February 7 — 28, 2023 Svitlana Stretovych, 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 37 is the last one in the series. You can get acquainted with the previous collection here.

Svitlana Stretovych: Habit 2022: Surviving. February 7

People say that it takes 21 days to form a habit.

But there are exceptions: a habit can be formed automatically and instantly if it has to do with war.

Residents of Ukrainian cities, who, for almost a year now, have been living in the conditions of great war, constant shelling and daily disasters, do not wake up to an alarm clock. They are awakened by an app that loudly imitates a siren and warns: “Air raid alarm! Immediately follow to the nearest shelter!”

1.

Habit 1 is to sleep in a hall with at least two walls protecting you from the outside. Although, as the experience of Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Mariupol and many other cities shows, this does not always save people. Therefore, it is better to have the habit of sleeping in the subway, in basements or bomb shelters.

At home, it is a good idea to have additional floor blankets; for the subway, opt for sleeping bags and ground pads.

2.

Air raid alert means that missiles or drones are heading towards the residents of a European country to destroy its critical infrastructure or residential buildings. At that point, progressive and modern Ukrainians rush to fill all containers with water. You need to have both technical and drinking water in the apartment. People also check if their phones and laptops are charged.

This is a two-component habit 2, which has developed after the blackout.

3.

Before the first missile strikes, charity had been seen as something patrons and sponsors do. On the first days of the large-scale war, all bonuses, cashbacks and funds from various bank accounts were transferred to the accounts of foundations that support the Armed Forces.

Now donating is a daily ritual, necessary to keep the balance: transferring money to support the army or to the families of the deceased, as well as to people whose homes have been destroyed by missiles or russian soldiers.

Every new day means another donation.

4.

Talking on the phone during a war is of little significance, although it is very important to talk. But when you dial the number of your loved ones every day and hear their “Hello!”, it means they are alive. This is what matters most.

Habit 4: at midnight, rather than starlit sky, happily watching the green messenger dots, which show who is online.

5.

News reports of February 2023 once again announce that the russian army is preparing a major new offensive from different directions, which means that an entire army of habits should be put on high alert:

— a full tank of fuel,

— cash in the wallet,

— stocks of dry food,

— documents collected in one place.

Soon, it will be 365 days of the great war, when Ukrainians have been dying every day. Over this time, I’ve lost one naive habit: I’ve stopped writing in social networks “Everything will be fine.” But I haven’t stopped believing it.

Svitlana Stretovych: Stencil of the 20th century. February 7

If someone had told me that I would live through such a situation, I would not have believed: during the war in the city, sirens keep going off, there is no electricity and no heat supply, but, despite everything, people dress up, get on the subway, take cars or trolleybuses and go to the theater for a literary night.

If anyone had told me something like that would happen, I wouldn’t have believed it.

…

As a rule, when you attend an event that, due to circumstances, post factum becomes historic, you feel it in advance.

On January 11, 2022, Kyiv was semi-dark in the evening. Commercial premises located on the first floors of residential buildings or in separate facilities, had already learned how to consume electricity responsibly to save it; besides, there was simply no electricity supply in the city on that day. At such moments, the darkness seems to be suffocating. It is insidiously forcing down on you with the stone walls of the city, which are not illuminated by electricity, as you can hardly make out the outlines of these walls.

We’re going across the city. On the main stage of Molodyy Theater, a book of essays by the Ukrainian writer Andriy Lyubka is to be presented. The title of the collection is “Something is Wrong with Me” — and it is a very accurate description of how every Ukrainian feels now. It’s cold outside. I walk the road, overflowing with anticipation and excitement. The theater hall accommodates about 400 people. But to fill it, Kyiv must have an irresistible desire to discuss literature on this wartime winter night in the absence of electricity and heat supply.

My tension subsides when half an hour before the event I see a line of readers in the theatre waiting for the author’s autograph. Andriy Lyubka smiles, jokes, signs books, and takes pictures with attendees. The buffet becomes crowded too. People are discussing different things, but everyone seems to be very happy to talk. Just utter words to each other.

Among those present in the hall are dozens of famous figures who create Ukrainian culture and education: from Serhiy Kvit, Rector of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, to the artist Matvii Vaisberg.

Here, you won’t hear any language other than Ukrainian.

At the beginning of the soiree, Andriy Lyubka mentions the premiere of the documentary film “Shchedryk against the russian world,” which premiered in January 2023. It became the most discussed premiere in the cultured circles. At the beginning of the film, it is mentioned that January 1, 1919 was the anniversary of the Ukrainian poet Mykola Voronyi, which was celebrated in Molodyy Theater. It was here that Symon Petliura, a Ukrainian stateman and military commander, decided to organize a cappella choir that used Ukrainian songs as a means to carry out a diplomatic mission abroad — in order to show the world that Ukrainian culture is not part of russian culture, and Ukraine is fighting for the right to be an independent state.

During the conversation, Andriy on the stage shares his feelings, saying how symbolic it is to have the presentation in this theater 100 years later. The Ukrainian language is spoken on the stage, we talk about Ukrainian culture and continue the struggle for the right to exist.

Organized in 1919, the cappella choir toured Europe, and later America. It attracted enthusiastic reviews from prominent people in different countries. Shchedryk (Carol of the Bells) by Mykola Leontovych, which was performed by the choir, became a trademark musical piece of the representatives of Ukrainian culture.

Mykola Leontovych himself was killed in his father’s house under mysterious circumstances in 1921. Meanwhile, the world was listening to his Shchedryk.

During Andriy Lyubka’s literary soiree, we talk about literature and travel around Ukraine, about how we manage to help the Army, about the importance of every person working for our victory. Andriy reads his texts, which send waves of eager joyous laughter throughout the audience.

At the end of the event, visitors applaud for a long time. Andriy, as a volunteer, had delivered 104 cars for the Armed Forces as of that time, so the public gives him a standing ovation to show their appreciation.

In the end, people go out and smile. Among the many expressions of gratitude voiced when leaving the theater, one woman says: “Thank you for mentioning Shchedryk. I am from the Donetsk region, from the city where Shchedryk was performed by more than a hundred people at that time, a hundred years ago.”

In our Donetsk region, I think, the war has been raging for nine years now.

And despite the historical echoes, I refuse to write or think: “history repeats itself” or “history goes in circles.” Yes, there are coincidences in this stencil of the 20th and 21st centuries, only this time we will win.

Svitlana Stretovych: Alive. Love You. February 17

Yulia knew that russia would launch an offensive as early as at midnight on February 24, 2022, a few hours before its actual start. She received a call from her friend’s husband, who had constantly accused Yulia of spreading panic and provoking anxiety with her speculations about the beginning of the war in February.

“Pack up and go to Bila Tserkva,” he said, “it will begin tonight…”

Yulia was up till 4 am. She just sat there, nervous, but couldn’t really believe it and wasn’t going to go anywhere. Because if she did, she would have to shock her family and friends in Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv region with the news.

And across the world, in New York, her son began his usual day of a tattoo artist when one of his clients asked:

“Aren’t you from Ukraine? Kyiv is being bombed! The war has begun.”

The first call about the inevitable beginning of bombing came from her son, from New York.

“Mom, the war has started again.”

“Again” — because in 2014 it already started once.

…

Yulia is my hairdresser. For more than 5 years, each change of hairstyle for me has involved frank friendly conversations.

She is now armed with a battery-powered hair-trimmer and two huge torches that her son sent her from the United States for work.

I come to my hairdresser in the evening, and there are power outages in the city.

“No worries,” Julia says. “We’re prepared.”

However, her voice betrays her insecurity and apprehension aroused by the war. Anxiety grows in the particularly acute periods of massive shelling. But this voice does not give in to fear.

“My brother was at the frontline,” she says at the last meeting. “He was so eager to join the army. Finally, he got conscripted. We couldn’t get in touch with him for several days, I already began bracing ourselves to say goodbye to him. And then in the evening Valerik sent me a message: ‘Alive. Love you’.”

Her brother, whom she affectionately refers to as Valerik, joined the army to defend the country after the beginning of the great war. He is divorced but has a son. His ex-wife also serves in the military. And so, Yulia really hopes they will be together again.

“First, I need to survive,” her brother says, “and then I’ll sort things out.”

He smiles. Yulia becomes calmer and more joyful as she talks about it. She hopes that her brother will soon write about love to his wife, because he WILL stay alive.

Svitlana Stretovych: At a high cost. February 17

I never thought that a final farewell with a person could be so solemn.

The first of February. February is a countdown that each of us, Ukrainians, wants to leave behind as soon as possible. Seeing the numerous reminders on social media, how we were anticipating the great war a year ago, how we were preparing our bug-out bags… Seeing our archives, reliving our memories, and finally closing the one-year cycle to move on.

The first of February. The morning begins with a final farewell to a soldier in our yard. He died in the war. A message about this appeared in the neighbor chat yesterday, indicating the building number and the entrance. High-rise buildings, just like low-rise ones, can’t avoid loss in wartime. There are more than 800 apartments in our building. Is there at least one unaffected by the war?

Men in military uniforms walk by our house all the time; khaki cars drive past it every day; residents regularly collect money to support certain military units.

This morning, February 1, reveals: one of our neighbors has given his life for us all. Every day he crossed this yard to come home and today he is being taken away from here for the last time. The farewell ceremony takes place very early, around 8:00–9:00 am, before parents with children go out for a morning walk.

At the entrance, there are farewell wreaths with blue and yellow symbols, with the military standing on both sides of the flowers. There are a lot of them — two-thirds. Our houses have 16 floors, and, standing opposite each other, they serve as a wall, when people shout out “Heroes do not die!” three times.

These words are clear, like a shot, hovering up above us, reverberating. They are going up, to the upper floors. I am standing with my daughter, who was born a few days before the great war in February 2022, at the window opposite to that entrance and watching from the height of the sixth floor a coffin being loaded into a small van. The military line up to form a passageway and kneel on one knee, their heads down. This is how we in Ukraine pay last respects to those who gave their lives for us — for those who live in these 16-storey buildings.

I get down on my knees just like everyone else — passers-by and those watching this farewell ceremony. Everyone freezes when the car with the soldier leaves the courtyard for the final journey.

The slogan echoes again: “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Heroes!”

And even louder: “Ukraine above all!”

My child, watching this from the window, is surprised to see so many people and tries to say something. She will soon be one year old, as old as the great war.

…As a child, I knew all the graves in our cemetery by name. I refer to it as “our”, because there are the graves of my relatives that we often visited. This is why my sister and I knew everything around these graves, because while the adults were taking care of the grandfather’s headstone, we would walk around the cemetery holding hands. And each time we would tell each other the stories of people who passed away. We sorted through the names, read them from the gravestones, remembered those who we had known when they were alive. It was a traditional and necessary ritual of paying respects that we performed every year.

Ever since childhood, I have seen that death comes at different ages. However, funeral processions always terrified me, especially when I encountered them on the street. Grief is an experience that you instinctively want to avoid. But now in Ukraine, death leaves us no choice.

In our cities or along our roads, flags fly on numerous military cemeteries. Now I don’t feel the need to stay as far away from this crater in life as possible, rather I want to come closer and kneel, my head down.

Iryna Vikyrchak: Each moment somewhere for someone the world is ending. February 17

Few weeks ago (mid January it was)* I took part in a writer’s conference with other international writers in Kolkata, India. It was a panel discussion addressing the topic of “Writing for the post-pandemic world”. It was only then that I realised that in this part of the world the PCR tests and even the vaccination certificates are no longer needed for travel or visiting restaurants, as it was before in most places. Even masks on people’s faces are a very rare scene to observe. I was sincerely astonished: really? The pandemic is definitively over? The humanity overcame this crisis and now life continues as before? Evidently, there it was: we were in the midst of a literary event with crowds of unmasked people enjoying a mass gathering. And even for India covid was so harsh and so many people were taken by the virus, we were there, celebrating life and literature, discussing what it means to be a writer in this brand new world.

The Indian artist creating comics showed us her new works she was able to do thanks to the lockdown. The German author was cracking jokes about being locked in the house with his two toddlers and still having to write. Someone else mentioned the governments which were using the limitation to empower themselves or to suppress the protests. But what about my country? For the Ukrainian people the post-pandemic world never happened.

I tried to explain how surprised I was by the theme of this panel discussion. Neither me, nor none my compatriots had this privilege of being able to breath freely and realise that humanity overcame this global challenge and life now goes on. russia took it from us. russians came to our home to murder, torture, rape and loot. Covid-related problems were not considered as problems any more. It has not even lasted as memory. Except for all the kids that were already deprived of a couple of years of normal school are suffering this again, but that is a different story I’m gonna write.

Coming back to the panel discussion and the astonishment of making it through the pandemic. I tried to make my point that the role of writers is to stay vigilant and it was supported by another Indian colleague of mine who mentioned other trials democracy is undergoing now in different parts of the world.

“Each moment somewhere for someone the world is ending” — summed up the moderator as our time was running up to take that burden off our shoulders. It worked. Just for a moment. Because I don’t agree. When too many worlds are ending in too short a time and there is a maniac and/or a collective body, responsible for it, the rest of us shouldn’t just be watching.

I am recalling another conversation I had recently with someone from a diplomatic corpus. The lady was twice my age, a European diplomat with dozens of years of experience and wisdom. The level of the conversation was rather historical — we were zoomed out and were discussing the pre-sets for the russian aggression against Ukraine. It left me with a lot food for thought. But also — with a deep insight of why I prefer literature to history or politics.

The thing is, literature is personalised. It has a human face, it has a story of a life, a unique one, multidimensional, in most cases universal but also unrepeatable. It makes you feel. It puts the person in the centre of the world, and when this person we identify with while reading dies, the whole his or her world dies with it.

History, politics and statistics are impersonal. Numbers and dry theory don’t talk to us. They do talk to our intelligence, to our prior knowledge and ability to think generally and abstractly, analytically. But what is true life we can only find in literature. Or that latter true life.

This is also what makes us human — being aware that with each lost life the entire world is collapsing over and over again.

Iryna Vikyrchak: Confession of a poet after a year of war. February 17

If you think of yourself as a poet or a poetess and you are considering taking this path seriously, most likely sooner or later you will ask yourself this question: what can I do for poetry?

Really, what is the point of playing around with words, especially in difficult times, if all your efforts yield only fleeting, ephemeral results, if they come and go unnoticed and bring no useful or lasting effects? If they cannot save lives, cannot stop bullets or help unbury the survivors trapped under debris of a multi-storey building destroyed by a russian missile last night?

After having 365 days of dramatic experiences and devastating news every single day I have rephrased this egocentric question. And now I feel gratitude to poetry as such and I have found my remedy within it.

Having a war in your country is trying to continue living your normal life in the abnormal circumstances. It is giving all your energy to simply function within the environment of the utmost violence and uncertainty. It is carrying on of seemingly normal activities when each bomb explosion leaves a huge crater somewhere deeply in yourself. And poems are like plasters on these wounds: practically useless for fixing reality, but mentally holding you together, one poem at a time.

The new question I ask myself now on daily basis is this one: what poetry can do for me today?

It has become my coping mechanism: writing out my pain through it, soothing the fresh burning wounds, serving as an instant glue when my heart breaks into million pieces for each ruined life. It is a placebo for my helplessness, for inability to do the impossible, to stop the war, to punish the evil to bring back the dead. It serves as a prothesis for the phantom pain of my heart, which is somewhere far outside of me and out of my reach.

Poetry is not an antidote for the war, but if it can unite my pain with the pain of at least one other hurting person and bring us both healing or, at least, a temporary relief so we can take a breath in order to survive, that is a precious. For a short moment, for one deep breath, poetry can help us stay afloat and, may be, in a long run, save us eventually — breath by breath.

For more than 365 days I had no tears, only poetry to breath with.

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: Svitlana Stretovych, Iryna Vikyrchak

Translators (from Ukrainian): Halyna Bezukh (Svitlana Stretovych & Iryna Vikyrchak’s essays)

Illustrators: Victoria Boyko (Svitlana Stretovych & Iryna Vikyrchak’s essays) and plasticine panel by Olha Protasova

Copyeditors: Yuliia Moroz, Terra Friedman King

Proofreader: Iryna Andrieieva, Tetiana Vorobtsova, Terra Friedman King

Content Editors: Maryna Korchaka, Natalia Babalyk

Program Directors: Julia Ovcharenko and Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski