To remain human: instead of the results of the year

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For a conversation about the results of the year in culture in the circle of foreign colleagues, I once again listed notable cases that testify to changes in our never-a-priority field over the past year and a half:

– a new bookstore opens every month in Kyiv;

– the national reading week in the first days of December broke all social networks – thousands of people wrote about the importance of reading and their lists of recommended books;

– the metropolitan theater was put on a website due to the hype around tickets, which are resold on the black market at Broadway prices;

– The Odesa Museum reopened a month after a Russian missile hit right in its yard;

– last year, a 6-hour-long modern opera took place in the Khanenko Museum, occupying all the premises of the museum. And a few days after that, a Russian rocket hit a children’s playground near the museum and blew out windows and a 19th-century glass ceiling with an explosive wave. Director of the museum, Yuliya Vaganova, recently received an Italian award for saving cultural heritage.

At the same time, culture is actually not financed by the state, a large part of the professional cultural community has gone abroad, the country’s economy is in a critical state, and dozens of kamikaze drones fly over Ukraine every night along with cruise and ballistic missiles. Air defense shoots them down, but the fragments fall into housing and infrastructure, taking lives.

Whenever I speak these facts in a speech, I feel a mixture of incomprehension and embarrassment in the air, as if I am saying something obscene. People are surprised, think, but do not dare to comment, as if they do not really believe in the truth of my words. As if all this contradicts logic and common sense, and I cause cognitive dissonance in people with these statements.

Let’s imagine a foreigner reading the news and seeing pictures of crushed houses, tears in the middle of the streets, bloodied bodies and charred equipment. This prompts him to sympathize, inform and put pressure on his government to support Ukraine.

For this foreigner, a trip to the theater, opera or museum, buying a book is an excess of his calm and settled life. Satisfying the need for intellectual leisure is often a luxury beyond the reach of many.

Can he imagine that after a night of anxiety spent, if not in a bomb shelter, then in a corridor between two screens or on the bathroom floor, people can get to work in the morning, take their children to school and go first to the bookstore for a novel, and then to the vernissage and the performance? These two realities do not intersect in the mind of a person who does not experience war. A person who is used to security as something normal and inviolable.

In reality, where there is no war, culture is one thing. And in reality, where war has become a part of life, culture is completely different.

This other culture is not luxury or excess. This culture is a refuge, the very shelter from an unbearable reality that otherwise does not lend itself to any control or logical understanding, in which there is nothing normal for a long time. How is it possible, without the help of reflection and the distance that the practice of culture gives us, not to go crazy from the realization that a genocidal war is taking place online before the eyes of the world, which for 80 years has repeated the mantra of never again?

We need culture so that we don’t stop being human, so that we don’t forget ourselves in the struggle for survival, so that we don’t forget why people live at all. In the book “Amadoka” by Sofia Andruhovich, in the second part, there is a terrible image at the end, when a Jewish boy lives in terrible wanderings for several months, escaping from the Nazis, and finally gets to the house of his beloved. But he turns into some other creature, in which she no longer recognizes her partner, and understands that he can never become the same as before. Something in him had finally died, even if he was able to survive bodily.

Read also: “Ukrainians should not help Russians deal with their feelings of guilt” – writer Sofia Andruhovych

I read this book at the beginning of the pandemic (which were not bad times, if you think about it) and was numbed by the horror of the situation described by Sofia Andruhovich. What should be done to a person so that physical existence no longer has any meaning? How small must the value of life be to kill in man everything that distinguishes him from the beast?

Like millions of other Europeans, I believed that this could not happen in our time. I needed a book to imagine and understand through empathy how fragile our life is, or rather what is in us that turns our existence into real life. I’m glad I read Amadoku before the invasion. I wouldn’t be able to do it now. Here one would not break down from reading the daily news and find the strength to continue to believe in something good.

Iryna Tsylyk and Olesya Ostrovska, discussing Iryna’s latest column for a German-language European edition, reflect on the importance of reflecting on the personal experiences we live. Iryna, a writer and director, emphasizes that “I decided that I no longer have the right to write and film about others, but only about what I know very well, and therefore about my own experiences.”

Olesya Ostrovska, although she cannot so openly share her personal life, understood that “only a certain physical literal experience allows you to truly understand reality.” But how to “relate to the entire history of literature” after that?

It turns out that art and culture are not always and not the same for everyone. For people living on the existential edge, art is a way to capture this true understanding of reality that is unavailable in other ways, including through empathy.

On the other hand, it’s a judgment, because you can’t help but reflect on it and you can’t get anywhere from that experience by moving it to the periphery and something else to the center of attention.

After all, this is a method of therapy, separation from one’s experiences, distancing, which allows you to at least conceptually master what tends to capture and take away your mind completely.

Perhaps this cultural doom we find ourselves in as a society will be our reward? The ability to record the truth about our reality, which cracked along the Russian-Ukrainian front line, and continues to break like a broken mirror the whole world, will probably be converted into brilliant films, books, plays, songs, which sooner or later will be translated into other languages ​​and captivate readers all over the world the depth of horror faced by people who faced the aggressor in a genocidal war but survived.

But now we are in different realities, where every word needs translation, and it is not about philology. Words have different meanings depending on whether or not a missile is flying at you. You can understand this difference only when you know what it’s like to fly. And here the question is not about the ability to empathize with others, but about the fact that some reality cannot be understood through any words, it is experienced only physically. Guns can save us from physical destruction, but only through culture can we survive these inhumane times and preserve what we are fighting for.

Cover photo: Yulia Weber

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