustration and a fictional story, albeit anchored in historic research and actual historic events, what does it mean to use the arts actually to help us see reality.
IVANKA: I guess I should go first because it’s the quote that I used, even though I feel utterly unprepared. [laughs]
ANDREW: You’re living it. You’re living that quote. I mean, it’s in your work, but I’m so curious to hear from you. You know, this seems to be a touchstone that you’ve really internalized.
IVANKA: Hmm, I guess this does relate precisely to the work I’m doing right now, which is, I’m an art therapy student. I’m studying to become an art therapist, and part of my practicum right now, so my training, my working with clients directly. And I think the reason I’m bringing this up in relation to that quote is because the first thing I think of when I hear that quote back again is, ‘I see you’. And I think that when, when people are suffering, they need to know that they’re seen, they need to know that their grief is seen.
ANDREW: Yeah.
IVANKA: But I’ll let maybe Adrian speak as well if you have anything you wanted to…
ADRIAN: Sure. Yeah, that’s a great quote. And, yeah, that’s a great question too. I mean, you’re going forward. For me, I guess I would go back, like, to my upbringing. And Ivanka, you and I are probably pretty different in this regard where, even though I was surrounded by Ukrainian culture, especially my maternal grandfather, I would, I remember him having a room in his house where he would just be mailing boxes and boxes of literature, you know, to this, you know, post-Soviet Union and during the Soviet Union. But I wanted to be a westernized kid. I wanted to watch Saturday morning cartoons. I wanted to go to the mall. I was embarrassed when my parents spoke Ukrainian in public and so I kind of just put it off to the side. It wasn’t until I graduated college and I had the opportunity to go to Ukraine to film a documentary and, at that time, my paternal grandfather had passed away and my other grandfather was in the hospital. And I guess things really culminated and just kind of built up to that point of that urgency to find out who you are, where you came from and share those stories. Especially as Ukrainians, we’ve been caught in between so many empires and going there, visiting family and just stepping foot on the soil, really lit that fire for me to tell these stories. And from then on, most of you know, my, you know, I’m a journalist as well, but my historical fiction, most of my stories have been rooted with my background in Ukrainian culture one way or the other I would say.
ANDREW: You’re both, I mean you invoked the word grief, Ivanka, but Adrian, you’re making me reflect on how I’ve lost all my grandparents at this point and I’m still really grieving them, and I think about how I would do anything for more minutes of them and their voices and their Ukrainian language, and maybe that’s just growing up as you start really longing for the things that you didn’t know the value of as a young person.
ADRIAN: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
ANDREW: And also to have all of that besieged right now, to know that there are people in the world that are trying to erase Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian language, Ukrainian realities. It drums up in me, like, some sort of, like, warrior guardian or kind of, you know, I want to make good, and I want to be able to pay the culture forward.
Um. I want to ask you about grief and you know, be it, I don’t know if you write by hand, Adrian, or at a keyboard. Ivanka, I don’t know if you illustrate with pen, pencil, or an iPad. I don’t know how you both work. But I’m wondering how, and if, you’re able to process your grief as Ukrainian Canadian artists through the work you’re doing.
ADRIAN: Uh, yeah, that’s, that’s a, that’s a great question as well. Um,
IVANKA: I don’t know if you heard that deep sigh from both of us, Andrew.
ADRIAN: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, like…
ANDREW: I think I may have been a third on that.
ADRIAN: Yeah, no, I mean, is that a grief that ever has, you know, goes away? It’s hard, you know, I’ve lost my father, you know, it’s almost been eight years and a much of what I’m completing now is kind of a story about that but told through different perspective, through the character’s perspective. And so no, I don’t think it does go, ever go away. To me, writing is very therapeutic. When I find that I don’t have a project that I’m working on, if, you know, I often feel a bit more depressed, I feel like there’s a void missing in me and, um, you know, maybe it comes back to why I work in historical fiction as well as because I enjoy doing the research and it comes hand in hand about learning about my culture. So I don’t want to say it’s an excuse for me to learn about my culture, but it’s, it’s just something, it’s a gateway and it’s, it gets me excited, like you say, I do feel like a warrior sometimes and like, you know, I’m like writing about the cossacks and like, you know, and finding out one of my ancestors was a colonel, like, this is to me, is like incredible and it’s yeah, I don’t know, it’s so cool.
ANDREW: It’s to your earlier point, you know, figuring out, from whom do we come from, where do we come from.
ADRIAN: Yeah.
ANDREW: And when you start sort of filling in more of those gaps or those puzzle pieces, it’s, uh, I don’t know, it’s somehow, one moves through the world a little bit differently.
ADRIAN: I think so.
ANDREW: Ivanka, how do you illustrate usually?
IVANKA: So, this book was illustrated on an iPad. Um, I started out with a few different iterations. I did pen and ink and watercolor, and all sorts of stuff. Um, but for the sake of expediency, is that the right word? Yeah, I did it digitally so that I could get it out there as soon as possible.
ANDREW: Okay. And, um, that’s surprising to me. Sorry. You sort of knocked me sideways a little bit because, um, it doesn’t read that. I mean, not that I should diminish iPad drawing, but – you should see my iPad drawings. Um, there’s, it feels, your human touch is so appreciable in these frames. And, um, to my surprise, it was all in black and white. And so how did you arrive at, you know, one might think that’s a way of simplifying the aesthetic, but I actually think that it kind of complicates the aesthetic. I’m wondering how you arrived at black and white.
IVANKA: I think it started out with just trying to convey a sense of bleakness. That’s really how it started. It was just like, okay, to us black and white is just kind of, you’re only dealing with value. So black to grey to white is really, you know, it can kind of give you more of a sense of heaviness.
ANDREW: Mm-hm. We talked a little bit about how the book changed for you, um, on the other side of the full-scale invasion. How about yourselves as artists, you know, what can you gauge within yourself as a difference between then times and now times?
IVANKA: I would say, um, yeah, for me, there’s a very clear before and after. It’s, it’s weird. I, I think early on as an artist, I think maybe aside from this project, aside from working on Five Stalks of Grain, I didn’t always have a lot to say as an artist, like, I was just kind of like, I know I want to do this, but what am I trying to say? What’s, like, what’s my message, you know? And when everything started in February 2022, it was like this feeling of being compelled to make something. Like, it was like, there was no other word other than just, like, feeling compelled, like I had to do something. And it all kind of started with this one image that I received, I think from either my cousin or a friend, of this woman, it was a photograph of a woman, and she was holding out her hand offering sunflower seeds to the Russian soldier. And to me, it was like I have to illustrate, I have to portray this somehow. I have to reinterpret this somehow and do an artwork around it. And I think from that point on, it was just like, I had one thing after another to say, you know, it was like, I had to, I had to talk about this. I had to do something. I had to put my, my feelings and my thoughts around what was going on into image form. I think for me, that was the big, um, the big shift there, and it started with a series of illustrations that then went on to raise money for Ukrainians, for the war effort and for refugees. And it was called Project Sunflower Ukraine, which is now defunct, but at the time, it, it served its purpose and, uh, and so that, that was kind of the change for me, the major change.
ANDREW: Yeah, I came across that image of the soldier and the sunflowers wrapping around his legs, and, uh, that defiant, resistant Baba looking him in the eye. How about for you, Adrian?
ADRIAN: Yeah, just more of an urgency to tell these stories in my way and do a small act of preserving our culture from what I can. I mean, I was very grateful that our publisher decided to publish, you know, the book in Ukrainian and especially at a time where, you know, museums and libraries and other historic monuments are being bombed and, you know, I think that it felt to me like a small act of, you know, preserving this culture, of keeping this, you know, alive. Yeah, so to me it was that urgency and I still, that fire is still lit with me and when I look to a new project or something like that, this is what I gravitate towards, is something within the Ukrainian topic that I can somehow tie into the present. Not, and I don’t, once again going to back to being didactic or you know hitting people over the head, but somehow kind of even just provide context to someone who might not know Russian Ukrainian history and put it into perspective, I guess.
ANDREW: You have this upcoming project called Beyond the Rapids. It’s a graphic novel, right?
ADRIAN: Yeah, yeah.
ANDREW: And it’s set in “the ruin”, right
ADRIAN: Right, yeah.
ANDREW: in terms of an era. And how do you frame “the ruin” for somebody who doesn’t know that particular historic moment.
ADRIAN: They didn’t, I would say chaos. Very much a very chaotic point in crossroads in Ukrainian history where Russian influence was very much growing, there was destability, destability, within the left and right bank, within Cossack leaders, the Hetmans, and much of it was due to Russian interference.
ANDREW: And this is in the 1700s, right?
ADRIAN: Our story starts in 1658, yeah. So this was similar to Five Stalks of Grain, and it’s told through the perspective of a young kozak and a young girl who kind of go on this different pathway but at the root, and just like as history and faults might happen, it doesn’t, we’re not always active participants in history and we might not be heroes in that story but this is very much going on in the background. It’s historical fiction with some fantastical elements, I don’t want to say making an analogy to what’s going on now, but once again going back and saying oh, this is how it somewhat started or this could be seen in the beginning of some of these tricks that, you know, were being played way back then.
ANDREW: Yeah, as we said earlier, this struggle is a long-time struggle and the attempted erasure of Ukraine as an idea, as a people, a language, a culture – this is, this is hundreds of years we’re talking about.
ADRIAN: Yeah.
[theme music playing]
IVANKA: I was talking to I think it was my cousin this, within the past year, and I was sort of lamenting to her how I haven’t had the opportunity to do grief work with Ukrainians yet and what she told me just really struck me. She was lik,e you know, this is an enduring problem. Ukrainians are always gonna need to process their grief because they’ve been victims of war, trauma, the refugees that are coming in now and also the people whose ancestors came, you know, during World War II, even earlier. Like, we all have something that we’re going through and processing, and this is going to be an enduring work. So we’re always going to be called to accompany these people. So it’s not that I haven’t had the opportunity to do it yet and I’m, I feel guilty and I’m angry at myself that I haven’t done that yet, it’s more that there is going to be an opportunity, and I will do it.
ANDREW: You’ll be more equipped than anyone. You know. I often wonder about us because I take it all of us are second generation Ukrainian Canadian, so our grandparents came over. I think about the power of distance, a little bit of distance on some of this trauma. And what we’ve been able to do as artists by virtue of having just that little bit of distance, that little bit of breath.
And the question popping into my mind is, Adrian, your five-year-old. And by virtue of this distance and this breath and the creative work that we can do around things that previous generations have felt silent about, or have felt too, the PTSD was just insurmountable. There was no real talking about this stuff. What do you want the inheritance to look like? The cultural inheritance for your son?
ADRIAN: It’s a great question. What do I want it to look like? What do I…
ANDREW: Or feel like?
ADRIAN: The first word that comes to my mind is resistance. I always have this mental image in my mind and a moment where I can’t wait to take my family to Ukraine. And I’m praying and hoping, and I want that day to come sooner than later so he can experience this culture, so he can meet relatives. Because I did it much later in my life. And we were talking about grandparents passing away, all my grandparents have left this earth now. And just… I don’t know, that’s hard. I still need to think about that a lot, but resistance comes to my mind and perseverance and just the culture. Yeah, yeah, it’s a tough one.
ANDREW: I mean, holding your book, it wasn’t lost on me that the terror famine didn’t work. I mean, it erased millions of lives. That, in and of itself, is… that’s a crushing, crushing reality. But… Ukraine endured. Ukrainians endured. The mission to snuff out Ukrainian personhood and sovereignty and dreams of independence, and… you know, all of it has… it endures. And so, in that regard, it’s a hard-won hope, I would say. Your book, you know, as brutal as what it enlivens and makes tangible, it also… it does give some measure of hope.
ADRIAN: We’d like to think so. I think Ivanka and I are both optimists at the end of the day and…
ANDREW: Ukrainian optimists?
ADRIAN: Yeah, I’d like to think so. You know, as bleak as it is. I mean, you know, it’s what people… and that’s part of the ambiguity of it. Without getting into spoilers, about saying what happens to the two protagonists. And we’re not painting… on the one side we’re not painting a happy ending to, say the least, a very tragic event. But the epilogue, I feel, and that’s another great reason that we wanted to add this, is somewhat of an optimism. That this story will carry on, and I always saw the one character in that epilogue as Ivanka. She’s an illustrator, and she’s passing these images on, and she’s telling this story. And so that’s, you know, a bit meta, but I don’t know… that’s whatever. But I always thought that.
ANDREW: Is that news to you, Ivanka?
IVANKA: It is. I feel honoured.
[Laughter]
ANDREW: Well, you know, that’s, honestly, it’s what good artists do, is they embed themselves, whether they know it or not, and they speak from their truth. And as much as I think you’re raising awareness and, again, creating an access point for people around something that’s quite unfathomable in many ways, I sense that this did something for you, too.
IVANKA: And I think it sort of brings back for me the quote about gazing on reality together, is that in order to do that, we have to be able to hold the good and the bad of our history, hand in hand. We have to be able to look at both. So, maybe this is our contribution to that.
ANDREW: Yeah. You certainly had me imagining what it might be to make life and death decisions on an empty stomach, you know. And that’s for so many of us beyond the realm of comprehension. But through the arts you can sometimes create a little bit of a connection, you know, an empathetic connection.
ADRIAN AND IVANKA’S CULTURAL RECOMMENDATIONS
ANDREW: So I want to close with asking you about what you would recommend by way of be it a piece of Ukrainian Canadian art, a Ukrainian Canadian artist, can even be Ukrainian artist, or a piece of Ukrainian art, something that you think people should seek out and forge their own connections with.
IVANKA: So, I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with Gerdan Theater. So these are, this is a troupe of singers from Chernivtsi in Ukraine. And they just finished a tour in Canada. So I think they’re back in Chernivtsi, but it’s a group of young professionals. So their day jobs are, you know, all over the place, some of them are dentists, some of them are teachers, you know, but they all come together in the evening and they learn Ukrainian music together in the tradition of bilyi holos, so that like really guttural, like, folk singing. Whenever I hear that style of music, I’m like, the…
ANDREW: Undone.
IVANKA: waterworks.
ANDREW: Yeah.
IVANKA: Yeah. I would recommend Gerdan Theater.
ANDREW: Okay.
ADRIAN: For me, also a tough one. I went with a Ukrainian writer Andrii Kurkov. It’s in my realm, historical fiction. He’s also written some other books. I haven’t read them yet, but he wrote a book, or two books actually, mysteries. The Stolen Heart is a second part in the series, which I just finished, which is fantastic. And The Silver Bone is the first one. And it involves Sampson, a young man in 1919, so just shortly after the Russian Revolution in the capital. And it’s chaos there, and he becomes a policeman and an inspector and investigator. He’s, you know, forced to make all these decisions all the time. And once again, it kind of goes back to what I like with historical fiction, is like it’s a very important crossroads in time, especially for Ukraine. And the way he presents everything is fantastic, so I highly recommend it.
ANDREW: Thank you both so much for this. It’s been a joy to top up my ride with your graphic novel, and to just spend a bit of time with your creative minds and hearts. So please, forge on, we need you.
IVANKA: Thank you so much, Andrew. Yeah, we need you too, my gosh. This was like, I said, this was my therapy session.
ADRIAN: Yeah, thank you for having us, it was a pleasure.
[theme music playing]
CREDITS
Kultura Rising is written and hosted by yours truly Andrew Kushnir.
Alison Broverman is our senior producer.
Pippa Johnstone is our executive producer.
Mixing and sound design by Mark Angly.
Original music by Daughters of Donbas (feat. Marichka).
Podcast graphics by Nicholas Luchak.
This has been an original podcast from The Shevchenko Foundation, Canada’s premier, national, charitable foundation for Ukrainian Canadian arts, heritage and culture since 1963. Here’s a little bit more about it.
OLHA KHAPERSKA: Hello, my name is Olha Khaperska. I’m the president of the East Coast Ukrainian Association in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’m the co-founder and chair of the East Coast Ukrainian Festival which connects Ukrainian communities across Atlantic Canada. Since the beginning, The Shevchenko Foundation has supported our work through grants to the festival. Last year, we were honoured to welcome the Executive Director of the Foundation as a Festival guest. To me, The Shevchenko Foundation represents trust and continuity in supporting Ukrainian culture in Canada. By supporting cultural projects, it helps grow local talent and allows Ukrainian artists to perform across Canada. It gives children and adults opportunities to participate through performing and volunteering, and to share Ukrainian culture with their local communities. My hope is that Ukrainian traditions continue to thrive and evolve in Canada with new voices emerging and children growing up feeling that this culture belongs to them. Above all, I hope our communities remain connected and united for generations to come.
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ANDREW: I hope you join us next time and that you’ll keep showing up on the cultural front.
Slava Ukraini!