Ukrainians Are Fighting the War With Poems and Artifacts, Not Weapons
How the war turned a culture reporter into a language student and prose writers into poets: Ukrainians are resisting the war's erasure of identity and memory by rescuing artifacts and writing poems.
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Culture is not a thing you look at, it is a lens you look through
After years of writing culture coverage, Charlotte says she grew less and less satisfied with simply judging whether a work was good or bad. She came to see culture as a lens for looking at the world rather than an object put in front of you to look at. The idea took shape gradually over 2020-2021. After the full-scale invasion, a Guardian colleague suggested she cover Ukrainian culture, and she agreed immediately. She believed artists would record this war the way they had recorded the First World War, and that what they left behind would be a deeper and more durable memory than news reporting.
— Charlotte HigginsThe war is not out on a border, it is in the middle of Kyiv
On her first trip to Kyiv, Russian forces had already been out of the city's surroundings for several months, and away from the front line everything was calm. Then, on the day she arrived, Kyiv was hit by its first large-scale cruise missile attack in months. She calls it a "pretty brutal" awakening. In that moment she understood that this was not a country that merely happened to have fighting on its border: the war had come back into the civilian centre of the city, and from then on that became the norm. Her own experience lets readers feel directly what she was reporting on — the cultural workers who go to work under that threat every day.
— Charlotte HigginsPeople turned to poetry because everyday language had stopped being enough
In his question, the host points out that many people in the book had been writing prose or plays before the war and turned to poetry once it began. Charlotte agrees, and offers two levels of explanation. On the practical level: poems are short, and can be finished on the move, in the moment; a novel by its nature demands time and sitting down. On the deeper level: the shock of the full-scale invasion was so great that everyday language no longer sufficed, and poetry is good at reassembling fragments of meaning. Ukrainian poets told her that in war, poetry falls back to its most elemental forms — laments for the dead, lullabies for children, curses for the enemy.
— Charlotte HigginsSoldiers starting to write long prose is the sadder news, not the better
She says that on a recent trip to a literary festival in Kyiv she found large numbers of soldiers writing prose and long memoirs, and that this is in fact a sadder sign. Writing a novel or a book-length work of non-fiction takes time, and the war has now dragged on for four years, so soldiers finally have the time to write something long. The shift in form is a mirror of the war's lengthening, and a sign that it has settled into a sustained, destructive state. Poetry was the immediate reaction; prose is the delayed sediment.
— Charlotte HigginsOnce an object is lost, the past can no longer be read out of it
She describes a group of young people at a museum in Lviv whose leader, as the front line moved, would rush semi-officially into dangerous areas to rescue artifacts and ask permission afterwards. Charlotte says she found it hard to understand at the time: who would stand in front of a rocket launcher just to rescue a poet's hat and a few personal effects? But the answer is that these people would. Her explanation: what makes you feel you belong to a national community is not only the intangible things like history and language — objects and artifacts are part of it too. Objects can be broken, lost, stolen, and once they are gone no knowledge can ever be drawn from them again. They have to exist for the past to remain legible.
— Charlotte HigginsThe war destroys artifacts and also kills the people documenting them
Victoria Amelina was a well-known Ukrainian novelist who switched to working as a war crimes investigator after the war began; she died in a missile strike in July 2023, aged only 37. Charlotte recalls meeting Victoria on her first visit to the Lviv Book Forum, and that when Kyiv was struck, Victoria was the first person to message and check she was safe. Later, when Charlotte was writing about poetry, Victoria helped her enormously. In the course of her investigations Victoria discovered that the children's author Volodia had disappeared, and dug up the war diary he had buried under a cherry tree in his garden. Charlotte suggested turning the story into a piece, and Victoria agreed. The day Charlotte finished writing it, Victoria was wounded, and she never read it. The detail shows the personal cost behind the work of cultural preservation.
— Charlotte HigginsIf you cannot name a Ukrainian writer, that is not Ukraine's failing
Charlotte makes a pointed observation: the West knows Russian culture inside out — everyone knows Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — but can barely name a Ukrainian novelist, poet or painter. She admits she was the same, until she spent four years going deep into Ukraine. Her view is that this is not because Ukraine lacks good culture, but because the tides of history submerged it: under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, writing in Ukrainian was severely restricted, Russian was the language of education, entertainment and ambition, and Ukrainian culture was pushed into second place. The cultures of Georgia, Belarus and other parts of the former empire were pressed down under Great Russian culture in the same way. The good work is still there, but you have to go looking for it.
— Charlotte HigginsIn their own words · checked verbatim
so yes it was a pretty rude awakening
Charlotte Higgins4:41
Poetry actually can be done on the hoof and it can be done in the moment
Charlotte Higgins11:02
I just didn't want to come back helpless, linguistically helpless
Charlotte Higgins15:14
what are those precious things that make meaning for us and how far would you go to save them
Charlotte Higgins24:31
Who can name Ukrainian novelists? Or Ukrainian poets. Or Ukrainian painters.
Charlotte Higgins34:31
Figures
| Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine | February 2022 | 1:10 |
| Victoria Amelina's age at death | 37 | 27:44 |
| When Victoria Amelina was hit | July 2023 | 27:44 |
| From the full-scale invasion to soldiers being seen writing prose | four years | 13:08 |
Glossary
- Cyrillic alphabet
- The writing system used by the Slavic languages; both Ukrainian and Russian are written in it.
- Lviv Book Forum
- The annual literary festival in Lviv, Ukraine, which has continued to be held through the war.
- citizen army
- An army made up of ordinary citizens rather than professional soldiers; Ukraine's army is one.
How to listen
Journalists, editors and scholars interested in how culture becomes part of a war's narrative, plus general readers who want to understand the logic of Ukrainian resistance.