There is a Land Beyond Perekop: Anastasia Levkova in Translation
Crimea
Sempre: Political Responsibility
Ai-Petri, Crimea (Ukraine)
Yalta, 2009.
From the Personal Archive of Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed
Cable cars go to the top of the mountain with occasional stops along one of the longest unsupported spans in Europe. They pause over a bottomless cleft for a few seconds that seem to last for eternity. Once you reach the top, the view is breathtaking. If one knows Kerouac’s haunts, such as Big Sur, the Crimean landscape can feel surprisingly familiar.
Like its landscape, Crimea’s history is a tortuous maze: it goes back to the first settlements and explorations by Greeks, Persians, and Romans. This land was attractive to the steppe nomads, the Cimmerians, Goths, Scythians, Sarmatians, Khazars, and Mongols. In the 15th century, Crimea became the core territory of the Crimean Khanate (1441-1783), which was established after the disintegration of the Golden Horde. In 1783, the Russian Empire annexed Crimea, violating the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. As a result, Crimea was declared “Russian.” This story replayed itself a few centuries later.
Kremlin, Moscow (Russia)
March 18, 2014
Two days after a sham referendum in Crimea conducted at gunpoint, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian Duma members and the representatives from Crimea, announcing the return of Crimea to Russia, its “home harbor.” He made a point of mentioning Ukraine as well: “Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source, we still cannot live without each other.” Everything about Ukraine was cast as Russian, and the nation was stripped of its identity, history, and culture. The words resonated with Russian society, who showed an overwhelming support of Putin following the annexation of Crimea: over 80 percent approved the illegal land grab, invoking imperial conquests of the past.
March 18 became an official holiday in Russia, commemorating the annexation of the peninsula and its integration into Russia. The event is presented and remembered as “the reunification” of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia. Since that moment, the “holiday” has been celebrated under the banner “Crimea, Sevastopol, Russia—Together Forever.”
During almost thirty years of regular visits to Crimea, it never occurred to me to ‘nationalize’ Crimea. Connected to Ukraine by land, Crimea came under Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954. After the demise of the USSR, Russia did not dispute the Ukrainian status of Crimea. Although hosting many cultures, the peninsula may sound “Russian” to observers early in their understanding of the place because other voices were muted or removed. The nineteenth century, for instance, is remembered by the Crimean Tatars as “the dark century:” for the first time since their ancient settlement in Crimea, they realized they were outnumbered by Russians, who were colonizing the peninsula. The “dark century” was followed by the genocidal deportation of Crimean Tatars sanctioned in 1944 by the Soviet regime led by Stalin. The representation of the Crimean Tatars in the peninsula dropped to 0 percent.
Despite the brutal removal of the Crimean Tatars, their historical and cultural legacy remained alive. The maze-like streets, hunched houses covered with grapevine, ancient architecture, breathing with the stories of residents before the Russian Empire arrived. A near-primordial connection to this land sustained the Crimean Tatars’ hope of returning to the peninsula that was their home.
In the late 1980s when the Soviet regime, which accused the entire Crimean Tatar population of collaborating with Nazi Germany, was decaying from inside out, the return of the Crimean Tatars to their vatan became inevitable. After Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, the reemergence of Crimean Tatars’ settlements became more vibrant, although not absent of challenges. Nevertheless, as it was once mentioned to me, the Crimean Tatars could be “themselves” in Ukraine. Under Russia, they had to conceal, again, their identity, history, and culture.
Today, Crimea has been occupied by Russia for more than 10 years. Political scientists and historians often compared Putin’s land grab in 2014 to Hitler’s so-called Anschluss and acquisition of the Sudetenland. In 2024, Amnesty International published a report entitled “Russia/Ukraine: 10 Years of Occupation of Crimea: Russia is Seeking to Effect Demographic Change While Suppressing Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar Identities.” The authors of the report stressed: “Russia has targeted the youth of Crimea, suffusing school curricula with propaganda that justifies its war of aggression and undermines Crimean Tatars’ legacy as an Indigenous People. Meanwhile, the de facto authorities have all but eradicated tuition in the Ukrainian language.” Under Russia’s occupation, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar cultures in Crimea face the threat of extinction: “Cultural celebrations are tightly controlled, with prior authorization required for any public assembly, or even the laying of a wreath at a statue of Ukraine’s national poet. Ukrainian books have been removed from libraries, and any public display of loyalty to Ukraine may be severely punished.
Under the current Russian occupation, Crimea, which includes a myriad of cultures and histories, is subjected to heavy censorship, surveillance, arrests, and illegal imprisonments. Although Russian authorities dictate the main narrative about the history of the peninsula today, dissident voices can still be heard. Domestic and international platforms outside Crimea became the major venues for not only expressing discontent but also for telling the (hi)stories of Crimea, which are diverse, dense, complicated, but revealing, illuminating, and hopeful at the same time.
Through the polyphonic complexity that Russia attempts to remove again and overwhelm with the single Russian voice, Crimea reveals the nuanced nature, refined texture of its history and culture. In this issue, Arrowsmith Journal shares a debut translation of Anastasia Levkova’s There Is a Land Beyond Perekop: A Crimean Novel. In Ukraine, this novel was received with high acclaim and listed as one of the best books of 2023 according to the Ukrainian PEN rating.
Anastasia Levkova, a Ukrainian writer and the co-founder of the “Crimean Fig” literary contest, was born in Hungary, grew up in Ukraine, and received her education at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. She writes about Crimea honestly, unapologetically, with the voice that refuses to be silenced. She exposes the complexities of Crimea’s political and cultural landscape, where Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians clashed. But this willingness and openness to interrogate the complexities, which are often disconcerting and painful, makes the polyphony of the peninsula resound.
Levkova’s novel reveals deep tensions, poking at some uncomfortable moments that uncover Russia’s imperialism and its colonization of Ukraine’s geographical and mental space. At the same time, this mental occupation probes into the Ukrainians’ unwillingness to embrace their own culture while choosing Russian culture because it is known in the world and has a reputation for being “mysterious” and “deep.” The fate of the Crimean Tatar culture is depicted as barely surviving under the pressure of colonizers: the owners of the land appear to be not simply guests but permanently unreliable residents, potential traitors and enemies.
Levkova carefully explores Crimea as an intersection of multiple cultures and the tension that such an intersection always already contains. Cultural diversity is not deprived of uncomfortable conversations, but it takes cultural sensitivity, responsibility, and respect to be able to navigate them, appreciate them, and indulge in them. Ultimately, the novel responds to Putin’s axiom about “Russian Crimea”—the peninsula is not Russian in its essence and was never Russian. It was made Russian through colonization and suppression of non-Russians. The novel’s protagonist undergoes a slow and painful process of self-rediscovery that allows her to better understand not only herself but her Crimean Tatar friend, and to build up her confidence and strength when defending Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar cultures and languages during fraught conversations with her boyfriend, who supported Russia’s cultural superiority.
Levkova’s description of Russia’s gradual takeover of Crimea in 2014 resonated with the memory of how things transpired: there was some disbelief, helplessness, and some hope that Russia would be stopped. There was a sense of waiting for a decisive move on the side of the international community that would not allow the nineteenth-century land grab to happen, that would guarantee the rule of international law, and that would show signs that it remembered how the Second World War started and learned from the lessons of appeasing Hitler. It did not happen. Instead, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine followed in 2022.
In There Is a Land Beyond Perekop, a compelling image delivers the beauty, strength, and vulnerability of Crimea: a vessel with plants inside. The majestic landscape of Crimea nourishes the spirit of fight and resistance. You can’t get the plants without breaking the vessel. If Russia is not held accountable for multiple violations of international borders and treaties, human rights and freedoms, for committing crimes against humanity, it means the vessel is broken. Crimea ceases to be Crimea. And once again, it will be the duty of the international community to shoulder this political responsibility.
I shared Levkova’s novel with my Harvard University students taking the Advanced Ukrainian course. Levkova’s talent to embrace a highly entangled and complicated story of Crimea and its residents and her mastery in interlacing stories resonate with Crimea’s polyphony. There Is a Land Beyond Perekop provided a rich material to undermine the loud voice with which Russia continues to overwhelm audiences at home and abroad, and to engage my students in a conversation about the multifaceted nature of Crimea, which I will be able to visit again after the deoccupation.
I am deeply grateful to Jemma Paek and Paul Morrison for their bravery in initiating the translation of Levkova’s novel, which can help international audiences learn more about, and feel, Crimea. Reflections on their translation process, and the excerpt from the novel, are below.
— Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed
In an uncanny way, Anastasiia Levkova’s There is a Land Beyond Perekop resonates with many Ukrainian voices ranging from the distant past to the present moment. The writings of Ukrainian cultural figures—from Hrihorii Skovoroda, to Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Lyuba Yakimchuk—bear witness and document Russia’s ongoing imperial projects in politics and culture from different historical contexts. By centering Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian narratives in their dialogue with Russian occupation, Levkova similarly confronts her readers with the persistent and extractive nature of the Russian state, one which has continually curated and shaped historical narratives with the aim of advancing its political agenda. The chapters translated here were selected in an effort to reflect this dialogue – specifically, the cultural chauvinism expressed by Vlad typifies the Russian imperial project, while the dialogue between Aliye and the protagonist affords space for Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian voices to express their relationship with each other and with Crimea itself. On the level of language alone, Levkova masterfully captures Crimea’s landscape, from her wave-like sentence structures mirroring the winding roads of Bakhchysarai, to the use of Crimean Tatar language expressing local culture on its own terms. This presented a challenge and delight in equal measure, and working with Levkova’s masterful prose was truly an honor. It was a joy to work with Jemma on this translation project that gave me a further insight into Ukraine’s entangled history and culture.
— Paul Morrison
I was compelled to translate this excerpt of Anastasiia Levkova’s Crimean novel, There is a Land Beyond Perekop, because of the distinctive and engaging voice of its narrator, Oksana. Oksana’s narration is characterised by its striking texture—there is a marked materiality to her language, a heft and richness in the way her thoughts are conveyed. The narrative moves seamlessly between the personal and the political, rendering Oksana’s experience of the world simultaneously unique and universal. Oksana’s fraught relationship with Vlad is filtered through the lens of competing narratives about Crimea’s past and future; their intimacy is at once private and emblematic of larger ideological tensions. In contrast, her friendship with Aliye is rooted in shared history and affection, manifested in their conversation about Bakhchysarai. These parallel relationships illuminate different forms of love. At the heart of the excerpt is Oksana’s evolving relationship with Crimea itself, a love that prompts her to reconsider her own identity along national and cultural lines.
Levkova’s prose constructs Crimea with extraordinary precision, rendering it vivid and immediate for readers who may never have experienced its landscape; through Levkova’s writing, Crimea becomes tangible on the page. The process of co-translation proceeded in the spirit of the novel, polyphonic and multiply layered, and I thank my co-translator, Paul. Our conversations often reminded me of the exchange between Oksana and Aliye—thoughtful, probing, and playful. I am deeply grateful to Anastasiia Levkova for crafting such a rich and resonant text. I am also grateful for the opportunity to help bring Levkova’s work to an English-speaking audience.
— Jemma Paek
From There is a Land Beyond Perekop by Anastasia Levkova
Chapter 9
Every day, like the ebb and flow of the tide, we were woken up at dawn by the sound of the ezan. Vlad was always mesmerized by its call: he would listen, spellbound, and check to see whether I was asleep. I could have slept, but didn’t want to. To me, the ezan was like trains to those living near tracks, or flights to those living by airports. But I wasn’t sleeping. I’d always wake up at the same moment as Vlad. At the same moment—for we had become one body, I would notice with a sense of surprise. A sense of surprise, because in the evenings I’d take stock of his many insults, which would pile up during the day, and feel myself growing distant from him. But during the night, under the blanket of the ezan, I felt how Vlad breathed me in, and I breathed him in. We were clay in one another’s hands: yesterday, set hard and cold, but soft and pliable today. We’d listen to the muezzin, and then I’d fall asleep and dream of Vlad.
“So…in your dream, who was I to you?” he would ask in the morning with trepidation. “You were my boyfriend,” I’d reply, and he would relax.
Then, after a few hours, our clay bodies set hard as stone and the feeling of oneness slipped through our fingers like grains of sand.
Insults?
Yes, insults.
I didn’t believe he loved me.
Yes, every month he’d come and see me. Yes, whenever I came to see him he would cancel all his plans. At the station, when we would meet after being apart, he would examine me with a strict and intense gaze. In his sleep, he would hold me tight—like a straitjacket—as if he were scared to let me go. He would write to me when we were apart, and his messages were sweet and a little creepy at the same time.
BUT:
He would never call me by my name, and I was tormented by doubt. Was he suddenly avoiding names all together, I wondered? What if he accidentally says someone else’s name in his sleep? I spent the nights tossing and turning and would try to enter his dreams, to understand who he breathed for—no, gasped for—when he was having nightmares. I’d hold him and comfort him until he settled down. He’d wake up, feel my body next to his, then fall back to sleep. Is it possible, I thought, it wasn’t me he wanted to see?
And another thing. He almost never talked about “us” together—there was no “we”. We went to the cinema together, walked around cities, travelled the country; we crossed roads, bridges, intersections together; we’d meet each other at the train station. And he’d begin his Facebook posts describing all this with the word “I”.
But what about me—where did I feature? Would he remember me in all of this or not? Or was I merely a minor detail conveniently added to the movies, the cities, the trips, the roads, the bridges, the intersections? Once, in a fit of jealousy, I told him that he wouldn’t have introduced me to his mother had I not met her myself before getting to know him. But this, of course, wasn’t true. He had introduced me to all his loved ones—and he wanted to know mine.
And another thing. Until now I thought that being in love meant getting excited about the same things. I wanted him to share in my passion for the things I loved—but instead, he criticized everything, even the things I thought he’d like. He’d describe pretty much everything I loved and talked about with fondness as crude.
My greatest heartache was his constant denigration of Crimea: Soviet, pro-Russian, self-involved, or worse—self-fellating! “We are only given one life, and it has to be lived in Crimea,” he once heard me say, a phrase coined by Voloshin, and he always mentioned it as an example of narrow-mindedness. “You’ve travelled so much,” he said, “seen so much—and you still don’t get it! Crimea isn’t even on the map! No one thinks it’s important.” We were lying together, naked, and after hearing these words I covered myself with the sheet, disentangled myself from Vlad, and rolled over to the opposite side of the bed so as not to touch him.
And another thing. He didn’t mince his words when it came to Ukrainian culture. The most interesting thing was that he knew it well; he understood artists whose work I couldn’t make any sense of, like Ihor Kostetskyi or Oleksandra Ekster. He was well-versed in literature, art, film: and so he allowed himself to offer his critique—quite often negative. “Lina Kostenko wrote powerful historical poems, but she’s preachy and moralizing in her work, so you can’t call it poetry.”
“But her poems are so inspiring and memorable!” I protested.
“I don’t disagree,” said Vlad. “But we should specify whom they inspire and why they are memorable: because they’re preachy and moralizing.”
I wouldn’t argue back. I just frowned, unable to discuss it further—maybe I just had no taste? To be honest, it was a sophisticated kind of torture: you had no right to respond, because it wasn’t you who was being disparaged. But everything you held dear, everything you identified with was being dragged through the mud. The truth is, I knew the Ukrainian authors and ideas we were talking about were important to Vlad, too. It’s just that “in the humanities”—he would say—“we have to constantly rethink our theses, ask questions, seek answers.” Strangely enough, my former postmodernist leanings turned out to be nothing more than posturing. My convictions could not be questioned—their infallibility and perfection were indisputable to me—and constantly rethinking theses seemed like too difficult a task. Wouldn’t it be easier to decide once and for all what made the most sense and leave it at that?
So, I didn’t believe he loved me. Or rather, I couldn’t.
But then why does he come to see me, I thought? Why does he count down the days until I arrive?
At first, I sensed a feeling that brewed just beneath the surface, which began to itch and burn; it itched and burned like skin auguring a cold sore, bulging and swelling before at long last erupting through the skin into a wound that takes up half the lip. This feeling became the answer to a question that had been plaguing me; and the answer, throbbing in my mind, which by then had already strayed far from sanity, hurt like an open wound:
Is it possible that for him I was simply a cultural, anthropological object—a research interest?
Chapter 10
It was the middle of spring, and by then the Crimean sun was already scorching. I had been working at the museum for a year, leading excursions for tourists. During university, I was making a little cash on the side by doing some translating from English and taking part in projects run by community organizations—which were a dime a dozen in Crimea. I had been supporting myself for some time. And I no longer had the strength to keep traveling between the two cities every day.
So, I started to look for a place in Simferopol.
When I first got to Studentska Street, I avoided the rental ads that said “for Slavs only.” I didn’t realize what kind of neighbourhood this was. The landlady picked me up in her car near my university building next to the Moskiltse housing estate. We crawled along Kyivska Street bumper to bumper, then at some point we began snaking in one direction down the winding roads, then weaving around in another, before finally passing by a large structure with columns behind a fence and arriving at the six-story apartment block.
A television tower loomed to the right. The columned structure was in fact the state television and radio company, “Crimea.”
I liked the apartment. It had been recently renovated, and the rent was fair. But the neighborhood was uninspiring. “We’re in the middle of nowhere—the very outskirts of the city,” I thought.
I went out onto the balcony—and I was transfixed.
The building stood on top of a small hill. Looking out from the fifth-floor balcony, tiny old buildings were visible, and a mosque’s minaret and the cupolas of churches peeked out between them. As a matter of fact, the minaret and cupolas were very, very familiar.
“Wait, is that Karaimska Street nearby?” I asked the landlady.
She nodded.
And I realized that we were in the very heart of the city, about a ten-minute walk from Aliye.
I went on to live in this place for seven years. At first, I rented it, but later, when I was in graduate school, doing fieldwork in Crimean villages and interviewing Crimean Tatar grannies and granddads, my parents and I bought the apartment with the money that I’d saved up, together with the amount we received after selling my grandparents’ place.
Once, sitting in a cafe with a group of friends, someone asked me and Aliye where we lived. Our description of the neighborhood went something like this:
I said, “Our neighbourhood is really green.”
Aliye said, “Because grapevines grow through the buildings’ broken windows and lush grass pushes through the cracks in the sidewalk.”
I said, “There are nice little buildings in our neighborhood.”
Aliye added casually, “They’ve grown into the ground and they’re peeling so much you can see the scabby old bricks underneath.”
I said, “When I’m walking down the street, I love to look into the courtyards, where children play and laundry dries on the clotheslines.”
Aliye explained, “It's really easy to take a peek, because the fences are made from whatever materials are left lying around – like roofing tiles or wooden boards—and the gates are usually in bad shape.”
I said, “It’s largely a Crimean Tatar neighborhood.”
Aliye disagreed. “I’m the only Crimean Tatar living here, because there’s nowhere for us to settle in this area: you can’t build big houses here. In general, it’s mostly drunkards living in the Old Town, people who lost their houses elsewhere because of their drinking and whose relatives bought them something cheaper.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But all the same, our neighborhood is Crimean Tatar simply because the Kebir Mosque is located here. This city was named Aqmescit in the sixteenth century after the Kebir Mosque; it’s the oldest and most important mosque in Simferopol. Crimean Tatars come here for the communal Namaz every Friday. And you know what else? Here, you can hear the ezan and the bells of the Peter and Paul church ringing out together, and you can see the Karaite kenesa buildings, and lots of synagogues, and the Talmud-Torah school and the Krymchak prayer house and the mosque in the Roma quarter. And the streets here are steep, like in Bakhchysarai.”
Aliye said, “and just like in Bakhchysarai, lots of these streets are dead ends.”
“So now you have the whole picture,” we said to our audience, laughing, after we had finished our duet of happy interruptions, contradictions, counterpoints, and resolutions. And it didn’t occur to me back then just why Aliye’s rebuttal of everything I loved and her dark humor didn’t irritate me, why it didn’t hurt me the same way Vlad’s rebuttals and irony did.
Instead, in that moment I realized why history is so diverse—not only in textbooks from different epochs and countries, but even the versions of history told by different people, even loved ones. And modern life, its prototype, is no different. Our history today is entangled and contradictory, with a multitude of dull side streets and dead ends, with grapes growing out of its broken windows, and you can see its scabby old bricks through the bright whitewash. What kind of clarity, finality, and unison do we expect of history?
Photo by Vitalii Fidyk
Anastasia Levkova is a writer, journalist, and cultural manager, and a co-founder of the Crimean Fig literary project. From September 2016 to April 2017, she presented a literary program on Crimean-Tatar Hayat radio titled “Radio Bookstore with Anastasia Levkova.” She elaborated the principles for Crimean Fig, the contest of writers and translators founded in 2018. Anastasia has been a coordinator and a jury member of Crimean Fig since 2018. She is the author of four books, including There is a Land Beyond Perekop: A Crimean Novel (Laboratory, 2023), and a co-editor of Crimean Fig/Qirim Inciri: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction (forthcoming, Arrowsmith, 2025).
Paul Morrison is a PhD student in Slavic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University. At the moment, his research interests center around themes of sickness in early-twentieth century Ukrainian literature, discourses of corporeality and language in postmodern Ukrainian literature, and the conceptualization of the North in Russian literature and film.
Jemma Paek is a PhD candidate at Harvard University writing on Eastern Orthodox icons and Ukrainian literature. Jemma’s writing has been published with Semiotica, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and daikon* zine.
Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a memory studies researcher and a literary critic. She writes on cultural memory, focusing on Ukraine and Russia. Her book, Russia’s Denial of Ukraine: Letters and Contested Memory, was published in 2024 (Lexington Books Press), and she is a co-editor of Crimean Fig/Qirim Inciri: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction (forthcoming, Arrowsmith, 2025). Her current research project is Russia’s Memory of the Past: The War Against Ukraine and the Forgotten Future. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed teaches Ukrainian at Harvard University in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.