While the UK has been engaged in its own kind of culture war, this event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival addressed something more consequential: the role of culture in a country actually at war.
In this case, Ukraine, now in the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
A podcast for deeper discussion
The event doubled as an episode of The Ukraine Shelf, reflecting how much serious cultural and political discussion now happens through podcasts, a format that, unlike television and radio, tends to give subjects room to breathe. Though the event ran for only an hour, it covered a great deal of ground, along with numerous reading suggestions for anyone wanting a better understanding of Ukraine and the conflict.
The Ukraine Shelf is hosted by Dr Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute London, and Dr Uilleam Blacker, a literary translator and scholar. Khromeychuk is also the widely praised author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. For this Book Festival event, they were joined by Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Culture and former journalist Bohdana Laiuk, and Guardian chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins, author of Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War. Together, they produced an engaging and enlightening discussion. It was, though, a pity that such an important topic attracted only a moderately sized audience in the Spiegeltent.
Not a luxury, but a necessity
The main theme running through the discussion was a shared belief that culture, and literature in particular, is not a luxury reserved for peacetime. Instead, it comes into its own during conflict, offering both a cathartic release from trauma and a way of making sense of it, reaching parts of the deeper story that journalism alone cannot always access.
Learning the language of resistance
For Higgins, the invasion led to something of a career change. Long a writer on culture, she found herself becoming something of a war correspondent, making regular trips to Ukraine. She decided to learn the language, partly to communicate better with Ukrainians, and partly because she saw the Russian invasion as, in part, an attempt at cultural annihilation: a denial of Ukraine’s existence as an independent country and of the Ukrainian language itself.
Travelling to Ukraine without the language, she said, left her ‘feeling helpless’. She also spoke of enjoying the subtleties of Ukrainian, such as its fine distinctions between verbs of movement, layers of meaning that English lacks, which deepened her experience of the country. Even so, she admitted still wanting to get properly to grips with the language, well enough to read poetry in the original and conduct ‘proper interviews’.
Blacker made the related point that many foreign visitors to Ukraine speak Russian, which allows them to communicate with most Ukrainians but also means they tend to view the country ‘through the prism of Russian and Russia’. This, he suggested, only underlines the importance of preserving and spreading the Ukrainian language.
Laiuk agreed that AI could assist here, but argued that literary translation remains ‘a very subtle art’, one that lies beyond it. In her political role, she focuses on encouraging people to learn Ukrainian and on supporting those who write in it, while also welcoming the translation of more foreign writers into Ukrainian, whose fresh perspectives feed into the culture. She is involved in efforts to create more literary prizes for what she called this ‘small language’, partly as a way of countering the decline in reading seen in many countries.
Higgins reflected that what began as a single piece on Ukraine had grown into ‘a big part of my career and life’. Writers, she said, can ‘detect vibrations’, social and cultural shifts not yet visible to others and often only recognised years later, doing work that journalists cannot.
She argued that ‘war is bound up in culture’, and that the question of whether Ukraine has a history and culture separate from Russia’s sits at the very heart of the conflict. Denial of that separate culture, she noted, is central to Putin’s justifications, including the idea of Russkiy Mir. In short, ‘culture is always a part of war’, and it offers a lens on the conflict that she finds ‘highly generative’, a ‘route to a deep engagement’.
That cultural lens, she added, has helped drive greater Western awareness of Ukraine, not in financial terms but in a growing sense of a country that needs to be supported. Writers and artists, she suggested, have helped put Ukraine on the map, in every sense. For Khromeychuk, this is precisely why culture has become ‘a target’ in the war.
Books as critical infrastructure
Laiuk described how culture has become part of Ukraine’s national security. In recent months, more than a third of the country’s published books have been destroyed in Russian strikes, strikes she was clear were deliberate. Ukraine’s flourishing book market, along with its libraries and bookshops, forms part of what she called the country’s ‘critical infrastructure’. Blacker put a number on the toll: around 10 million books destroyed, including many school textbooks, with real consequences for education.
The form we reach for in extremis
Yet cultural life has continued. Higgins spoke of how poetry and poetry readings have become a significant part of wartime culture, recalling her experience of readings held in bomb shelters, often intensely emotional, something close to a religious experience.
She wasn’t surprised poetry had taken off in this way, calling it ‘the form we reach for in extremis’, the form of the lament and the lullaby, reached for ‘when all meaning has been stripped’ and the future feels uncertain. This ‘subterranean poetry’ produced some of her most powerful experiences of the war.
A bad time for fiction
Novels are a different matter. Unlike poetry, great novels need time to be written and for their themes to settle. For Laiuk, this is ‘a bad time for fiction’, a period when people lack the time and peace needed for extended work, and some novelists feel it is still too early to publish what they are writing. Long-form journalism has filled some of that gap, and novels responding to the 2014 invasion are only now beginning to appear; anything responding deeply to 2022 remains further off. As Laiuk put it, ‘literature takes time’.
That, ultimately, was the discussion’s overriding theme: that the creative act is inseparable from war itself, and that the cultural energy still evident in Ukraine offers a genuinely hopeful sign for the country’s future. By the time the discussion turned to reading recommendations, there were almost too many writers and titles to mention, testament to the richness of a culture continuing to create, argue and reflect even in the midst of war.
