They took up arms to fight Russia. They’ve taken up pens to express themselves.
| Kyiv, Ukraine
The war in Ukraine has spawned a new generation of Ukrainian writers-turned-soldiers and soldiers-turned-writers who reconstruct the horrors of war in poetry and prose. Their voices are amplified by Ukrainian publishing houses and cultural envoys who recognize the public’s need to affirm Ukrainian identity while making sense of the unfolding madness.
“Everything that I have witnessed and experienced has taught me that I don’t have the right to forget,” says Maj. Andrii Kirichenko. “I must pass this on to others. Every story, every poem is rooted in reality.”
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onWar has always been a catalyst for creativity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no exception, as Ukrainian soldiers turn to writing poetry and prose to express their anger and pain at what they’ve seen on the battlefield.
Poetry appears to be a popular format for soldier-writers. Quick snatches that pack a punch are compatible with active duty. “Poetry is an important medium in wartime because of its short format,” says Pfc. Yaryna Chornohuz, a combat medic and poet. “It shows how we can all feel the same but from different points of view.”
“Being on the front line, it is easy to lose your humanity because you can see really horrible things that make you dead inside,” says Lviv Book Forum’s Sofia Cheliak. “But literature is a way to share the love and keep something good in you alive.”
When Ukrainian combat medic Dmytro Shandra writes poetry about his life on the front line, he does so in Russian.
It comes naturally. The son of schoolteachers, he grew up reading Russian literature. Besides, Ukraine and Russia have long shared a cultural space, and he wants Russians to read his work, to grasp how much hatred they have sown with their aggression in Ukraine.
“The most interesting fragments come from the least comfortable places, where the tensions and emotions run highest,” says Junior Sergeant Shandra, sitting on a park bench in Kyiv. He is briefly unsettled by the buzzing wheels of a passing cyclist because it reminds him of the hum of incoming drones – a sound so ubiquitous it torments civilians and soldiers alike.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onWar has always been a catalyst for creativity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no exception, as Ukrainian soldiers turn to writing poetry and prose to express their anger and pain at what they’ve seen on the battlefield.
Russia’s invasion has spawned a new generation of Ukrainian writers-turned-soldiers and soldiers-turned-writers who reconstruct the horrors of war in poetry and prose. Their voices, like Sgt. Shandra’s, are being amplified by Ukrainian publishing houses and promoters, who recognize people’s need to affirm their Ukrainian identity while making sense of the unfolding madness.
“People want to know what is happening in this war,” says Alla Lysenko, distribution manager at the Folio publishing house, which has tripled sales since the start of the war thanks to the surge of interest in Ukrainian historical nonfiction and Ukrainian-language books about the ongoing war. “They want to understand from firsthand, personal accounts, not just television.”
No longer on the margins
At the Kyiv Book Fest, a handful of men in uniform bask in celebrity status during panel discussions and author keynotes. Maj. Andrii Kirichenko smiles behind one of the busiest sales stands as women snap up his latest titles, then line up for his autograph.
“Everything that I have witnessed and experienced taught me that I don’t have the right to forget,” he says in between selfies and readings. “I must pass this on to others. Every story, every poem is rooted in reality.”
Hanna Skoryna, a literary promoter, makes sure that military writers like Maj. Kirichenko are heard. She took a serious interest in Russia-Ukraine war literature in a bid to reconnect with her husband, a soldier who had been fighting since 2014. By 2017, the independent researcher had tracked 150 Ukrainian titles about the conflict, only 30 known to the broader public.
“These accounts used to be on the margins,” says Ms. Skoryna, who has documented 580 new titles since 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine. Eighty of the titles are by soldiers. “Now, every home, every publishing house has been touched by the war,” she says.
Iryna Bilotesrkovska of the Squirrel-Bilka publishing house keeps the printing presses running in Kyiv despite regular blackouts. “People react differently to stressful events,” she points out. “Some don’t want to know anything at all. Others want to know everything; they are are brave and strong because they volunteer to let the war into their lives, into their homes, and into their heads.”
The inevitable common thread for Ukrainian writers of all stripes now is war – one that has grown in scale and intensity. “In the 15 minutes I was at a position, say, near Bakhmut, the number of mines, artillery, or tank shells fired by the Russians was much higher than in the 10 months I spent on the front lines in 2015,” writes Artem Chekh, a soldier and author of 16 books, in an online written conversation with The Christian Science Monitor.
“I am more interested in who will be left behind,” he adds. “Who will speak when the guns fall silent? Whose voices will continue to be heard? Because war gives rise to many meanings in literature, but will these writers be able to keep from losing themselves as writers? Is it not because of their naked nerves that they have the power of their words and thus become famous?”
The giant of war
Poetry appears to be a popular format for soldier-writers. Quick snatches that pack a punch are compatible with active duty. “Poetry is an important medium in wartime because of its short format,” says Pfc. Yaryna Chornohuz, a combat medic and poet who also writes prose. “It shows how we can all feel the same but from different points of view.”
Mr. Shandra dedicated his collection of poetry, “Solid Black,” to a fallen brother-in-arms he befriended in the early days of the war. It draws inspiration from the uncomfortable marriage of beauty and pain, using the titular color as a theme. “It is the blackness of your fear and despair; it is the blackness of the soil you are hiding in. It is the blackness of the night you operate in,” he explains.
Private Chornohuz likens war to a giant that makes everybody feel small and at the mercy of uncontrollable events. “When you are a soldier, you feel this,” she says while visiting her daughter in Kyiv between deployments. “You do a small job, you feel small. And the same thing happens to civilians under rocket attacks. You feel very small.”
Sofia Cheliak of the Lviv Book Forum, another book festival, knows about that. On Sept. 4, a Russian missile strike killed seven people in the center of Lviv in western Ukraine. Sitting on the terrace of a café just hours later, she reflects on the violence. “Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, everything is happening to you, with different degrees of intensity,” she says.
“Everything is horrible, horrible, and you can’t find language to explain this,” she adds, pondering the bonds that bind war-battered creatives. “You stop believing in God, in literature, in art for art.”
Her mind inevitably turns to her friend, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian author killed last year in a Russian missile strike on a pizza place in Kramatorsk. In an introduction to the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was tortured and killed by Russian soldiers in 2022, she had referred to the generation of Ukrainian writers in the 1920s and 1930s who were killed during the Stalinist purges in Ukraine.
The memory of those victims looms large in the collective creative consciousness taking shape now. “I am in the midst of the new ‘Executed Renaissance,’” Ms. Amelina had written.
“Literature is a way to share the love”
But lives cut short and interrupted projects have not been enough to stop Ukrainian culture from reasserting itself.
The full-scale invasion has spawned not just poetry, but also a huge amount of nonfiction writing, says Ms. Cheliak. Books range from occupation diaries, to memoirs by those who have suffered loss, to accounts by prisoners of war. And, of course, many writers have joined the army, while some soldiers have discovered writing at the front.
“Being on the front line, it is easy to lose your humanity because you can see really horrible things that make you dead inside,” she notes. “But literature is a way to share the love and keep something good in you alive.”
Like the need to fight, Ukrainians say, the act of writing is, today, an existential requirement.
“All throughout history, Russia told us that we are one nation, that we are nothing special,” says Ms. Bilotesrkovska. “Russia has tried to take our voice, to take our culture and appropriate all that we have and present it as theirs. But it is not. Right now, we are on our way to finding our own identity and our own voice.”
Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting of this article.
