Bohdana Neborak: Tell us about the format of the book. You choose a light manner to speak about the most difficult things through acceptance, through food. How did you dare to do this and why is it important for you to try to speak about the most difficult things so lightly?

Dmytro Kuleba: We've all read many smart books with complex sentences, seven or eight lines long. But this book was conceived for those who have followed the news these three years, who have seen what's happening but didn't understand why it's happening exactly this way. So I tried to explain everything in simple language.

Bohdana Neborak: How did you work with Volodymyr, how did you combine the texts and the dishes?

Dmytro Kuleba: In 2023, I came to Volodymyr Yaroshevskyi with the idea to write a book and an approximate understanding of the menu. There were many requirements for the text and the dishes, as they had to match.
In his essay, George Orwell writes about the English language in politics, and he essentially says that behind verbiage lies a person's inability to formulate their own language for what they want to say. So the first question I ask myself is, "What do you want to say?" Accordingly, when I selected the number of stories that I consider important, the selection of dishes and drinks began.

Volodymyr and I are very different, but actually we are the same, because overall, both in diplomacy and in cuisine, you can't fix a bad dish even with ketchup. So we worked comfortably; the only issue was finding the time to do it.

Bohdana Neborak: How can one learn to search within oneself for what one really wants to say, what one needs to say?

Dmytro Kuleba: For everyone who wants to develop this function in themselves, I recommend reading Marcus Aurelius's book "Meditations" ("Alone with Oneself"). If you take 10% of what you read into your daily existence, your life will change forever. To understand what you want to say, you need to understand who you are.

Bohdana Neborak: In the book, you touch on the topic of how others think about us. Sometimes it's ironic, although serious. My question is quite general. In 2022, we all felt an incredible surge of interest in Ukrainian culture. But it's clear that the dynamics are changing.

How would you talk today about the topic of how Ukraine tells the world about itself? I mean gastronomy, literature, and our intellectual thought.

Dmytro Kuleba: Why are we all fans of Italian, Chinese cuisine? During migration, they brought their dishes to the center of the world, and there this cult was created. Now millions of Ukrainians have gone abroad. This is a tragedy, but at the same time it is our chance.

We have two paths: we can remember our people once every four years when we need them to go and vote. But assimilation will happen and they will hide. So we need to build such a state strategy so that Ukrainians remain Ukrainians, and so that they develop institutions: their own media, clubs, schools, restaurants, that will appear only where there is Ukrainianness capable of supporting a minimal demand.
When we, as a state, as a nation, learn strategy, we will be able to put our brand on solid tracks.

Bohdana Neborak: Let's talk about institutions. On one hand, we would like them to be in more capitals, not just European ones. On the other – we understand there are challenges, primarily concerning funding and the people who will work in these places. This is a complex, big story.

When we talk about the state budget, there is a first priority for using budget funds. And since we are at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, the conversation here is always about business responsibility and support for culture.
What do you think is the role of Ukrainian business in diplomatic projects? Because at Columbia University in New York, there will be a Russian library funded by a Russian entrepreneur.

Dmytro Kuleba: A question for everyone to think about: “What is more effective: an institution or an influencer? And is an influencer an institution?”

I was at the origins of the Ukrainian Institute back in 2014. One can constantly complain about the lack of money, but you and I see that the world is starting to work a bit differently.
What's cooler: a Ukrainian exhibition organized by the Ukrainian Institute, say, in Paris, attended by 10,000 people, or a video by a super-popular French blogger who comes to Ukraine and gets 5 million views? From a business perspective, which would you choose?

I devoted ten years of my life to organizing various exhibitions and film screenings. But the state must rethink its approaches. In culture, the state should do only one thing – subsidize competitive Ukrainian-language products on platforms. Because that's where our children, our youth, are.

Historically, the state cannot lift the world without business, and small and medium-sized businesses, unlike large businesses, are not capable of lifting themselves in another market without the state. Therefore, we created the online platform "Nazovni" to support small and medium-sized businesses in entering other markets.
Ten years ago, this didn't exist; then a Ukrainian exporter wanted to sell something "in a sack," take the money and disappear from the radar, nothing else interested them. Then a class of conscious exporters began to form, for whom reputation is important, for whom it's important to tell what "made in Ukraine" is. Accordingly, sponsors began to appear in various cultural projects. While exporters worked "in a sack," there were no sponsors. And when there are no sponsors, there are no projects.

So here, business and the state are natural allies.

Bohdana Neborak: Thank you for your observation. Many people working with Ukrainian literature are racking their brains about how to move from successful cases to a systemic view of Ukrainian culture. If we stick to the topic of literature, we will have four big names that are translated. These are Andriy Kurkov, Yuriy Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, Oksana Zabuzhko.

This is already great, but on the other hand, the question arises: How can we talk, in a good sense of the word, about clichés or stereotypes about Ukrainian literature and culture? Can we now generally think about our cultural branding not through cases, but through big stories, big narratives?

Dmytro Kuleba: The problem of the absence of a holistic perception of Ukrainian culture in the world lies in the absence of a holistic state. Because if there is no state that holistically represents itself, there is no holistic picture. And no one will create this picture for us.

The Western literature market is deeply corrupt. You can get there not because you are the most talented, but because you are in the right society. And I am very glad that our stars, whom you named, have succeeded.
On the shelves in bookstores, there are heaps of foreign books, yet almost every third one has something Russian: either a mention of Chekhov, or admiration for Dostoevsky, or Russian bogatyrs. This is already embedded in their mentality. For us to rewrite the mentality of the Western, Eastern literary reader, it will take years to implement a purposeful strategy, promoting the entry of our writers, composers, bloggers, influencers into foreign markets.

Bohdana Neborak: How would you speak today about the task you outlined for yourself: to work with the feeling of secondariness of Ukrainians in Ukraine. I don't want to tie it only to the full-scale invasion, because these trends are not only related to this date. How far do you think we have progressed? Because today there are many more popular Ukrainian products. There were always good, complex books, but there was not always Ukrainian pop music, for example.

Dmytro Kuleba: In Ukrainian culture, in my opinion, there were two turning points. The first was the order of the Ministry of Culture on the mandatory dubbing of films into Ukrainian in cinemas. And the second was the transition of the Ukrainian show business to the Ukrainian language.

Today, some children still listen to Russian rap, or in society they speak Ukrainian, but in their circle of friends they switch to Russian. This is all a product of the fact that Ukrainian culture for a long time remained in the zone of narrow enlightened circles of the intelligentsia. So we need to go to the masses, otherwise we will always suffer from internal discord.

Bohdana Neborak: From a pragmatic point of view, what does reading fiction give you?

Dmytro Kuleba: True freshness of thought and an unexpected perspective can be obtained not in professional literature, where we all look for it, but precisely in fiction. Therefore, in the last three years, I have read more fiction and poetry than I did in several years before.