Russia’s war against Ukraine has never been only about territory and artillery, about politicians and putative peace deals. Of course, that is the easiest and most acceptable register in which to consider unthinkable violence: as a geopolitical problem happening at a far distance. But Russia’s aggression is an event of shocking magnitude in every individual life in Ukraine, and in lives elsewhere, too. The war is not only happening on the frontline but in homes and hearts. Deaths are mourned. Lives that were once straightforward have been propelled into directions that were never sought or wanted. Ambitions have been abandoned and plans have been cast aside. The war has crept like a mist into every chink of domestic life, into the tender, tremulous matters of love and sex, into the school day where cheerful young Ukrainian kids, alongside maths and English, get lessons on never, ever touching something that might be a mine.
“What we don’t see in the news headlines is conversations around the kitchen table – families discussing, for example, how much fuel they would need if they suddenly had to flee to Warsaw,” said Uilleam Blacker, associate professor of Ukrainian and East European culture at University College London, at an event last week. To come close to the feeling and texture of war as it is lived behind the lines – and behind front doors – it is necessary to turn to the work of Ukrainian artists, writers, playwrights and filmmakers. Blacker was in conversation with Natalya Vorozhbit, one of Ukraine’s most significant playwrights, and Molly Flynn, the editor of a new anthology of Ukrainian plays in English translation, which were all written in the wake of the Maidan protests a decade ago. Since then, Ukraine has seen an efflorescence of documentary theatre, often rapid and reactive, and centred on ordinary lives – work that has formed a kind of artistic parallel to Ukraine’s vigorous civil society.
This writing has been grounded in realism, but not always in expected ways. Vorozhbit’s play Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha, written in 2014, deals with a family coping with the death, in the war in the Donbas, of Sasha, a father and husband. The play starts after his death; his presence is initially a portrait on the wall. Then he begins to speak: a ghost, if you like. British author Deborah Levy once described how human “reality” does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations, thoughts and fantasies, which are also real events in our lives. Through our daydreams and reveries, we can time travel, talk to, and be addressed by, the dead. Such things are not the material of sober reports or news bulletins, but they are as meaningful, and they are the territory of art.
In Kyiv last autumn, I met a group of playwrights who were debating how to write in the thick of the full-scale war. In the immediate wake of 24 February 2022, it had felt difficult, and perhaps unimportant, to write at all, they told me: the focus was on how to survive. In the months that followed, though, there was an outpouring of documentary theatre, closely based on real accounts of stories of escape and survival. And last year, they told me, they detected a fresh turn in Ukrainian theatre. Some playwrights were using comedy in their work, some fantasy, some even forms of sci-fi. Playwright Oksana Grytsenko told me she was writing a play about Ukraine’s toppled statues of writer Alexander Pushkin coming alive to join the Russian military. When life is turned on its head, surreality and metaphor might provide the only accurate way to express a situation. Similarly, poetry is flourishing in Ukraine: it is the medium capable of expressing how violence explodes meaning; how it cuts into and unravels the plot coherence of individuals’ lives.
You might think that reading a poem about the war, or looking at a painting or watching a film, might somehow be a secondary experience, less immediate and instructive than, say, watching the news. I suspect the opposite is true: in the hands of a good artist, you can be plunged into the life of another human, all distance eradicated, all boundaries collapsed. This can be extraordinarily painful, as in the Bafta-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, whose director, Mstyslav Chernov, thrusts the viewer right inside the besieged city. Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk wrote a poem recently, which Blacker translated last week. It begins by considering a scene of recent horror and death. “Watching from afar, you can always stop in time, / not get too close, where the eye sees too much”. Literature, she writes, can edge us towards a position where we can absorb what might otherwise be unendurable details: “The child’s shoe, which flew into the air from the child’s foot, / when they were mixed with the shards of glass and concrete, the women’s broken fingernail emerging from the rubble, / the unblurred remains of the body”. A poem can offer a way of seeing an unblurred reality, in its bright and painful glare, Kruk suggests: the boundaries of artistic form contain it, and make it – just – bearable to see.
I think a lot about the tender paintings by Lucy Ivanova I saw last month in an exhibition at the Jam Factory, a newly opened arts centre in Lviv. Using the simple means at her disposal – small canvases, sketchbooks – she painted the most intimate scenes: her husband Yehor scrolling through the news, or sitting on the edge of the bed; the two of them naked, she heavily pregnant, in the kitchen of a temporary apartment; later, her son Sava at five days old. These works of art are also a witness to experience and the foundations of cultural memory. This, too, is the war.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
