Before 24 February 2022, writer Oleksandr Mykhed, then 33, and his wife, Olena, had an enviable life. In 2018 they’d bought a three-storey townhouse in Hostomel, a suburb of Kyiv. On Saturdays, they’d go out for brunch – poached eggs for him, cottage cheese pancakes for her – and walk their dog, Lisa, in the forest. Their weekend ritual involved cleaning the house, and for Mykhed, that often meant being pleasurably distracted by one of their many books. Life was full of things to look forward to: tickets for a Nick Cave concert; his new book, on classic Ukrainian authors, nearly finished. On weekend evenings they’d cook something delicious. Olena was perfecting her shrimp curry.
Just over two years later, I meet Mykhed at a Georgian cafe near Kyiv’s central railway station. He’s late because of an air raid alert: when the siren’s sour notes rise through the rush-hour bustle, Kyvians, as usual, look at their phones, discover it’s just planes loaded with ballistic missiles taking off in Russia, and by and large decide to get on with life. When Mykhed arrives, wearing a hoodie and cargo pants, he looks pale and tired, his once floppy blond hair shaved to a scalp-revealing military buzzcut. He volunteered for the armed forces as soon as the full-scale invasion started. He’s not allowed to tell me anything about his service, except that he’s just back after an exhausting 40-day training exercise. What he can tell me is that his old life is irretrievably lost. “I live with the feeling that I don’t have a past. I live with the feeling that I don’t have a future. I feel like my memories don’t belong to me,” he says. He doesn’t even know how old he is, he says – 36, officially. The war has made him feel both way older than that, and way younger.
In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion, the veil of normality was already beginning to slip. Over dinner one night in December 2021, Artem Chekh, a writer and veteran of the earlier phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war that began in 2014, remarked that a British magazine had asked him to write about preparations for a full-scale invasion. “I can’t imagine Russians pummelling Kyiv with rockets just like that,” Mykhed remembers saying. Nevertheless, he and Olena were sufficiently rattled that on 18 December they went on an unconventional shopping trip for a power bank, a knife, an axe, a head torch, freeze-dried food and a first aid kit – the ingredients of an emergency grab bag. Then, in mid-February, for the first time in his life, Mykhed touched a gun. He and Olena did a few hours’ training on how to assemble and disassemble a Kalashnikov. The boundaries of what might constitute ordinary life were becoming thoroughly distorted.
And then came 24 February. Early that morning, the couple woke to a scene that should have been played out to Ride of the Valkyries: “It was helicopters, helicopters, and there was the smell of gunpowder in the air. That smell of gunpowder: as a writer, you realise this is a detail that you could not invent,” he says. It was the Russians battling for the airport a few miles from their home. He tried to persuade his parents to leave the apartment they had recently moved to, in a nearby leafy commuter town. They refused, and stayed at home. That evening, Mykhed and Olena took their grab bags and got out of there, heading to the south-western city of Chernivtsi.
Within less than a week, life had completely transformed. The house in Hostomel was destroyed by a direct artillery hit. He signed up for the military. His parents were enduring occupation at home in Bucha; its streets were soon strewn with the corpses of civilians. It was more than three months before he saw the physical ruins of his old life: birds had already nested in the wreck of his house, among the Dostoevskys and Nabokovs, the Russian classics his wife, who visited earlier, decided not to rescue from the rubble. In his new book, The Language of War, Mykhed remarks that only a bad poet would be tempted to use those nesting birds as some kind of metaphor for stirrings of new life.
And the other guests at that dinner party, back in the old life, in December 2021? One is already dead: Viktor Onysko, a film editor who also signed up to the army, was killed, aged 40, by a Russian shell on the penultimate day of 2022. One of the chapters of Mykhed’s new book is a “requiem” for this beloved friend, whose call sign was Tarantino. “It is not normal, for any writer from my generation to know how to write requiems and obituaries for friends and fellow writers. But I know how to do that. And I don’t want to do that any more,” he says.
The Language of War is a book told in short, jabbing, paragraphs, written in the moment, and charting the first year of Russia’s invasion, precisely, he says, to preserve his “huge feeling of rage”. Scattering fragments of his exploded past through the brutal reality of a grindingly violent present, he connects “what’s happening to me, what’s happening to my family, what’s happening to my friends,” to the wider story of “what’s happening to my generation, what’s happening to the country”. He wants the book to be “a time capsule for myself so that I know where I’ve been, when in five years or 10 years, my rage won’t be so sharp. And I want it to be sharp.” The Language of War is, he says, a testament of “rage, love and memory”.
Mykhed’s rage is epic, Homeric. Russia’s invasion is genocidal, he argues. He points to double-tap strikes (when rescue missions are deliberately targeted); the use of phosphorus bombs; the abduction of thousands of children; ecologically consequential events such as the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and the occupation of Chornobyl nuclear power plant; the mass killing of civilians (a total still unknowable, but in Mariupol alone, for example, the Ukrainian city authorities estimated that 22,000 were killed during two months of fighting). His rage is against not just Putin but against the Russians – “because this is not Putin’s war. This is a war waged by the whole Russian nation, and all the people that are coming here to commit war crimes, and all the little people who think that they don’t influence it, but who are part of the evil.”
* * *
The Russian invasion is now scything through a generation of young Ukrainian men. In Kyiv and in Odesa, I’ve started hearing men in their late 20s and 30s discuss how they need to achieve as much as they can in their lives now, before they are mobilised, before they are killed. The war is killing farmers, doctors, engineers, IT specialists, people from all walks of life. And it is killing artists. Throughout Ukraine’s history, Mykhed says, artists have been killed before they’ve reached their full potential; it’s a cliche that Ukrainian writers die young, he says. The history of Ukrainian literature is “the promising debut, the first collection or second collection of stories, the future that might happen were it not for the Russian empire, or the Soviet Union,” he says. The horror is that “now we’re talking about the same thing, we have a generation of lost poets and writers.”
He names Victoria Amelina, a novelist turned war crimes investigator who had started writing poems before she was killed in a missile attack on a pizza restaurant last summer. “We are losing artists, actors, musicians, writers – a black void of loss,” he says. He also mentions poet Maksym Kryvtsov – callsign Dali – killed in action, “the author of one great poetry collection”. He believes Russian culture should be boycotted, and not just in Ukraine, but elsewhere, too, because, he argues, Russia uses culture as part of its “hybrid warfare”. He points to the director of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who has been quoted as describing international exhibitions sent out by Russia as “a ‘special operation’, a great cultural offensive”. The emotion he feels, he tells me, is specifically “not hatred, it is rage, because hatred doesn’t give you power, it’s more chaotic. But rage gives you words.”
Words are at the disposal of the writer, always – but what use are they when your country is invaded? As Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk has put it: “No metaphors work against an armed soldier. No poetry can save you from a tank.” However, words have other uses, providing you survive. That morning of 24 February, amid the terror, Mykhed realised he was witnessing a historic moment; that as an author, he should document it. “So I started writing in a notebook the feeling, the thought, the detail,” he says. These early observations became an essay published in March 2022, the basis of the first chapter of The Language of War. “The day I finished that text was the day I volunteered for the armed forces. Because I thought back then that this was not the time for writing. I had done my manifesto, I had told the world what we needed… I had done my work as an essayist and as a writer and I was now in the military.”
But his work as a writer was far from done. As time went on, terrible events unfolded: the killing of some of his neighbours, the experience of his parents in hiding in Bucha. “I realised that actually there was only one mechanism I could use to cope with this reality: I had to write.” Those short, jumpy paragraphs echo “how I breathe”. The time isn’t right, he says, for metaphor or symbolism or elaborate prose. “I’m trying to survive, I’m not trying to ‘think big’. I’m not trying to invent some kind of new art. I’m trying to make a document about a massacre.”
We talk about life here in Kyiv: here we are, sitting at a pleasant outdoor table on a terrace sipping mineral water. It is May, the weather is beautiful. The chestnut trees and acacias and roses are blooming. People are walking in the parks, eating out, and drinking a lot of delicious coffee, the preparation and consumption of which is taken extremely seriously in Ukraine. Olena, as well as volunteering for the war effort, has opened a bar in central Kyiv where very fine cocktails are served (Mykhed’s parents and indeed the dog, Lisa, are also safe for the moment). It looks normal, in a way – because, as Mykhed says: “We can have a nice drink, we can have lunch, we have taxis, we have a banking system, we have wifi, we have everything.” But it’s not normal, it’s really not.
“We have air raid alerts. And we say, ‘Let’s hope it’s only a short one,’” (which is exactly what I’d texted Mykhed earlier). “At the moment, we are having new blackouts. Again, this is totally abnormal for Europe during the 21st century, but it’s normal for Ukrainians who say, ‘Oh, it’s almost summer, it’s not like it was a year and a half ago when we had them during the winter, so we’re going to be fine.’ Each day, you have this feeling that the borders of normality are changing.” Another aspect of this boundary shifting, he says, is how military losses are folded into an acceptable statistical range. “One of the functions of art now is to try to remind people that this scale of loss is not normal.”
I have swallowed my instinct to ask Mykhed the Englishwoman’s phatic question, “How are you?” – there’s a section in the book where he describes what an impossible question this is to answer. But I do ask him about his failed attempt at having therapy, which he also mentions in The Language of War. He laughs. “You want to talk about that? The whole mechanism of trying to feel at least something is really interesting.” He feels numb, a lot of the time. Playing basketball has become a coping strategy. It’s a couple of hours when “I don’t think about anything except being with my team”.
He adds: “The particularity of the full-scale invasion is that you don’t have time to reflect, or any time for grieving, because each day brings something even more horrible into your mind: another missile attack; somebody else from your circle has been killed by Russians. It’s like a huge void inside of your body and everything is going into this void. Some of my friends are asking: ‘Are we gonna be OK when this ends? Is there any way that we will be normal, compared with our generation in different countries?’ And I don’t know.”
Mykhed’s face lights up when he tells me about the book on classic Ukrainian authors he was just finishing when the Russians invaded, which he co-wrote with his father, Pavlo, a literary scholar: its delayed publication date happens to be the day we meet. Its Ukrainian title translates as Alive – which, with a heavy resonance, is also the single word that his parents managed to text him during their weeks under occupation in Bucha. The book ranges from the formative years of the Ukraine-born Mykola Hohol – or, to use the Russian version of his name, Nikolai Gogol (his father’s lifelong academic focus) – all the way to novelist Taras Prokhasko, “a contemporary classic”, he says. Celebrating his colleagues – whether poets, painters or photographers – feels urgent, now. Especially the living ones, and especially those of his own generation.
“In normal life, people say: ‘Oh, we will see in 50 years, how great his or her work was.’ But that doesn’t work for me, because we are living in circumstances where we don’t know if we will have time for that.” Amid the bleakness, there’s a gleam of hope and a great deal of resolve about Mykhed. “The future: I don’t know when it will come. But for those who survive, the future is going to be bright. The issue is just how to stay alive.”
The Language of War by Oleksandr Mykhed is published by Allen Lane (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
