August 1-9, 2022 Volodymyr Yermolenko, Iryna Vikyrchak 

Flash essays from the collection “Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity” tell about the insights, experiences, and beliefs of Ukrainians, which ignited their society in 2022, when the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine began.

The Cultural Hub community and curators carefully collected, translated, and illustrated these texts in order to capture the values ​​of Ukrainians — Freedoms, Bravery, Dignity, Responsibility, and Humour. 

A series of publications in partnership with Chytomo introduces this collection to the English-speaking audience. Volume 26 continues to present the series. You can get acquainted with the previous collection here.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: The land hugs us. August 1

This land, it is embodied in voices. It’s embodied in bodies, souls, and eyes wet from rain and tears. In the steps you take, measuring the space you will never give away. In the people sprouting up from its soft, powdery black soil as trees, stalks, battalions of plants, and armies of flowers. 

It is embodied in village chiefs who never abandoned their people. “No. I can’t leave my people,” they said, even after most of them left. Some of them were killed for it; others threatened with execution. But they held onto their villages, two-story schools with spacious gyms, burned-down grocery stores, and churches with bullet-pierced domes.

It is embodied in men and women who took their loved ones to safety and returned to the military recruitment centers the next day. In those who resorted to tricks to be honest with themselves. In those who reassure their family every day, without revealing where they are.

This land, it is embodied in the heads of cultural centers. The centers that suddenly turned into bomb shelters. And then into humanitarian hubs. And then into evacuation centers. And then those heads of cultural centers—their smiles sad, their voices soft—gathered their people together, got hold of the buses and drivers, got into their squeaking cars, and led those evacuation convoys away under enemy fire. 

This land, it is embodied in librarians. They, who are on a first-name basis with all their fellow villagers. They, who know when those people were born, when they got married, what kind of books they read, and when they escaped death. They, who know who needs what today—and will need tomorrow. They, who read their people better than books. They, who know stories someone else will definitely write down some day. 

This land, it is embodied in grandmas, home chefs of pickles and preserves, who brew the magic potion for the army and the poison for the enemy. In builders who patch up the damaged roofs, restore fences, lug bricks, and build houses. In first responders who get people out of the places you won’t find in Dante’s Inferno every single day. In truck drivers who drove their trucks full of food into the encircled and artillery-shelled towns. 

It is embodied in the water utility workers who deliver water in cisterns when the water pipes get broken. In volunteers who stayed in their home villages and towns, not knowing if they would still be alive in a moment. In other volunteers who arrived to the destroyed villages the next day after the liberation and got down to help rebuild them. 

It is embodied in those who enlisted in the army, even though they knew it was not “their thing.” In those who were ready to become ordinary soldiers, even though they were “irreplaceable” in civilian life. In those who know: “If not me, then who?” It is embodied in those who donate to the army daily and weekly and search through all kinds of stores and warehouses for the things frontline fighters need.    

It is embodied in millions of Ukrainians who can create worlds around them. Act at their own risk and peril. Believe that their actions matter. We hardly ever realized how many people like that we have. How many people can become great. How many people became heroes while remaining ordinary people.

This land, it is embodied in our equality. In the equality the war created. But it is not the equality of coercion. It is the equality of dignity. It is the equality of appreciating a person next to you—regardless of their status, gender, financial standing, national origin, religion, or sexual identity. For you understand how much they’ve already done for you, your people, and your country.

This land, it is embodied in those who don’t want to live under the yoke. In those who give more than receive. In those who are always skeptical, critical, sarcastic, and suspicious but spring into action when the need arises.

This land, it will never give us away. It holds us close to its heart. We grew into it knee-deep. It hugs us like its own children. We will never give it away, either. Our roots are covered with its black soil. Our heads watered with its heavy rains. 

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in reality. On the way out of Bobryk village.

August 6

We saw a crushed car on the way out of Bobryk, a village just outside Kyiv. What used to be a humble vehicle turned into a shapeless mixture of metal — a flattened iron beetle. A russian tank steamrolled over it. A chief of the neighboring village was inside the car, but just a few seconds before the run-over, he had managed to jump out of it. He might just as well have not.

The cars crushed by the russian tanks are a frequent sight of this war. Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel — each of these towns has its own “car graveyard” where you can see these crushed heaps of metal. They are often bullet-ridden and pockmarked with shell holes. Sometimes, people were inside them.

Why did the russian tankmen make sure to ‘crush’ those cars? Not just shoot them, not just kill people inside them who were trying to flee from war — but crush? Perhaps, they felt so weak that they wanted to convince themselves of their power. Perhaps, they considered Ukrainians parasitic bugs that you just had to stomp into the ground, enjoying the sounds of their wafer-thin shells crunching. Perhaps, they treated what was happening to them as a computer game without reasonable limits. Perhaps, they were envious that Ukrainian villagers had cars, and some families had even a few of them.

We can accept one of these explanations — or all of them at once. But they all indicate one and the same symptom: in this war, the russians are fighting reality. They hate the reality too much to tolerate it. A Ukrainian villager’s car is an example of reality, unbearable, uncomfortable, and illegitimate. It has to be not just killed. It has to be crushed like a bug. With the force of a heavy boot. With the power of equipment that can do nothing else but destroy.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in reality. War changes your understanding of what is real and what is not. August 6

War changes your understanding of what is real and what is not. What you have always considered impossible is real. Missiles hitting shopping malls with hundreds of people inside them (Kremenchuk); shelling of the railway station when dozens of passengers are waiting for their train (Kramatorsk); people murdered in basements after inhuman tortures (Bucha); keeping people in one basement like in a freight car for weeks (Yahidne); destruction of cities; and mass graves where thousands of people are buried (Mariupol) — just a few years ago, we thought all of those things were impossible. We considered the arrival of another Holocaust or Holodomor impossible. Now all of it exists; all of it is ruthlessly real. And it negates all our previous ideas of what’s possible.

The residents of Chernihiv describe how their city was living during the heaviest shelling. Money lost all meaning. People quickly switched to exchange, primordial exchange, when the most surprising things — for example, cigarettes — turned into currency. Or food — war gives you no choice. At some point, you can find yourself in a situation when all you can eat is chicken brought by volunteers. Or shrimp still left at the supermarkets. There is nothing but shrimp. Shrimp is the only accessible reality.

War amputates reality very fast. It takes away many of its numerous colors. Usual things become inaccessible. When Mariupol was left without water, people melted snow still lying in the city in early March. The cold made their nights unbearable, as the heat was cut off, but at the same time, it gave them more chances to survive since they could change snow into water. It is a much more awesome miracle than changing water into wine.

During the war, reality shrinks, so you can see only a small fragment lit by the beams of the spotlight of your wounded conscience. It snatches this fragment amongst all the rest, like a beam of light on Baroque paintings. You can see only what that divine beam is pointing at. The vast reality you were used to in peaceful times no longer exists. The space of countries, seas, and continents is replaced with the space of exact coordinates. Reality becomes meager — but also sharp. You can cut yourself on it. It causes wounds.

Here, reality pricks, cuts, explodes, shoots, and pierces. There is only one way out of reality like this — to hell or heaven.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in reality. You live in a multiplicity of possible worlds. August 6

In peaceful times, you live in a multiplicity of possible worlds. You can escape from one of them into another one. From a daytime world of routine into a nighttime world of pleasures. From a work climate of paved cities into a holiday climate on the ocean coast. From the world here-and-now into the world there-and-then, watching a late-night TV series about the Borgia or the Medici.

This multiplicity vanishes in war. All of a sudden, you cannot escape. You cannot get on a plane and fly away. You cannot open a book and read it just for pleasure. You cannot watch movies late at night.

In your mind, there is no space for movies. In your ideas of geography, there is no space for warm, happy places. Even when someone offers you to go on a trip, you just shrug your shoulders — what’s the purpose? Suddenly, you start treating your country like a baby you cannot abandon under any circumstances. Suddenly, you feel that everything will collapse the moment you cross the border. The planets will stop moving.

The idea of possible worlds can be born only in peaceful times. Leibniz, its creator, was possible only in Europe after the religious wars. In Europe that could finally sigh with relief. This idea could not have been born, for example, in Shakespeare. In the space of Shakespeare’s plays — just like in the space of plays by Sophocles, Racine, or Lesia Ukrainka — there are no possible worlds. There is only the ruthless reality you cannot escape. This reality will kill you sooner or later. It will crush your hopes. And you hate it for its cruelty. And you love it, too — because it is your only one. You cannot run away from it. You have to bear its name.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in reality. War is similar to a dramatic poem. August 6

War is very similar to a dramatic poem. Drama might well be the most honest literary genre. A genre with nothing extra. No descriptions, no landscapes, not even an internal or external world. Only action. And every action, every second of it, changes everything.

Change is possible in a drama, but it happens vertically, not horizontally. Drama turns the world upside down; it flips the pyramid from its base onto its apex. It pulls up the base and tosses the mountain down. Inside a drama, you are both “from the peaks and lowlands” at the same time — you cannot be somewhere in the middle.

It is exactly what is happening to us now. Our reality is as narrow as a path winding between the cliffs. But the skies get turned upside down in it. It pulls up those standing at the bottom. It tosses down those standing on the top. It is a reality of an earthquake; a reality of an artillery strike.

In a garage in Kharkiv’s Saltivka, a wound of a neighborhood that suffered most from the hostilities, we saw a car lifted by the blast wave into the air for a few meters. It crashed down on the garage roof and has been there ever since.

When you watch the footage of a missile hitting Kremenchuk, you see pieces of metal and concrete raining down on people, small like bugs. Hail from the skies.

We all are living in this reality of the blast wave. We have been lifted into the air like helpless little kittens. And we do not know whether we will catch hold of the peaks or smash down on the ground.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in Reality. War quickly turns you into a witness. August 6

War quickly turns you into a witness. Into someone who crossed the rift of history. You can tell so much as a witness. But most often, you just lose the gift of talking. There might be no reason for talking. Or you might be incapable of choosing the right words. Or the right words might not exist in nature.

We are trying to tell our stories to each other. We listen to them; we share them. Sharing stories has become more important than sharing things. Words are now more important than money.

At this point, you realize what history is. History is what happens to you at the moment when you might stop existing. History is careful walking along the edge of an abyss of non-existence.

After all, history is always about life and death. About those who could die but jumped across the abyss. Or about those who jumped into the abyss. Those who died for us.

During wartime, people do not just die. They always die for someone. Death is no longer a private affair. It brings not only sadness but also a commitment. It is always a beginning, not just the end.

During wartime, you understand: you did not die today because someone else died. Someone protected your life — with their own life. That’s why every death is a connection. Every death makes more of us. Every death enriches us with new names. We become overgrown with them, the names of our heroes.

We give these names to the trees and plants in our gardens. We want these names to take root. Take root in the skies.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in reality. During wartime, reality shrinks. August 6

Yes, this paradox does exist. During wartime, reality shrinks — and expands at once.

Your reality becomes a small fragment illuminated with a spotlight. But at the same time, you suddenly know much more than you used to. You know many more personal names — and the names of villages and towns. The types of military gear. The rules of survival. You get messages from across the world. People you will never meet in person say thank you to your fellow citizens.

During wartime, everyone becomes a comms officer. Your life loses its meaning unless it is connected with the lives of others. You no longer consider “self-expression” a value, since you stopped expressing yourself a while ago. You feel the power awakening within you only when you continue something, not begin it; when you pass it on, not finish it. When you are part of a chain. When you do something you did not begin and will not be the one to finish.

Thus, your microcosm turns into a macrocosm. Thus, you lose yourself to find yourself.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: Rooted in reality. They are waging war against the reality. August 6

The russians are waging war not against Ukraine. And not even against Europe. They are waging war against the reality.

Fakes and lies have become their thinking space, the air they breathe. “Joy,” one woman in moscow said when a journalist asked her what she expected in the nearest future. 500-kilo bombs dropped by the russian jets on Ukrainian villages and towns; apartment blocks that folded like a house of cards, burying their residents alive; civilians shot into the backs of their heads — she considers all of it a reason for joy. Another russian said he had stopped talking to his relatives in Ukraine because they’d been reading “wrong Telegram channels.” We scream in a language of murdered people and ruined towns which we see with our own eyes, which come into our dreams and haunt us at night. “You are reading wrong Telegram channels,” they tell us.

It sounds absurd and crazy, but it is true. It is also the russian “reality” that wages a desperate war against the reality. Against the facts, against the truth, against the real life.

What can you counter it with? Returning to life. Touching the rough surface of the reality. Its physical simplicity. Its simple undeniability. You just have to see things with your own eyes. You have to feel it all and touch it all. You have to forbid yourself to shape your worldview through “Telegram channels” and fun TV shows. You must plunge into the river of simple, crude reality. Climb down into it like into a coal mine.

The reality is here, next to us, below us, above us. It is often brutal, sometimes banal, but always undeniable. The reality of war reminds us that some people can become beasts again. And that we all can die fast. Our children, too. But there is a way out. And there are people defending us. They do their best to delay the arrival of death — often at the cost of their own lives.

Ukrainians hold on to the reality. The reality of soil, the reality of their home villages, the floral reality of their gardens. We never wanted to leave this place. Our metaphysics has always been material; our philosophy weaved into literature; our abstraction grown out of folk art.

“Stamped knee-deep into the soil, the frenzied multitudes of them would fall down and rise up…” Vasyl Stefanyk wrote over a century ago. “The soil was groaning under the pounding of their hearts.”

“Stamped knee-deep into the soil.” Embrace with the soil groaning “under the pounding of their hearts.” They took root in it.

Perhaps, this is why it is so hard to defeat them.

Iryna Vikyrchak: The Ukrainian sacrifice and cucumbers. August 9

Recently I have taken a habit of starting my morning by reading a random paragraph from the legendary book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, and reflecting on it during the day. Reading and reflecting has always been my coping mechanism during difficult times. The book is based on the theory of archetypes. And an archetype, as defined by Oxford Languages, is (in Jung’s theory) “a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.” 

So the paragraph of the day in question was a comment on a fairy tale that exists across cultures and tells the story of a girl who fell victim to her father’s contract with the Devil. Anxious that the latter would snatch her away, she demanded to have her arms chopped off — and saved herself with this sacrifice.

Even though this kind of image is striking enough by itself, I was struck even more by the coincidence of having watched a similar scene in a movie just the night before. It was — the parallels in the title are also a mere coincidence — World War Z, a 2013 zombie movie. In that particular scene, the Brad Pitt character cuts off a hand of a young Israeli female soldier a second after she had been bitten in that hand by a zombie. This immediate reaction saves her from dying, from turning into a beast herself, and thus — from being snatched by an enemy. In these two cases, is the price of not getting snatched by the enemy too high? Yes, it is. But this is the price of victory: they already won by having the courage to sacrifice the part of their bodies.

There is a popular self-deprecating joke in Ukraine. If you take one Ukrainian and two members of any other nation and let them measure the land they would like to get for farming, they would, most likely, do the following. The first one would walk along a field for an hour and stop there, saying “enough”. The second one will probably take a day-long horse ride and, when the night falls, decide that it should be enough. And a Ukrainian would take a horse and ride it for a week, get off his horse, continue running on his own feet, and when he wouldn’t be able even to crawl anymore, he would chop off his hand, throw it ahead of himself as far as possible, and proudly declare: “And over there, I will plant some cucumbers!” 

This joke is not about Ukrainians being greedy for the land but about their deep love for it and their connection with it. We never encroached on other countries’ land throughout history but have worked very hard on our own. 

In a less bloody version of the joke, the guy just threw his hat ahead of him. Given he had one. 

Anyway, this metaphorical chopped-off hand on Ukraine’s body is no longer there to express the joy of having your own patch of land to work on. It has become an act of courage, the price we all pay as a nation in order not to give in to the enemy. And that’s why we have already won. It is all the necessary acts of courage undertaken without thinking, without doubts, without even losing a second before the enemy gets a chance to snatch you. And yes, it is a sacrifice — for the right to grow your own cucumbers on your own land and feed the world at the same time. 

The editorial “rule of small letters” or the “rule of disrespect for criminals” applies to all the words related to evil, like names and surnames of terrorists, war criminals, rapists, murderers, and torturers. They do not deserve being capitalized but shall be written in italics to stay in the focus of the readers’ attention. 

The programme “Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity” has been created by joint effort and with the financial support of the institution’s members of the Cultural Business Education Hub, the European Cultural Foundation, and BBK — the Regensburg Art and Culture Support Group from the Professional Association of Artists of Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate.

Authors: Volodymyr Yermolenko, Iryna Vikyrchak 

Translators (from Ukrainian): Hanna Leliv (Volodymyr Yermolenko’s essays)

Illustrators: Nastya Gaydaenko (Volodymyr Yermolenko’s essays), Victoria Boyko (Iryna Vikyrchak’s essay), and plasticine panel by Olha Protasova

Copyeditors: Hanna Leliv (Iryna Vikyrchak’s essay), Yuliia Moroz, Terra Friedman King

Proofreaders: Tetiana Vorobtsova, Iryna Andrieieva, Terra Friedman King

Content Editors: Maryna Korchaka, Natalia Babalyk

Program Directors: Julia Ovcharenko and Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski