Last year’s Lviv BookForum, a literary festival in the elegant western Ukrainian city, was mostly an online affair, held in a basement lecture theatre that might double up, if needed, as a bomb shelter. By contrast, this year’s edition had about 150 live events, with many available online, too.
Some were so popular that audiences, many of them in their 20s and 30s, filled the aisles and crowded at the back of the main venue, a handsome 16th-century “powder tower” that once formed part of the city’s arsenal. Publishers were selling books at stalls in the soft autumn sunshine. There was an evening of poetry and live music in the city’s marionette theatre. There was laughter, there was drinking, there were old friends to see and new ones to make.
But the turn of 12 months has meant other, darker changes. In October 2022, in the Field of Mars, where Lviv’s war dead are buried, I counted 153 graves of those killed since the start of the full-scale invasion. This autumn, I gave up at a heartbreaking 500. Each plot was overbowered with flowers and heaped with small offerings; from each was fluttering a yellow and blue flag. Beside many, quiet clusters of family and friends were sitting with their beloved dead.
In another part of the city’s Lychakiv cemetery is buried one of the most eloquent speakers of last year’s festival, the novelist turned war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina. Tiny yellow and pink roses bloomed on her grave, and someone had put out a glass of champagne for her. She died from her injuries on 1 July, aged 37, after the Russians targeted a pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. Her absence was everywhere.
In many of the events last year, Ukrainian writers spoke of shock, escape and survival; of abandoning novels and later tentatively taking up their pens to bear witness, to write essays and diaries. They spoke of how the escalation of Russia’s war against them had exploded through language, changing how they understood words, the world.
This time around, the topics had deepened and broadened. In some cases they had become more difficult. In one event Anne Applebaum – the author of Red Famine, about Stalin’s forced starvation of as many 4 million Ukrainians in 1932-33 – suggested that supporting dissident Russians was “something that Ukrainians might usefully do”. In response, a questioner from the audience asked who these dissidents could possibly be, since there is precious little sign of their existence. “Change is possible,” insisted Applebaum of Russia.
That seems unlikely any time soon to many Ukrainian observers, whose own post-1991 genealogy of protest and grassroots action seems deflatingly absent in their neighbour across the eastern border. In such conversations, it was possible to detect a certain gap in understanding and experience between the Ukrainians present, 19 months into resisting a devastating invasion, and even their most sympathetic friends.
The Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić, who lived through the violent collapse of Yugoslavia, warned Ukrainians that, postwar, “your experience will be so specific that transmitting it will be very difficult” to those abroad – and that coaxing their society back to peacetime norms will be a long, hard task of patching and repairing, “like making a quilt”.
When many Ukrainians see their struggle as a war of decolonisation, identifying Vladimir Putin’s invasion as a recrudescence of Russia’s imperial ambitions, why does much of the global south see the conflict in quite different terms, as a war between Russia and “the west”? Seeing the war solely through that prism, argued philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko in a fascinating conversation with Indian writer Pankaj Mishra and the Crimean Tatar journalist Sevgil Musayeva, eradicates the role of Ukraine itself.
Mishra pointed out that for many nations in the global south, including South Africa, their own anti-imperial struggles were supported by the USSR, a memory that still looms large. He also argued that a barrier to solidarity from the global south is the fact that Ukraine’s staunchest supporters, such as Britain, have not yet properly acknowledged their own crimes committed in the name of imperialism. He was speaking before the full horror of events unfolded in Israel and Gaza: the problem is yet more complex now.
Some of the most interesting conversations were about seemingly smaller, but in fact momentous things: grieving, intimacy, love. The festival programme director, Sofia Cheliak, spoke movingly of the death of her friend Amelina – and her pain when a well-meaning acquaintance repeatedly talked of the writer, soon after her death, as “a loss to Ukraine”.
“She was a person, she was funny, she was my friend. For me, the biggest loss is not of someone … who becomes a symbol, even though she is now clearly turning into a symbol.”
In a session on relationships, film-maker and writer Iryna Tsilyk spoke of the difficulties of reconnecting with her husband after his time on the frontline: his physical body might be in Kyiv, but “I have no comfort to offer because we have been in parallel realities”. In the light of the profound incompatibility of experience that pervades Ukraine, in light of the accompanying feelings of guilt, and the knowledge that “at subtle, deep levels we are all changed, and we often have little idea how fragile the person sitting next to us is”, what right, she asked, do we have to tell someone else’s stories?
Such questions hang in the air in Ukraine, fiercely debated, essentially unresolved. What is clear is that stories are powerful, and narratives can be truthful – or destructive: “The road for bombs and tanks has always been paved by books,” wrote the novelist and poet Oksana Zabuzhko last year, referring to the imperialist ideologies that inhere in certain classic Russian novels. But literature can also be a helping hand, a defender against loneliness.
As I left Lviv, I encountered the author and historian Olesya Khromeychuk, taping a clear plastic cover round a copy of her powerful memoir, The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister, ready to take it up to the Field of Mars. She’d seen an interview with another war-bereaved sister, and recognised some of the woman’s emotions. Khromeychuk had tried to find the woman on social media. She proved elusive. But next time she visits her brother’s grave, she will find Khromeychuk’s book there, carefully wrapped in plastic. I hope she finds some comfort in it.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
