In Shevchenko City Garden, in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, there is a new memorial to the children killed by invading Russians. Officially unveiled this summer by the first lady, Olena Zelenska, the bronze assemblage depicts a young boy and girl in the guise of angels, apparently embarking on a winged ascent to heaven. To my taste, it is a triumph of kitsch, whose sentimentality is out of step with the profound tragedies it commemorates. Still, when I visited, little offerings of toys had been left at the statue’s base: evidence that many people disagreed, and found it a useful focus of contemplation.
Ukraine’s landscape of memory is in a state of flux. On one hand, history is being rapidly reassessed. While many public sculptures in the capital and other cities are sandbagged and protected from missiles, Pushkinopad, or Pushkin-fall, is the name given to the steady removal of statues of the Russian poet from Ukrainian streets and squares. Over the past century, the author of Eugene Onegin has been so thoroughly appropriated as a metonym for the Russkiy mir, or Russian political and cultural space, and so consistently instrumentalised as a marker of Russian power and influence, that he has fallen foul of new Ukrainian decolonisation laws. Pushkin Park in Kyiv, for instance, is now Ivan Bahrianyi Park, named after the 20th-century Ukrainian novelist and dissident.
