When much of Kharkiv’s city centre was demolished by Russian airstrikes at the start of Moscow’s invasion, the city’s historic House of the Word was among hundreds of buildings hit.
The block of flats, built by the Soviets in the 1920s for Ukrainian writers and poets of Kharkiv’s dynamic literary scene, was later a site for brutal purges in the 1930s, with dozens of intellectuals killed. Now Moscow has hit its residents again.
“It’s been almost a hundred years and it feels like history is repeating itself,” said Ivan Senin, a local poet, as the sound of heavy shelling echoed through the garden of Kharkiv’s Literary Museum, which is just a 10-minute walk from the House of the Word.
Founded after independence to celebrate Ukrainian culture and inspire a new generation, the museum has a courtyard that is lined with portraits of famous Ukrainian poets and writers – from Taras Shevchenko, the grandfather of Ukrainian literature, to the Kharkiv literary stars of the 1920s and the famous “Sixtiers” generation who started publishing Ukrainian works in the early 60s.
They all have one thing in common, said Senin. They were repressed for trying to promote Ukrainian culture. Since the war began he feels history is repeating, and his generation is taking inspiration from the resistance of the past.
“You can’t say this is the same situation,” said Senin, noting that the current generation of Ukrainian writers is the first to live through an all-out war with Russia. “But everything they were talking about, is still happening today – Russian chauvinism, their desire to be in control [of Ukraine].”
Senin and other Kharkiv writers who work with the museum, including award-winning poet and novelist Serhiy Zhadan, have decided to stay in the city despite the constant shelling and are working to boost morale by organising readings.
In the early 1920s, Ukrainian artists and writers had flocked to Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, making it an avant-garde hub, said Markian Dobczansky, an academic who specialises in Kharkiv culture during the Soviet era.
But as the House of the Word apartment building was finished in 1929, Joseph Stalin began to crack down on Ukrainian intellectuals whose exploration of their national identity threatened his desire to dictate the direction of the Soviet culture.
Getting a flat there had seemed like great luck, but became a curse. A total of 33 writers living there were executed; six were sent to forced labour camps, three of whom never returned, and two kill themselves. The scale of the killings meant the period became known as the “executed Renaissance”.
“One of the necessary steps on the way to building a dictatorship is to destroy alternative centres of power,” said Dobczansky. “Having [writers]... who had different ideas than Stalin was a kind of intellectual challenge for the whole Soviet enterprise.”
Sanctioned Soviet Ukrainian culture was then limited to its non-politicised aspects such as folk dancing, said Dobczansky. Still today, Ukrainian culture cannot be separated from politics.
“There’s no way for [Ukrainian culture] to have an independent direction of development without it offending the sensibilities of the Russian state,” said Dobczansky, adding that the Russian state denies the existence of Ukrainian identity.
Because Kharkiv is Russian speaking, close to the border, and the country’s capital in the early Soviet era, Moscow apparently expected its troops to be welcomed there. Perhaps officials even saw the city as a possible capital again, for the eastern half of a partitioned Ukraine.
But it has always had a strong Ukrainian identity that Moscow overlooked, as one of the birthplaces of the Ukrainian national movement two centuries ago, and an intellectual hub in the early 20th century.
“Russia has a real blind spot when it comes to Kharkiv,” said Dobczansky. “Kharkivians claim Ukrainian identity in their own way... They are Russian speaking, yes, but that’s a whole different thing than your political identity.
“There’s already been a generation of kids who went to Ukrainian schools. They speak Russian with each other, but in a political sense, and a kind of worldview sense, they see themselves as belonging to Ukraine.”
Only a few ancestors of the original House of the Word residents still live there. The Kharkiv Literary Museum uses a flat there for its residency programme. After the bombing, the apartment building still stands but has smashed windows and damaged walls.
Inside the museum, Senin says he has managed to write only one poem since the war started as he struggles to process his emotions. It is a testament to how Russia’s invasion has destroyed any dreams of a Russian Kharkiv.
No one invited them here to roam
Fuck all the predictions made.
Those who are attacking our home
Will never be forgiven for the raid.
Ivan Senin’s poem was translated by Anna Kurus
