People living in the frontline Ukrainian city of Kharkiv have been close enough to death to look it in the eye – and make some kind of peace with its proximity. These are the hardcore ones, equipped “with nerves of steel” according to Nataliia Ivanova, the director of the Yermilov Centre, the city’s contemporary art gallery.
Daily life in Kharkiv.
A student population of about 200,000 in the university city has disappeared as undergraduates take classes online. Many others have left too, ground down by the stress and terror of nightly missile attacks 18.6 miles (30km) from the Russian border. Among those who have remained is an interconnected web of artists, poets and curators, impelled by a strong sense of mission: to keep a defiantly Ukrainian artistic scene alive.
“There is this concept of Kharkiv as a fortress,” said the publisher Oleksandr Savchuk. “But that is a dangerous idea. Because if there is no culture, the city will just turn into a grey zone, a military zone. Kharkiv itself will just disappear, and lose its integrity.”
Savchuk led the way downstairs into his premises in the city centre, where many buildings are boarded up, scarred or cratered. “When I started here in 2015,” he said, “I thought being in a basement would be a disadvantage.” Now the subterranean location is a blessing. He has set up one room as a “book shelter” – a place where readers can take refuge, attend events and browse his lovingly produced titles, most of them on Ukrainian art, history and culture.
Oleksandr Savchuk, publisher.
He is about to expand into a larger space, with its own coffee shop – “but it will also be underground. The recent shellings show it is too early to move to the surface.” Two nights before, three people had been killed in a residential district in the city. And, on 30 August, the creative community lost one of its own, when a young artist, Veronika Kozhushko, was killed in a missile strike.
Savchuk began publishing in 2005 when he was a lecturer at one of Kharkiv’s universities, often reprinting beautiful 19th- or early 20th-century books on Ukrainian history, anthropology or art. Back then, he had few readers in Kharkiv. The language and cultural leaning of most inhabitants was, until recently, Russian. He felt out of place, like a “white crow”.
“Most people were concentrating on their home, their work, their family – and feeling that they should stay away from politics,” he said. That is no longer an option: politics came crashing into the city with the violent force of cruise missiles and S300 bombs, and people started seeking answers in history – and in his books, he said. He now has a strong local readership and has published 10 titles since the start of the full-scale invasion, despite the difficulty of transporting materials into the city. Each book bears a colophon on the inside cover that reads “published during the war”.
In the early months of the war, he bumped into another Kharkivian cultural figure, the artist Kostiantyn Zorkin, when they were both seeking respite in the western city of Lviv. Now they are working on books together.
The war had created “a new era of collaboration”, said Zorkin, a shared spirit of defiance bringing cultural figures from different fields together.
Kostiantyn Zorkin in his studio.
At Kostiantyn’s Zorkin studio in Kharkiv. Oleksandr Savchuk, the publisher, showing the book by Kostiantyn Zorkin, In the Name of the City.
In his own studio – also, coincidentally, underground – Zorkin works with lovingly maintained tools to create work including carved wooden figures such as staffs topped with skulls, hearts or flowers, representing death, love and life, which he described as magical or ritual objects rather than sculpture. “There is a lot of death now,” he said. “These figures allow me to speak about the war.”
He is working on a carved, articulated wooden arm – an imagined prosthesis for a limbless ancient Greek statue, prompted by the sheer number of Ukrainians who are now amputees. “We are living in myth now,” he said. “We know what is love and what is death.”
One institution in the city had been particularly crucial to the new cross-currents between artists, he said: the city’s Literary Museum, and its director, Tetiana Pylypchuk.
Tetiana Pylypchuk, the head of the Literary Museum in Kharkiv.
The exhibition In the Name of the City at the Literary Museum.
The institution holds a precious collection – now evacuated to a safer location in the west – of manuscripts by the 1920s generation of Kharkivian writers. These authors invented a modernist Ukrainian-language literature when, from 1919 to 1934, Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That was also the era of avant garde Kharkiv-based artists such as Vasyl Yermilov and the theatre director Les Kurbas.
Brutally repressed by Stalin in the 1930s, this generation, now known as the “executed renaissance”, remains a touchstone for today’s Kharkiv creatives, who also cast back further in history to figures including the 18th-century philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. (Savchuk has published a single-volume edition of his complete works, which, at 2.7kg, might come in handy for self-defence, he joked.)
Before the full-scale invasion, said Zorkin, it would not have occurred to him to work with an official institution such as the Literary Museum. But when Pylypchuk invited him to create an exhibition, he took on the challenge. With the collaboration of a poet, a film-maker, an architect and others, it will also result in a graphic novel illustrated by Zorkin and published by Savchuk, and a film.
Titled In the Name of the City, the exhibition imagines Kharkiv as a ship containing travellers who shelter in its hold. This imaginary space below deck, enclosed and safe from the storm outside, is a place for reflection and discussion. “There is a sense of safety here,” said Pylypchuk of the enfolding, dim space Zorkin has created at the centre of the exhibition.
Nataliia Ivanova, the director of Yermilov Centre, at its current exhibition, Sense of Safety.
By coincidence, Sense of Safety is also the title of the current exhibition at the Yermilov Centre. Set in vast concrete spaces beneath one of the city’s main universities, it sheltered a community of Ukrainian artists during the first days of the invasion, including Zorkin and Pavlo Makov, who in March made an epic drive across Europe to convey his family to safety before representing Ukraine at the Venice Biennale.
But a sense of safety, said Nataliia Ivanova, the centre’s director, was also precarious and fragile: not only in Kharkiv, but in peaceful western European cities too. The exhibition contains work by Kharkiv’s most celebrated living artist, the photographer Boris Mikhailov, as well as younger artists from the city and abroad. The show is scattered with the Greek artist Andreas Angelidakis’s soft cushions made in the shape of ancient ruins – ready to be used by those who seek sanctuary when the Yermilov Centre doubles up as a bomb shelter.
Gamlet, a street artist in Kharkiv.
Gamlet’s work in the city.
A recruitment poster plastered over one of Gamlet’s pieces, and another of his works, called The Keys Are Missing Their Doors.
Above ground, a sense of care also flows through the philosophical, sometimes sardonic work of the Kharkiv street artist Gamlet, for whom the city’s rusting gates and neglected corners are a canvas. With their monochrome images and text, the works have a distinctive style that is now a part of Kharkiv’s grammar. A passerby might almost feel that the city itself is conversing with them.
In May 2022, when the streets were empty but for the military and volunteers, he made new works undisturbed by the police. He also repainted all his early text works, painting over the Russian he once used and remaking them in Ukrainian.
“I have never lived so much,” reads one made during the war, referring to the avalanche of events that Ukrainians have experienced over the past two years. “The keys are missing their doors,” reads another, a nod to the Kharkivian habit of keeping your house keys in your pocket, even if you are displaced and have no idea when you might return.
People relaxing at Sarzhyn Yar park in Kharkiv.
On a balmy autumn day, Kharkivians were demonstrating their adaptability in the face of nightly threats to life: Sarzhyn Yar park was busy with people jogging, reading in the sunshine and even taking cold-water dips in the plunge pools. At Trypichya, a city-centre restaurant that opened in the first summer of war, the owner, Mykyta Virchenko, was serving Ukrainian classics with a modern twist: bean hummus made with sunflower-seed tahini; home-fermented vegetables; and gombovsti, cottage-cheese dumplings from the Carpathians filled with sour cherry.
August 2022 was not the most obvious time to open a restaurant in Kharkiv. And yet Trypichya has survived, becoming a regular haunt for the city’s creative community. “Teachers, musicians, publishers, radio people come, and I’m glad to have them here,” said Virchenko. “It feels like a cultural renaissance like it was 100 years ago.”
Mykyta Virchenko, the owner of Trypichya restararunt.
The kitchen team of Trypichya restaraunt, cooking borscht for guests.
Ivanova, at the Yermilov Centre, was going nowhere. “I have only one life,” she said. “I can’t postpone things. I have exhibitions to put on, residencies to organise, things to be done in Kharkiv. I am not going to let the war ruin my plans. I can be useful here.”
