Ukrainian intellectuals speak: "I feel a double threat: the bombings and being killed as an artist"

• PAOLO GIORDANO

  Corriere della Sera

Updated Wednesday, March 23, 2022-01:32

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There is a silent prejudice that accompanies our assessment of the war in Ukraine.

A prejudice that is very convenient for Vladimir Putin, with which he is in fact imbued.

The idea that there is really

se, that it is at most a by-product or a derivation of the Russian one.

And if there is no Ukrainian culture, perhaps there is no real state either.

Our imagination of Ukraine is poor.

It harkens back to some unfortunate commercials with burly peasants and scarves wrapped around their heads.

Then Chernobyl, hunger and backwardness.

We know the Russian classics, at least by hearsay, and we brag about it, but not contemporary Ukrainian writers (and maybe we brag about it too).

However, the limit is all ours.

This is not about foolishly banning Russian classics from our university courses, but about taking a step of maturity by recognizing that

, that there is a current scene - in kyiv, in Lviv, in Kharkov, in Odessa - that is the culmination of an ancient tradition, and that today is in close dialogue with ours.

Because if we are the first to not be able to free ourselves from the prejudice that Ukraine is "a part of the former Soviet Union", how do we expect a thought of freedom to rise through the ranks of power and finally turn into action?

At the Lviv book fair in 2016, I met Kateryna Mihalistyna,

.

She now tells me that she has lost the ability and desire to draw.

But

: she announces train schedules at the Kiev station, she translates antihemorrhagic drug brochures into Ukrainian.

And she helps me gather in record time as many Ukrainian writers and artists as possible who still have an Internet connection, to talk to them, to be able to write their names here.

I meet them on Zoom, one after the other, or in groups, for an entire day.

They have in common that they are young, Ukrainian, and that they have had a terrible night.

The nth.

“I have made it my duty to check the news only three times a day,” says Ostap Slyvynsky, “because it has become a compulsive gesture.

But tonight I was stuck until five.

.

That's not good".

Ostap Slyvynsky.

Like him, they all carry the signs of a lost dream in their voices and on their faces.

They have the same expression that is sometimes seen on people inside hospitals.

Under the bombs, Maria Kozyrenko speaks to me from her home, about 15 kilometers from Kharkiv.

So far, her village has been bomb-free and the Russians aren't there yet, but Maria, her husband, and her 11-year-old son spend most of their time in the only windowless room in the house. House.

They don't have a shelter.

Outside, Maria hears the explosions.

"They are different types of bombs, but I can't tell them apart, because I'm not an expert in weapons."

No, actually Maria Kozyrenko is a painter and a poet.

She is well known in Ukraine and her paintings are sold in international galleries.

In her field, in particular, she is a figure of reference, and that is why she has not left.

"It would be a desertion."

However, she thinks all the time about getting at least the child out of her.

"But where?".

, stops, exposed to bombing.

María and her husband go out to volunteer among the cars, bringing food, welcoming those who are cold.

I don't know if she is about to cry or if she is already in another zone of suffering, much more advanced, where all emotions collapse into exhaustion.

In January 2020, before the pandemic and the invasion, Maria was with her family in Martinique.

There she made a series of paintings, 'The Islands', for which she received several awards.

Some of those canvases are now piled up in the room where she is, I recognize them.

She hopes, by keeping them together, to better protect them from shelling.

Maria Primachenko's museum was razed to the ground by the Russians a few days ago.

We talked about it, but only for a moment.

The news flow in war is too fast to be entertained.

," Maria Kozyrenko tells me now.

"The first is that of the bombings, which affect everyone. The second is that they kill you as an intellectual."

There is a specter that hangs over Ukrainian culture, in fact over all artists, writers and thinkers.

It bears the name "Renaissance Executed".

Between the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, almost all Ukrainian intellectuals were killed by Stalin.

A massive and systematic elimination directed at all those who tried to give an identity back to the country.

Victoria Amelina also tells me about that massacre.

On February 24, she was returning from a family vacation in Egypt.

At the airport they were informed that the flight no longer existed.

They passed through Poland and Victoria left her 10-year-old son there.

She then went alone to Lviv.

.

Victoria Amelina is a poet, but she no longer writes.

"

For example, the director of PEN Ukraine has just left kyiv with his family and she is waiting for him, she has prepared a room to receive them.

In this new life, Victoria is in charge of coordinating humanitarian and ammunition arrivals.

In the previous one she organized a literary festival in New York.

No, not in New York City, but

, a city of just 10,000 inhabitants.

The origin of the name is mysterious: perhaps the wife of one of the German founders came from the USA.

In any case, Stalin Russified the name in Novgorodske, but as of 2021 the city has regained its original identity.

In fact, the festival was called True Stories, True Names.

"It was a festival at the front. Eight kilometers away was Horlivka, occupied by the Russians. But I guess from now on all Ukrainian festivals will be at the front."

The Italian writer Paolo Giordano, author of the report.

Before February 24, Ukraine was full of cultural festivals.

I met a group of directors and producers - Elena Rubashevska, Tetiana Stanieva, Veronika Kryzhna - located in different places, inside and outside the country.

Among them there was also a 20-year-old girl, Sofia Tymchyshyn, who works for a film festival near Lviv.

Now she went to kyiv to help.

"

. Yesterday we found a package at the door. Before leaving, people leave leftover food for those of us who stayed."

Sofía is so young and slender that it is incredible to imagine her there.

I ask her what she thinks she will go through, even though I know it's a stupid question.

"I'm 100 percent sure our military will pull it off," she says.

"But

. On the ground we can win, in the sky we can't." The no-fly zone is the point where all the discussions precipitate because only air cover would stop the bombing, the mass civilian casualties, the time spent underground, the constant terror. But the West is not going to impose it, they know it, I know it. Ukraine will continue to be bombed.

Nor is Ostap Slyvynsky considering leaving Lviv.

"On the contrary, I am considering joining the territorial defense forces."

Ostap is a poet and has no military experience.

In 2014, after the invasion of Crimea, he received the summons letter to the army, as a reservist.

«I remember that he was psychologically prepared.

I walked the streets and said goodbye to everything.

In the end, he was not called up to fight.

"But it could happen in two or three days."

He waits for the letter and meanwhile, like many, he deals with logistics, especially helping people who want to leave the country.

"

. We have a tradition of considering writers and poets part of the institutions. Not only on a moral level, but also on a pedagogical level. The Poles call it useful romanticism. During the Revolution of Dignity, in 2014, we were constantly reading, organizing, debating." They also went to the front, reciting poems to the soldiers, who often cried. "But now it's different.

There are tanks and there is political leadership."

In Ostap's house, journalists and photographers from kyiv and Dnipro are camping.

In everyone's house, at this moment, there is someone else, especially those displaced from the east.

I ask him about the phantom division of Ukraine into two: the western more European, the eastern more Russian.

"Let's stop talking about two Ukraines.

There is only one Ukraine, and it is united and in solidarity.

That division is part of Russian propaganda."

And Russian propaganda is the topic that comes up several times in these talks, in addition to the no-fly zone.

The propaganda that seems to have prepared this invasion for a long time, and that partially disproves the most convenient hypothesis of the initiative of a madman.

"It is a mistake to say that the war began on February 24.

. In all this there is nothing new. Only the brutality and scale are new». On the propaganda posters of the Soviet Union, remembers Ostap, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were three brothers, ranked from oldest to youngest.

“Now in Europe they understand the rush of countries like Poland and Slovakia to join NATO.

We are paying the price of

.

But Europe is the only option for Ukraine.

And vice versa".

Halyna Kruk looked at the social networks of many fellow writers and poets abroad, including Italian ones, and was upset.

"They spread aspects of Russian propaganda."

In 2014 one of her poems was recited in the European Parliament and today it sounds like an even more serious accusation: "Forgive them, Europe, and don't be surprised. / Here we are like animals, / Bullets hunt us like rabid wolves".

Halyna's husband is a physicist and a lawyer, but at the moment he fights in an unspecified position;

not even she is allowed to know where.

Halyna teaches medieval Ukrainian literature and even for her there is not much news on the propaganda front: "

, a Ukrainian state, a Ukrainian culture."

"Before 2014, almost all cultural content was in Russian," Marjana Savka tells me.

For this she founded, together with her husband, the publishing house The Old Lion, one of the first to publish only in Ukrainian.

They started with children's books, now they translate and export all kinds of literature, they have more than a hundred employees.

," she tells me.

"It was also seen at the Bologna book fair, where the Russian stand had this very tall poster, which dominated the others."

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