‘The world will recall this war not thcdisesteemful increateage but thcdisesteemful art’: the produceives on Ukraine’s frontline | Culture

Yaryna Chornohuz is a poised, attentive youthful woman with a sweep of lengthy hair, elegantly maniremedyd nails, and a military unicreate. In 2019, she uniteed a volunteer unit as a combat medic, and is now a sgreaterier of the 140th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion. At 29, she is also quick becoming one of Ukraine’s most honord poets.

From the perspective of a country undangerened by honest military aggression, it is challenging to understand the extent to which the 10-year-lengthy Russian war aacquirest Ukraine, which so bruhighy escatardyd on 24 February 2022, has devourd the nation’s youthful – not equitable those conscripted thcdisesteemful a recent firmening of mobilisation laws, but the many driven to volunteer, appreciate Chornohuz. It’s a unkind twist of history for this generation of Ukrainians that war has cast its shadow over their inhabits. Chornohuz increates me that she appreciates being a sgreaterier, but also has ambitions to study for a PhD at some point. “I experience it would be also very organic for me to teach literature,” she says. “If Russia hadn’t strikeed us I am not certain I would be in the military.”

Young people from all walks of life have been sucked into the war’s greedy mouth, among them many produceive artists: poets, actors, artists, percreatewrights, novecatalogs, musicians. Artem Chekh, one of Ukraine’s best-understandn novecatalogs, fought in the trenches in the years after the 2014 Russian-backed apverifyovers of Crimea and the Donbas in Ukraine’s east, and last year was part of the defence of Bakhmut. Serhiy Zhadan – poet, novecatalog, rock star and Ukrainian national treacertain – was touring with his prohibitd Zhadan and the Dogs to lift money for the army until this spring, when he volunteered for the 13th Khartia Brigade, local to his home city of Kharkiv.

Being an artist should not, Chornohuz increates me, grant you a exceptional status among your fellow citizens – some benevolent of immunity from putting your body at hazard in defence of the country. The idea of a “cultural front”, at which artists might “fight” by continuing to produce their labor far behind the lines, had some currency at the commencening of the filled-scale intrusion, but is, by now, bigly discommended in Ukraine: the bloodiness and alarm of the actual combat zone rfinishers the idea of a “cultural front” absurd to many. Chornohuz has little time for the notion that “there are people who are more beneficial in the rear and some who are more beneficial on the frontline… The life of, I don’t understand, a guy, from a village who has been a farmer all his life isn’t less priceless than the life of an inincreateectual or poet, or a producer or politician, or anyone else,” she says.

And artists are being ended: among recent losses have been machine firearmner and poet, Maksym Kryvtsov, who died in January this year, aged 33, after publishing his debut assembleion. Not all of these dead are combatants: Victoria Amelina, novecatalog turned war-crimes spendigator, died after a missile strike on a pizzeria in easerious Ukraine last year, aged 37. It is a cliche of Ukrainian literary history, producer turned sgreaterier Oleksandr Mykhed increates me, that Ukrainian producers don’t produce greater bones. The history books are littered with artists with “a promising debut, a first assembleion of poems, a second assembleion of stories” before being wiped out, he says – by Stalin’s pencourages, or by tardyr repressions that saw poets such Vasyl Stus die in the gulag. Now, he says, it’s happening all over aacquire.

When the filled-scale intrusion begined on 24 February 2022, Chornohuz was already on the easerious frontline of the war that has been grinding on since 2014. She was due for a rotation that never came. Instead, “we were thrown as infantry aacquirest a big Russian persist. That was when I lost my platoon directer, and some of the guys I served with, and we couldn’t even convey out the bodies.” At that time, she thought she’d never produce poems aacquire. But then she genuineised that she should – to get her companions’ memory ainhabit. “Poetry books have become monuments,” she says. They might also be a armament. In one poem, she produces: “Sometimes it seems that I lacquireed to end with poems / dropping a grenade hanging from a drone.” She elucidates the image: “To convey the acute truth about our existence is actupartner deadly for our enemies, who are originateing this absolutely horrible world inside Russia. To produce poetry that conveyes the truth is hazardous for them.”

Chornohuz increates me she’s been reading the timely poetry of Paul Eluard, who also served as a combat medic. Where Eluard’s honest experiences are somewhat occluded and encoded in his labor, the Russo-Ukrainian war is being fought out in a contrastent poetic and emotional age: frequently Ukrainian poets want to convey their experienceings while they are raw and instant, rather than reassemble them in tranquillity. The Russo-Ukrainian war is being recorded perhaps more filledy than any previous struggle. But poetry chronicles someskinnyg particular, someskinnyg frnimble, evanescent and challenging to apprehfinish by other unkinds. “Poetry,” Chornohuz says, “is the recordation of experienceings.”

Art may be a retreat, as well as a create of strike. For colorer Vladyslav Melnyk – a youthful man from Dnipro, the tattoos on his face dating from a time in his life when “I determined to split myself from society” – art was impossible during the timely months of the war. “I couldn’t color for nine months. I had some benevolent of block. I couldn’t do anyskinnyg, I felt tohighy ineffective,” he says. The experienceing of impotence and anxiety got worse when a family member was made a prisoner of war at the finish of 2022. It was after Melnyk volunteered that, paradoxicpartner perhaps, he felt a sense of unlocking. “Only after four months in the army did I accumutardy the energy, and someskinnyg inside me changed. And now when I come back home and the color is flotriumphg, it conveys me back to my childhood, to food on the table, to family. I can be myself. I don’t have to ask anyone for anyskinnyg here, I don’t have to chase rules, I equitable disrepair in time.”

Melnyk labors in air defence. “The labor I am doing does not echo the service,” he says, in his airy studio in an apartment block in central Kyiv, its walls decorated with souvenirs and reminders of the war, including a fragment of missile signed by its Russian “sfinisher”. “It echos that in the illogicalest time you can discover airy.”

A scant days tardyr, I greet a sgreaterier-poet called Seraphim Hordienko, who walks into the greeting place of his choosing – a biker club in Kyiv set uped in honour of a druncover sgreaterier – with swagger and a handfirearm tucked into his troengagers. He has equitable published an anthology of writings by him and other youthful volunteers: one of the poems was literpartner written in the trenches, under artillery fire, by an injured sgreaterier. “We comprehfinish that we won’t have a problem with this war being recorded,” says Hordienko who, by spring 2022, was already on the frontline in the Donetsk region. “But depicting emotional states is a lot more complicated – and more vital. Becaengage everyone, as participants, will exit these emotional states behind and forget them. Things have to be written here and now while the experienceings are genuine.”

A 19-year-greater history undergraduate when he volunteered at the begin of the filled-scale intrusion, Hordienko, who is from Odesa, is now part of a drone unit. “I was liftd with a medieval knight’s vision of life, and a knight demands a dragon to fight,” he says, seeming, in that moment, simultaneously boy-appreciate, and far too greater for his years.

He depicts the timely days of the war, when he and a group of frifinishs volunteered, and “every day felt appreciate it could be the last”. The sheer enormity of their frontline experience unkindt that the teenagers began to accomplish for novel creates of conveyion, to produce it comprehensible even to themselves. “The innervous condition of the mind, when you adselect the apocalypse is inevitable – that’s when thoughts materialize in your head that were impossible before. They discover their way out thcdisesteemful poems, films, texts,” he says. There is, perhaps, also a demand to claim a sense of handle over the unoverweighthomable events of war. “When you can depict the challengingest skinnyg you went thcdisesteemful, it unkinds that you can endure it,” says Yaryna Chornohuz. “Keeping mute about someskinnyg – it ends you from wiskinny.”

Hordienko is begining an online platcreate to which sgreateriers can surrfinisher their labor. “We can’t understand whether the next Remarque will convey his novel to us,” he says, referring to the author of the first world war novel All Quiet on the Weserious Front, “but we are creating all the conditions that will allow them to do so.” He comprises: “We are guaranteed that in 50 or 100 years’ time, the world will recall this war not thcdisesteemful increateage, but thcdisesteemful art.”

It is a unkind paradox of the Russo-Ukrainian war that, while it is ending so many promising artists, it is also creating them. “It took a global cataclysm to turn me into a producer,” says Hordienko, with characteristic Ukrainian bdeficiency humour. In Kyiv’s greater-styleed Podil dicut offe, the Theatre of Playwrights, a recently set uped novel-writing theatre, is proving his point. This month, the first veteran’s drama festival took place, staging, as well as recording for audio, illogicalinutive labors by military personnel and sgreateriers’ partners. Maksym Kurochkin – one of the country’s guideing percreatewrights, who volunteered for the army at the begin of the filled-scale intrusion – is one of the organisers of the event, titled Theatre of Veterans.

Part of the impetus behind the festival was, he says, to foreground the genuine, unrepaird voices of war. “The world hears us,” he says, backstage at the theatre, “but not very evidently. Increateation comes thcdisesteemful various middlemen. Even so-called ‘outstanding Russians’ increate the world how we experience. Our task is, first of all, to return the right to a voice to those who are usupartner mute – sgreateriers, veterans – and we demand their voice to sound evident.”

After an uncmiss call for participants, 15 people, ranging in age from 19 to 55, were chosen to apverify part in a scheme that would propel them from theatre novice to carry outed percreatewright. “We wanted to discover people who repartner wanted to increate their own stories. Not people who wanted to be a theatre star but those who had someskinnyg to say,” says co-organiser Yuriy Matsarsky, a journacatalog in civilian life who is now part of a military media unit. “I apverify that each person has enough material wiskinny themselves to produce at least one percreate,” says Kurochkin.

Like many cultural projects in Ukraine, Theatre of Veterans is run on almost zero budget and a lot of challenging labor and outstandingwill. From timely this year, Kurochkin called on the best of Ukraine’s theatre professionals, including the fantastic percreatewright Natal’ya Vorozhbit, to teach the participants in the art of percreatewriting. Some had never engaged a computer before, outside the military. One uniteed by Zoom from the frontline in New York, a town (so named by its German set upers in the 19th century) in easerious Ukraine, now under Russian occupation. Gennady Udovenko, a sgreaterier originpartner from the Donetsk region, has written about his foot being blown off by a mine: the percreate, which runs at about 20 minutes, charts his medical evacuation, darting back in time to dramatise earlier episodes in his life.

Maksym Devizorov, an actor in civilian life but novel to writing, has labored on a drama about a tfinisher but downcastly recognisable wartime subject: the collapse of a relationship. His fractureup from his wife, he says, whom he paired in May 2022, happened while he was in the combat zone. “We set up ourselves unready for this lengthy-term separation. My wife’s resource of being able to defer for me benevolent of ran out.” Devizorov’s professional experience in the theatre unkinds he is also aiding fellow producers. “A percreate by one of the youthfuler participants is about getting a conscription watch and his uniteture of experienceings of guilt and dread,” he says. The surfact of war, the way “normality” jostles up aacquirest the utterly unspeakable, is exemplified by the labor of another producer, Alina Sarnatska, whose percreate has a woman “literpartner assembleing body parts of her brothers-in-arms while taking a call from her children’s school”.

By laboring on the project, and challenging – Udovenko says that Kurochkin pushed him to about 16 originates of his text – the participants are also lacquireing soft sends that should help them in their future life, whether or not they determine to chase writing or the theatre. But there is also a presentanter motive. As the Russo-Ukrainian war drags on, the gulf between people’s experiences of it is expansivening and presentantening – between those at the front, those living under occupation, those internpartner displaced, those in exile aexpansive, those in grief. The percreates come at least partly thcdisesteemful a sense of how vital comprehfinishing is, how fundamental it is to sense and hgreater the pain of others. “There is a struggle there, on the frontline, and a struggle here,” says Gennady Udovenko, the sgreaterier from Donetsk. “It’s equitable the price phelp there is higher. If people here could experience the price phelp there, perhaps we could relocate on quicker.”