October 13-19, 2022 Volodymyr Yermolenko, Svitlana Stretovych, Taras Prokhasko, 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 31 continues to present the series. You can get acquainted with the previous collection here.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: What is Ukrainian culture? October 13

This has not come to existence yesterday, nor on February 24, nor in 2014. The brutality of russian violence against Ukraine, the imperial cult of sadism and humiliation, have been here for centuries. russia acted in Eastern Europe as an arrogant slave-owner who saw freedom as a major anomaly. It scorches the earth, turning life into death, freedom into slavery, and energy into indifference. Erasing, destroying, devouring any testimony that rebelled against it.

Conversely, this stubborn and fearless resistance of Ukraine against this aggression has deep roots behind. It has lived here for centuries, occasionally manifesting itself in uprisings and resistance. These roots are enwombed in the Ukrainian black soil, down to the heart of this land. They are buried in the memory of those who died, but did not break. This resistance lives in their breath, which can still be felt in rebel songs.

Many people ask us today: Who are you? Where did you come from? Why don’t you give up? We are finally starting to talk about ourselves. Finally, are they ready (as we believe) to listen to us.

Let me tell you about us. More specifically, about the Ukrainian culture. Let it be a few strokes to the portrait.

1. Ukrainian political culture is anti-tyrannical. The tyrant, the autocrat, the king is its major enemy. In the eternal dispute between the idea of empire and the idea of a republic, it takes the position of a republic. Ukrainian republicanism can be seen in the political organization of the Cossacks, free warriors who are regenerating today into fighters of the 21st century. We can see it in the Pacta et constitutiones of Hetman Pylyp Orlyk at the beginning of the 18th century; in the interpretation of the agreement between the Ukrainian Cossacks and 17th-century muscovy, as a contract with mutual obligations, rather than as a slave subordination, as the moscow tsar believed. We can see the republican idea in opposition to the “autocratic domination” expressed by Ukrainian intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century; in the idea of the community as the basic organism of political life in the texts of a key Ukrainian philosopher of that time, Mykhaylo Drahomanov. This confrontation to tyranny stretches through the Ukrainian uprisings and liberation movement — all the way to the Ukrainian Maidans of the 21st century. We can draw a line from Ukrainian political culture to the “noble republic” of the Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to the decentralized system of Medieval Rus’ described in the nineteenth century by a Ukrainian historian, Mykola Kostomarov; to the “German law” that regulated the autonomy of cities in Eastern Europe, and which, in turn, was rooted in the idea of autonomy of German and Italian city-states. This line goes back centuries ago, down to the Ancient Greece idea of a policy and the interpretation of the state as a polythea, an association of free and responsible citizens. When Drahomanov wrote about the Ukrainian “community” as the basis for politics, as a teacher of ancient history, he describes it roughly as Aristotle describes the origin of the policy. Ukrainian political culture interprets politics as a “bottom-up” process, as an association of people into communities, of communities into a state, of states into interstate unions, rather than as an imperial process of “top-down” politics, where everything is decided at the top of the pyramid, and politics turns into a vertical movement of orders and punishments. Staying in Eastern Europe, at the point of collision of different empires, often with tyrannical models of government, Ukraine amazingly stretched through the centuries this European idea of a republic and ancient polythea.

2. Ukrainian culture has its own peculiar attitude to time. There is no great conflict between the past and the future, between tradition and modernity. Past and future are intertwined in this culture, like patterns in botanical ornaments of Ukrainian houses. Because it often developed in a context where foreign conquerors waged wars against its tradition, the eras of cultural emancipation and cultural revival were characterized by a double leap — into a deep tradition and into an unparalleled future. The main gap of the last few centuries in Europe, since the French Revolution until today, the gap between tradition and modernity, is much less characteristic of Ukrainian culture. Taras Shevchenko, the “founding father” of Ukrainian literature, rediscovers the Ukrainian tradition. However, for his time, he was a modernist revolutionary. That is why Dmytro Horbachov, one of the most prominent experts in the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, compared his texts with the texts of the futurists of the early twentieth century. The key “modernists” of the fin de siècle era, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, Olha Kobylianska, Vasyl Stefanyk, modernized the Ukrainian language and style of Ukrainian literature, while at the same time making a leap into the deep past or traditions of Ukrainian peasants. The Ukrainian avant-garde, from futurists to Malevich, saw in the Ukrainian visual and verbal tradition the basis for a revolutionary leap. And even today, the main trend of Ukrainian music is a combination of ethnic traditions and modern rhythms. Listen to DakhaBrakha, Onuka, Go-A, Kalush Orchestra, Mariana Sadovska — and you will feel it very well.

3. Land is one of the key archetypes and leitmotifs of Ukrainian culture. This culture has a lot of botanical, floral, and organic elements. Words and sounds in this culture grow from the ground and return to it. Even in Skovoroda, a key Ukrainian Baroque philosopher, you can see the identification of thought with seed. It is the old Christian (and ancient agrarian) metaphor, which finds yet another soil for itself in Ukraine. The founders of their modern literatures of the nineteenth century, the Ukrainian Shevchenko and the russian pushkin, are radically different: pushkin created a literary russian language, transferring there the cult of lightness of the French belles lettres from the Rococo era, weaving words into the air, which produces a pleasant and embellished effect, but non-obligatory and politically flexible. On the other hand, Shevchenko extracts his words as if from the ground; they germinate in him and through him, like Polissia forests; they have grown their roots in this land and are not going anywhere from it — therefore they are politically unbreakable. When the russian writer and landowner turgenev described to his russian friends the “Folk Stories” of the young writer Maria Markovich (Marko Vovchok), he said that “all this grows from the ground like a sapling.” Ukrainian literature was created from earth and fire, rather than from the air. Therefore, it was always intransigent and firm about the empire. It scalded, and did not give away its land.

4. Despite these organic metaphors, Ukrainian culture is often the subject of choice. It is quite inclusive, accepting those who have chosen to be Ukrainian. Olha Kobylianska could be a German-writing author but she chose the Ukrainian language for her writing. Yurii Shevelov, one of the key Ukrainian intellectuals of the twentieth century, was a German by birth. Mike Johansen, one of the most interesting writers of the “shot Renaissance” era also was of German origin. Ukrainian identity was chosen by Wilhelm von Habsburg, the second cousin of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, calling himself Vasyl Vyshyvany. He also became a colonel of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and aspired to become the “king of Ukraine”. One of the archetypal Ukrainian heroes is Aeneas — a Roman Trojan, who was transformed into a Ukrainian Cossack by Kotlyarevsky, since his poem and further. It laid yet another bridge from the Dnipro River to the Mediterranean. Ukrainian identity was chosen by Poles Volodymyr Antonovych, Viacheslav Lypynsky, Michal Tchaikovskyi, Michal Grabowski, and many others. Today, in addition to ethnic Ukrainians, there are also Ukrainian Crimean Tatars, Jews, russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and many more. A Crimean Tatar singer, Jamala, is today one of the most riveting Ukrainian musicians; Crimean Tatars Akhtem Seitablayev and Nariman Aliyev are some of the most interesting film directors.

5. Ukrainian culture has an amazing ability to regenerate. The metaphor of palingenesis, the passage through death, was a key metaphor for the 19th-century European romanticism — and that is how it came to Ukraine. But, apparently, in no other country has it been tested for durability like here. Our Renaissance and rebirth were destroyed, burned, wiped off the face of the earth — to rise again from the ashes later. Ukraine-Rus’ almost disappeared from the European map after the Mongol conquests in the 13th century, but it revived in the early modern era, in the 16–17th century. The russian empire erased it from the face of the earth and its own memory in the 18th century, to the extent that at the beginning of the 19th century there was a void in Ukraine. But out of a sudden, as if from the earth, Shevchenko came up. “As if a new head had grown to the decapitated body of the people,” according to a Ukrainian intellectual of the 20th century, Yevhen Malaniuk. For many generations, Shevchenko became a Ukrainian hetman, a president, a high priest, and a military commander. The Ukrainian language was banned in the russian empire for almost half a century, but the stronger came the outburst of the Ukrainian cultural revival in the 1910–1920s. This revival was repeatedly shot and destroyed in the 1930s — to burst out with renewed vigor in the 1960s, and later, after Ukrainian independence, in the 1990s. Today, russians are trying to obliterate it again. But the Ukrainians proved that they are able to go through death. They are able to be reborn from the seed. Capable of being a collective phoenix. They are created by earth and fire — and these elements do not destroy them, but rather empower them.

6. Women play a special role in Ukrainian culture. I think, the greatest writer of the Ukrainian canon is a woman, Lesya Ukrainka. No one can compare to her, neither with the sharpness of her texts, nor in the scale of thought. In the nineteenth century, when feminism in Europe was still in its infancy, when women writers had to hide behind male pen-names, there were several prominent female authors in Ukrainian literature already: Marko Vovchok, Anna Barvinok, Olena Pchilka, Olha Kobylianska, and Lesia Ukrainka herself. An Austrian author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who was born in Lviv and had keen sentiments for Galicia, described Ukrainian women as having “the ideas of freedom and equality in their blood. She is a Democrat.” In today’s Ukrainian culture, women’s voices so often give an incredibly true and personal human touch to reality.

7. Ukrainian culture has always seen itself as part of the European culture. Our discussions between nationalism and liberalism, tradition and modernity, community and individualism largely involved a common denominator: unity with the European context. This is a grand difference from russia, where the main consensus is the opposition of russia and Europe. Even when russia includes “Western ideas” (in the days of peter I and catherine II, in the days of alexander I, in the days of the bolshevik coup, in the days of the “capitalist” revolution of 1991), they are subsequently used to build a new anti-Western empire. To become worse than before.

In Ukraine, everything is the opposite. Our Slavophilism was European (much more closely related to the Western Slavs than to russians); our Marxism was European; our conservatism was European, and, of course, our liberalism, too.

Over the past decades, Ukraine has sought to return to the European home, to the European family. But today it gives Europe no less than it receives. It is becoming a home for Europe, too. It makes Europe feel like a family again. Passing through death and suffering, having an amazing ability to revive and be born anew, today, Ukraine gives a chance to Europe to be re-born, too.

The Ukrainian version of the text was written for the Ukrainian weekly magazine “Krayina,” translated into English for the “Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity” program and published with the consent of the author.

 Svitlana Stretovych: Light at the end of the war. October 13

Kyiv.

It is night outdoors.

It is absolutely dark in this yard. 

Two multi-storeyed buildings standing one after the other are not lit at all. Adults, children, elderly people with specific needs live in these buildings. There are no chances for heating some water, charging the phone or switching on a heater, taking the lift to the 16th floor so far. I am sure that not all of them have even managed to buy candles. That is why the windows are absolutely dark.

— Please, tell me, do you have candles? — I ask in the nearest shop. 

— No, none. And for quite a long period already. We have ordered them, but they are not been delivered yet.

We have to be ready for everything:

no electricity and water,

shortage of foodstuffs,

missile strikes and a nuclear explosion.

On October 10 the russian army staged another massive missile strike of the Ukrainian territories with particular cynicism, destroying critical infrastructure. Electricity was cut off in plenty of inhabited settlements. They cannot even be counted.

Luckily, it is warm outdoors. Indian summer. And you can just stay in silence when it is dark. Daily household problems are nothing tragic, but the other thing is that there are some places where life is generally not possible without electricity. 

I am just thinking about hospitals.

… 

— Go to the bomb shelter or leave the premises. Air alert! — says a guard in the hospital. 

We have come with a baby who is seven months old, with an emergency request. But there is no reception of patients during the air alert period. We leave the premises. Nobody knows how much we’ll have to wait. 

…

Everyone who chose to stay in Ukraine after the outbreak of the great war, probably, realized that it would all be not easy. But the desire to stay in the country, to help with your presence and with your work has won.

Even when you are going back home across the unlit European capital, the first thing that dawns on you is that winning in the war is about the engagement of each of us. Now victory lies in helping electricians restore stable electricity supply. Each of us has to reduce the general load on the power network and terminate all excessive spending. That is why a washing machine will now be used in the night time. And only after that you recall the fears you used to have in childhood.

But it is not darkness that you should be afraid of.

Kyiv.

It is night outdoors.

But Victory is coming. We feel it even where there is no light.

Taras Prokhasko: Our old cowshed got lit… October 13

Back in January, I got to sort out my library, again. Although I have been repeatedly doing it for thirty years now but the books kept landing in all possible nooks and holes in the house, in such big numbers that they threaten, as the desert sands, to devour the oases of life in the house. Thus, January and February were spent establishing the ecosystem balance. Besides, there was no reward for myself. I took some bags to the library hoping that many more generations of teenagers deserved to be clapped on with Dumas, Scott, and Simenon. Other bags, much heavier, were taken to the well-read men, dried up or bloated from bad nutrition, staying around the garbage bins and specializing in much lighter-weight cardboard.

When the war started, I remembered that the cold has always been a strategic weapon of russkies. One of the pillars of the many-centuries long regime of violence. It was not for nothing that the genocide they exercised was related to the relocation of victims to the perpetual cold areas. All types of punishments, far and near, also included the “lockup in the cold.” All discipline was based on the brink of tolerable and intolerable cold. All privileges were imbedded in the warm sheepskin overcoat and the cast-iron stove. The same as geopolitics dissolved in the dreams of the menials who were desperate for the south, such as Ukraine, sochi, Tashkent.

That is why, in the end of February, I stopped giving the books away. I remembered that the house had old people and children. And that the winter was coming in any case. Even when the house gets uninhabited or destroyed. It’s good that it has the stoves. And you can burn anything in there, even the nutshells. So, why not burning the unwanted books, in case it is needed. I can imagine how intricate this type of survival game can get. When in the morning, in complete darkness (for some reason, I picture the woolen worn out mittens) you are choosing several volumes and folios that are about to be devoured by fire that is hardly going to warm the area larger than five feet around. Some last sentences singled out from the blindish paragraphs as the food for the cooled down brain for the whole day. For the brain is mostly about water, some solution where the thoughts work like the semi-destroyed electric generator. 

I might add. The most important thing, in the present circumstances, is to watch the chimney. The written things never burn down to the ground. There is much more soot after the best books than after the brushwood from the nearby park. And chimney cleaning today is much more difficult than tolerating the warm smoke in the rooms that has not outlet to the chimney.

However, no fuel and no stove can retain the heat without the fabric. I remember the carpets, blankets, and coverlets with the straps sewn along the perimeter. I remember the pegs on the perimeter of all windows. They lived down to my childhood since the times of the previous colds of the previous great war (they did not have to take long, some thirty years only). I remember the family members walking in the house in the winter overcoats and sleeping in woolen hats and socks. Children always wearing the sweaters… The shimmering of flames out of the stove doors ajar….

In a feeble russkie armored vehicle in the middle of the forest, with no electricity to switch on an illegal heater, with nothing warm, with just the frost and ice on the outside of the iron case, the ice in the bread, the ice in the flask, the ice in the bones, and under the skull, we managed to survive thanks to the fabric. We would attach a woolen blanket to the ceiling, right in the middle, and stayed there next to each other nobody knows for how long (because the cold is a madly efficient time adjuster). It was not even a mountain hut, neither a teepee, nor a wigwam, nor a reindeer skin tent. It was the igloo with a piece of cloth.

That’s how you can survive. If you also have the books, the open fire stove, the cats, children, dogs, and Guinee pigs, if you finally sit next to each other, then, given the climate change, you shouldn’t be coming down to burning old photographs. After all, when the face images and personae are burning, I wonder whether survival is the goal per se.

 Volodymyr Yermolenko: Country as a baby. October 18

Your country is your baby. You’ll never, ever leave it. You won’t abandon it for a minute. You wake up when it’s awake. Your brain is designed to record its audio waves. It depends on your milk. It is reaching for your warmth. It can’t survive without you, and that’s why you can’t manage without it.

You take it underground with you, to hide from the missiles. It might have been born there, in the darkness of the dungeons. It might have been months before it saw the sky and the birds flying. Its lullabies are chopped off by fragments of enemy bombs. They are sung in a G-minor, in unison with the sounds of prolonged air alarms.

You didn’t immediately feel its presence inside you. You didn’t know right away whether to keep it. You might have seen it as a threat to yourself. You might have seen it as a prison for your freedom.

But then everything changed, suddenly and forever. The country has become your kin and forever alive. You began to recognize its smells and colors. You started looking forward to the moment when you can touch its skin. You looked into its eyes and recognized your own consolations and your own pains.

Your country is your baby. Everything in it now depends on you. Go out for a day and it will die. Get on the plane, fly across the ocean, and it will choke crying. Forget about it for a week, and it will be stolen from you forever. Give up your rights for a moment, and you won’t get them back. It will disappear without you; it will fall ill; it will starve to death. Its death will be your death. Its tomorrow will be your tomorrow. Your country is your baby.

It needs you every day from now on. When you go out for milk, you call and ask how it feels. You buy that milk, and bread, and candy, and you call again and ask if everything is all right. You call even when you’re in the elevator and you’ll see it in a minute. You ask how it is, you open the door, you take it in your arms, you ask how you are, it’s me. Your country is your baby.

It demands daily action. It makes you forget the words “rest” and “weekend”. It narrows your space and time, turning them into arrowheads. Those tips may be able to help you someday, at least you will not be unarmed then.

You know that — who else but you. You know that you are indispensable here now; there is only you and no one else. And suddenly you realize that there are millions of irreplaceable people in this country. They all think the same way you do. That being indispensable today is a duty and a privilege. Your country is your baby.

At the same time, no, it’s not. Your country is an old man who has grown into the trees of thick forests. He has the wisdom of the root and the hardness of the bark. He’ll give you a language when you’ve forgotten it. He will remind you of those who gave you a chance to have this day, and another day, and yet another one. He will remember who was born and died on this earth. He will preserve the memory of you, give it to your descendants, with underground water and cold autumn air.

But this old man grew up out of people like you. They are people who think they can always do more than everyone else. Those who thought that the earth would not manage without us. That it wouldn’t live to see the day of tomorrow if you do not do something right now, today, at this point in time.

A nation is when you give more than you take. When you always have the power to give something else. When through fatigue and despair you still see the sun and tomorrow. When so much depends on you and on those who stand shoulder to shoulder with you. When if you fall asleep today, the sun will fall on the earth and the Dnipro River will turn the tide north.

A nation is made up of independent people. Those who are always ready to go against all odds, but when needed, they are ready to be in the same boat. Those who know that, by and large, no one owes anything to them, and so it will always be. Those who are ready to take in their hands the country, their baby. To stay with it today, tomorrow, a year from now, and till the end of days. And to say, yes, this is my country, yes, my dear, it’s me.

The Ukrainian version of the text was written for the Ukrainian weekly magazine “Krayina”, translated into English for the “Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity” programme and published with the consent of the author.

Iryna Vikyrchak: Can you kill the past? October 19

On the 17th of October 2022, a russian bomb fell on a building in Kyiv downtown, not only taking the lives of innocent people but also ruining a 120-year-old architectural monument. And if there is one thing you should learn about Ukrainians and Ukrainity from this essay, it is that we grieve not only our dead but every loss of our tangible cultural heritage destroyed by russians. This very house was erected by a Jewish merchant and was a witness to Kyiv’s history and the lives of its people from the previous century. It had survived all the mischiefs of the time and contributed to the visual ensemble of the contemporary Kyiv streets. It has done nothing to provoke russian aggression. But for russia, the mere fact of being a cultural and/or historical artifact in Ukraine is a provocation. The poor old pal, another innocent architectural victim. 

The pain of this loss resonates very strongly with another heritage lost — so close to my heart it is almost personal. It was in my hometown, a small place in Western Ukraine located on the banks of the Dniester river with a Mediterranean-like microclimate. Thanks to these two factors and some local politics, it became a popular Polish resort in the 1930s and remained so throughout the interwar period. Back then, the heart of the town was in its main square in the shape of a rock castle from the 16th century. It had a long life, the castle, and watched centuries pass by. It survived the Turks in the 17th century, when it served, according to some theories, as a caravanserai. Later it was turned into a hunting residence of the Poniatowski, a Polish noble family. In the early 19th century, it was slightly rebuilt and made into the city hall. Craft shops dotted its perimeter, and a farmer’s market was scattered around it. What a treasure it must have been! 

It also survived World War I and II but did not survive the soviet (please, read: russian) occupation. As a little tourist guidebook published by the local authorities in the 1980s “proudly” presented, the castle was “dismantled during the redesign of the main square of this prosperous soviet town.” In 1968, a 500-year-old witness of time was cynically murdered. A marker of rich history and heritage; a red flag for the hateful eyes of the russian oppressive imperial machine.

I was born just twenty years later — a curious little girl, forever deprived of the right to see the history of my birthplace with my own eyes, to be part of it, to know it, to understand it better, to pass it on to my children one day. Instead,  my hometown appeared before my eyes with a vast barren space in the place of its historical heart, with a meaningless statue of lenin in the midst of it. Luckily, the statue was removed back in 1990, just after Ukraine regained independence. But my hometown is still hurting with an open wound and longing for its past. 

Sometimes I ask myself: will it ever be possible to speak about Ukraine without having to mention russia? Probably not until we reclaim everything stolen and ruined, everything erased and destroyed. Not until all our pains go away. But will they ever go away? They won’t until, for the first time in history, russia is made fully responsible for its crimes. 

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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, Svitlana Stretovych, Taras Prokhasko, Iryna Vikyrchak

Translators (from Ukrainian): Svitlana Bregman (Volodymyr Yermolenko & Taras Prokhasko’s essays), Halyna Pekhnyk (Svitlana Stretovych’s essay) 

Illustrators: Nastya Gaydaenko (Volodymyr Yermolenko’s essays), Victoria Boyko (Svitlana Stretovych & Iryna Vikyrchak’s essays), Yuliya Tabenska (Taras Prokhasko’s essay), and plasticine panel by Olha Protasova

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

Proofreaders: Iryna Andrieieva, Tetiana Vorobtsova, Terra Friedman King

Content Editors: Maryna Korchaka, Natalia Babalyk

Program Directors: Julia Ovcharenko and Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski