Kyiv Book Arsenal Festival: Life is happening now and here

The Kyiv Book Arsenal is intriguing as it is both a book fair (one of the biggest in Ukraine) and a literature festival simultaneously. Since 2011 it has been bringing together hundreds of publishers and thousands of readers for several spring days within the 18th-century Mystetskyi Arsenal building. The monumental building, which is also among the biggest museum structures in Europe, used to be a zeughaus – an armory. Now, it is dedicated to preserving art and thus safeguards the creative and literary community. This year the event happened in wartime conditions.

So it happened — nearly 100 events, over 200 festival program guests, and four days of readings, conversations, book sales, and enjoying the hot summer in Kyiv (interspersed with brief gentle rains).

For the visitors as well as for the participants, the Book Arsenal was fraught with uncertainties: will it take place? Would air raid sirens or bombardments interrupt the event?

In total, there were 18 foreign guests in the festival program. Some of them, such as the famous American historian Timothy Snyder, whose comprehensive course on Ukrainian history is a must for everyone exploring Ukraine, were present online. During the Arsenal, you could also meet Witold Szablowsky and Jonathan Littell, both writers and reporters and columnist Peter Pomerantsev. In addition, the IPA Vice President Gvantsa Jobava bravely attended the Arsenal and conducted a  seminar for Ukrainian publishers on international cooperation.

“My visit here is a gesture to say: we are here now, in solidarity, when you endure this difficult situation when you are at war. Meanwhile, you are so brave that you decided to hold a book fair during the war, and it is so inspiring. Your festival is a sign that even in these dreadful conditions, books and reading still matter,” Gvantsa said in a conversation with the Chytomo team.

The Kyiv Book Arsenal itself is a cornerstone for Ukrainian publishers, serving as a seasonal marker (Kyiv Book Arsenal in spring/early June and Lviv Book Forum in autumn).

Last year the festival was canceled due to the escalation of war, and the focus theme of that festival The Migration Period seemed prophetic, having been announced just a month before several millions of Ukrainians fled the country due to the conflict. This year’s theme When everything matters also reflects the war experience, in particular the time of aggravated reality when almost every word and every phrase acquires its original meaning, as a curator of the theme, Nataliya Gumenyuk mentioned.

This year’s festival was special, like any other festival that has taken place in Ukraine since the escalation of the war. Visitors hardly remember that COVID  ever existed, and meanwhile, they’re facing losses from the war, missile strikes  (like one in Kyiv only a day before the festival), and it had only been a few weeks since Russian troops destroyed the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant (one of the largest in Ukraine). Each event for Ukrainian audiences is now a unique opportunity to see their peers, most of whom  may be spread all over Ukraine, serving in the army, volunteering, or living  abroad as refugees

So it goes without saying that people at the Kyiv Book Arsenal were hungry for communication (although last year Ukraine hosted at least a few major literary festivals, for example, in Chernivtsi (Meridian Chernowitz) and in Kharkiv (The Fifth Kharkiv). In my eight years of attending the professional program at the Book Arsenal, I don’t recall public discussion being so packed at 11.00 on a Sunday or Saturday morning. It reminds me of Arsenal in 2014, right after the war began, when people gathered more because they deeply needed the support of each other, friends, and colleagues. 

The first glance at the official website of the festival offers  an important caution: “The Festival organizer reserves the right to make changes to the program and procedure of the Festival, with further notification of all interested parties through updates posted on the Book Arsenal website and social media.” And indeed, the entire event was in a fragile state.

“During the last year of the full-scale war no bomb, no siren air raid has deprived cultural, intellectual, and literary life in Ukraine. We can continue our existence,“ said the director of the Mystetskyi Arsenal, Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta at the opening of the festival. The meaning of this existence and presence (in a certain sense Dasein) in wartime is indescribable, yet precious.

This year not only were the conditions unique, but the format was also special. The participants of the fair program were not publishers (as is typical) but several indie bookstores based in Kyiv. The purpose of this change is not only to highlight the intriguing trend of new bookstores opening in Kyiv during the war but also to ensure equal conditions for all participants. It is worth noting here that 80% of Ukraine’s book publishing capacity is located in Kharkiv, which is 50 kilometers from the Russian border and is constantly shelled by Russian troops. The level of safety is different in Kyiv (which was hit almost every night in May, but the situation improved in June), as well as in Lviv and Ternopil, located in the western part of Ukraine. For some visitors, Kyiv is too dangerous, for others it is as peaceful as a sanatorium, like in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain by Tomas Mann).

“The bookstores in the city are islands of peace and life. I am happy that during the full-scale invasion not only the old bookstores are continuing to be open and full of people, but also we see new places opening in Kyiv — Knyzhkovy Lev (Book Lion), Skovoroda (named after the eminent Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda  — editor)”, said  Oleksiy Erinchak, the co-founder of the indie bookstore Sens. 

Each bookshop also presented social projects. For instance the Sens bookstore, in collaboration with the Dostupno UA Foundation, presented the “Words have meaning” project where one can learn the appropriate terminology for people with special needs in the form of cards. In times of war, when dozens of soldiers and people from the frontline territories are getting injured, such a project is essential. The Zakapelok bookstore together with the Vplyv Foundation presented a “Braille Books” project. During the festival, the bookstores collected donations to print a book in Braille by Ukrainian writer Tetiana Stus entitled The Secret Stories of Big and Small Victories.

Traditionally the festival is a platform for the voices of living artists, but here, during the Kyiv Arsenal, it was crucial to underscore the voices of those who had been slain. Some of them served in the armed forces, and some were kidnapped and killed in the occupied cities or died during missile strikes in cities far from the front line. The names of these artists resonated during the events, in the small talk of visitors, and at the book stands. Among these was the presentation of the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a writer who was found in a mass grave in Izyum city. It is known that Volodymyr Vakulenko buried his diary at his parents’ place, realizing that the occupiers would come for him.

“It is important to read Volodia`s diary as a testimony of horrendous  Russian crimes, especially for foreign readers. In the preface, I provide a broader contextualization for this story citing other Russian crimes, like the extermination of Ukrainian writers in the 1930ths, also referred to as the  Executed Renaissance. This, along with the diary itself, gives you a glimpse of the tradition of Russian crimes, and I hope we managed to translate the book into many languages,” commented Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina who worked on the edition.

Among the visitors were many military personnel, some of them are also writers, who haven’t seen their families for months, such as Ukrainian poet Yaryna Chornohuz, visiting with her little daughter.

“The preparation for the festival took place during the challenging times that we all survived all together: blackouts, bombardments, air raids. And throughout all this, we continued our work. Walking around Mystetskyi Arsenal today, each one of us is filled with gratitude for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which allow us to do our business and to be ourselves,” said the coordinator of the International Kyiv Book Arsenal Yulia Kozlovets during the opening.

A separate section was dedicated to the topic of the Russo-Ukrainian war, curated by indie bookstore Syaivo and Hanna Skorina, a scholar of veteran literature. Hanna pointed out that just during this year of invasion alone, 75 new titles about the war were published, including memoirs and fiction based on real events, some of them written by soldiers. 

Next to this section, visitors could also get acquainted with another important project — a 6,000-page book “Crime Without Punishment” (the title suggests an allusion to Dostoevsky’s novel). The concept of the book is to draw attention to the deportation of Ukrainian children by Russian soldiers, as the deportation of children is one of the indicators of genocide). There are 6,000 such cases in Ukraine officially recognized by the European Union, while the Ukrainian government cites 12,000. The book was presented in Germany, Poland, and four other European countries. After the Book Arsenal, it will travel to Chicago in the United States.

“I think that life is happening now and here. Of course, we have some hopes about the future, for what may come after Ukraine wins the war, but we care about what is happening now,” said Gvantsa.

The subway at the Arsenalna station is full of people with books. You can see groups of young people laughing loudly, arguing, and holding some of the popular Ukrainian books about the war — Drabyna (The Stairs), a novel about a refugee family written by Yevheniya Kusnetsova and a collection of poetry by Serhiy Zhadan (On love and trains). Some were engrossed in discussing the latest news  — on that very day, June 23,  President Zelenskyy announced the possibility of a Russian terrorist attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. A girl interrupted a  guy who was discussing the news: “We don’t know what we will have tomorrow, but today we have the Book Arsenal.” 

It seems that throughout the festival days, which ran from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.,   the skies remained calm, and not a single siren blared across the city, and Kyiv felt as festive as ever. Thousands flocked to the festival for the readings, the books, and the chance to come together, to see each other, and to share each other’s company. 

“In a broader sense, Kyiv Book Arsenal serves as a signal to readers in Ukraine and colleagues abroad that the Ukrainian book publishing industry is operational, and that, in itself, communicates a strong message. I believe that cultural events happening in Ukraine, despite all the odds, should excite, and we need this excitement”, said Kateryna Ivanova, the co-founder of the Knyzhkovyi Lev (Book Lion) independent bookstores, a sentiment I completely agree with.

Read also: The Ukrainian book was published abroad. It was a triumph! What will happen to it later?

Photos: Book Arsenal

The report was created with the support of the Chytomo Club