Before I started reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in autumn last year, I’d never been to an active conflict zone. As a culture writer, I stumbled into writing about Ukraine, led by my curiosity and protected, to an extent, by my naivety. I got more than I bargained for. I had never seen at such close quarters the recent, direct consequences of war – the grief-felled parents, the improvised graves, the villagers with nowhere to go but their mine-riddled land and ruined homes. I’d never before met ordinary people who had dropped everything to sign up to the military to defend their country from an invasion. Because I write about culture, these “ordinary people” have tended to be novelists and cinematographers and playwrights, the kind of people I know and write about in Britain, but whose lives, because of history’s forking paths, have taken them in a direction I hope my British friends never have to follow.
Oddly enough, one of the ways I have tried to make sense of the profound shock of total war, the way it spills into and stains everything, has been through British novels and poems of the second world war. Just now I’m reading Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. It was written in 1938, and the way it summons London’s ordinariness cut with a seeping sense of dread seems horribly familiar: “But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered / World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks / And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily / Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’.”
Amid all this, what can stop hope – that fragile “thing with feathers” that Emily Dickinson wrote of – dying? In Ukraine, despite everything, I have found many reasons to hope, and most of those reasons have been people. Something that must strike any visitor to the country is the remarkable vitality of civil society. Everywhere there are people volunteering, doing humanitarian work, raising money: a tremendous national effort. It’s not just a phenomenon of the full-scale invasion, it’s longstanding – often forged in the painful furnace of the Maidan demonstrations almost a decade ago and hardened by the travails the country has experienced since. And among these people, I reserve special admiration for the younger women I’ve met – women in their 20s or 30s, who often seem older, because of the strength they’ve been obliged to show as the tides of history crash over them.
There is Kateryna Iakovlenko. She’s the editor of the culture website of the national broadcaster, running an energetic team expanding Ukrainian arts journalism. She’s also just co-curated a major exhibition of Ukrainian art at Lviv’s newly reopened arts centre, the Jam Factory. Her home town in Luhansk oblast, in eastern Ukraine, was occupied by Russian-backed separatists in 2014 – her “place of strength”, as she once described it, which she can’t return to. Until early last year she was living in Irpin, which became the frontline for the battle for Kyiv. Luckily she wasn’t in her apartment the night it took a direct hit, leaving her with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. She once told me that her coping mechanism is sheer hard work. She has written about how she believes that love and empathy are the fundamental underpinnings of her country’s civil society – small acts of gentle care adding up to a powerful sense of solidarity. “My love is born in grief and sorrow, and thanks to my rage, it becomes even stronger,” she has written.
There is Sofia Cheliak, a cultural broadcaster who also runs the programme for Lviv BookForum, a brilliant literary festival where ideas are exchanged vigorously, held in the thick of war. There is Bohdana Neborak, who is editor-in-chief of the Ukrainians magazine, a podcaster and cultural manager: she is elegant-minded, intellectually rigorous and an energetic ambassador for Ukrainian literature. There are the talented, generous, very funny photographers with whom I’ve covered stories for the Guardian, Anastasia Vlasova and Julia Kochetova. Julia told me once that her career had been defined by documenting conflict, not out of choice, but because war came to her doorstep: it’s an unlooked-for, tough destiny. There’s Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel peace prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties, whose work as a human rights lawyer is about strengthening institutions in Ukraine and campaigning for justice for war crimes. She is one of the most poised public speakers I have heard, and uses her quiet, eloquent powers of persuasion relentlessly. I could go on: there are many others.
I don’t like to use the word “hero”. I studied Homer, once: the original heroes, the violent, godlike men of the Iliad and the Odyssey, have nothing to do with these women. In our own times, declaring someone heroic often does that person a disservice, flattening out their human complexity, turning them into untouchable paragons. So I don’t call these women heroic. But when I think of the future of Ukraine in such hands, hope still perches in my soul.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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