In a time of violence, warfare and bloodshed, what is the use of literature? This was a question addressed at the Lviv BookForum, a three-day literary festival in the Ukrainian city, staged despite – and in defiance of – the Russian invasion.
The festival has brought together Ukrainian, British and international authors including human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, whose bestselling book, East West Street, is largely set in 20th-century Lviv.
Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mykhed told audiences that at the moment of the invasion, he realised: “You could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems. You could not hit someone with a book, you could try but it won’t work with the crazy occupiers from Moscow. I lost belief in the power of culture, lost interest in reading.”
That week, he enrolled in the armed forces. The sense of complete rupture was magnified when, “on the seventh day of the war – this sounds almost like a biblical story – my past, my wife’s past, was taken when a Russian shell destroyed our home”.
Soon, however, he started writing again. “I started writing non-fiction diaries, to be a witness to events. This is a primal function of art … More talented writers of the next generations will take this raw material and make a beautiful novel about it. But being in the centre of the hurricane you just try to grab the tiniest moments of your grief, the tiniest moments of your scream.”
“Art in war has a very practical role, to be a support, a help and to be a testimony, to be a tool for empowering memory,” said writer and translator Ostap Slyvynsky. “The most important is the testimony that’s recorded immediately, during events, not afterwards. We will not forget what’s happening now, because it’s unforgettable, it will remain in our individual memories and collective memories for a long time. But we will never speak about it the way we are speaking about it now.”
Volunteering in Lviv at the start of the war, he found himself helping give out food and drink, as refugees from the east of the country arrived. But he realised these were not their only basic needs. “I understood very quickly that people also have another very important need – to tell stories. I was an anonymous listener to them, often the first person to hear their stories.”
It is these tales of trauma and dislocation that have formed the basis of his Dictionary of War, which charts the transformation of everyday language during the conflict.
Artist Diana Berg, who has twice lost her home to Russian aggression, ran an arts centre in Mariupol, and endured the first days of the city’s brutal siege before escaping. Her work there gave her faith in the practical value of art in the most extreme situations, she said, after young people said their creative work helped them endure the war and forced deportation to Russia. For weeks, they lost contact, and Berg had no idea if they had survived one of the most violent ordeals of the invasion.
“Most of them are alive and safe now, and when we spoke to them finally, they said it was you who made us confident, who empowered us, it was there in your place that we learned we matter.”
She emphasised the need for creatives in Ukraine to communicate with audiences beyond its borders, and for people in the west to hear them. “We want people to engage with Ukrainian art and artists,” she said. “There is a bit of ‘west-splaining’.”
“I’m here in solidarity,” Sands told the Observer. “It’s a very bookish place; there are many Lvivian writers and poets and they believe in the power of the written word. They have long had a book festival and the fact that they are also organising it this year is a means of expressing the fact that we continue to exist, and please come and support us. And a bunch of us want to be supportive, although we are a bit anxious about being here.”
Sands has written about the violent tides of history that engulfed Lviv through the 20th century. “My grandfather left in 1914 as the Russians were about to occupy the city … one hundred years have passed and we are back in the same kind of scenario … For me and for many people, there is this sense we are back where we were – is it 1914? Is it 1939?”
