Stalin erased one generation of Ukraine’s artists. Now Putin is killing another – including my friend
On 12 October last year, I met up in Kyiv with the novelist and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina, who died on 1 July from injuries sustained in an attack on a Kramatorsk pizza restaurant. We had first encountered each other some days earlier at a literary festival, Lviv BookForum, and taken the same overnight train to the Ukrainian capital. Ninety minutes after we arrived, on the morning of 10 October, Moscow targeted the city centre with cruise missiles.
The first person I rang to make sense of events, after the deafening whoosh-bang shook my hotel room windows, was Amelina. Her taxi home had taken her past three of the missile sites. Being absolutely unshakable in her calmness, and because of her determination to bear witness to events, she had got out of her taxi, filmed the smoking craters and recorded precisely what she had seen. One of the missiles had destroyed a children’s playground in Taras Shevchenko park nearby, which two days later we were now sitting in.
We started that conversation as relative strangers and ended up as friends: Amelina had a rare kind of ease and openness that drew people to her. She was also a sharp and subtle thinker, and an expert wielder of the kind of coal-black humour that can disarm, for a moment, the horror of war. She talked that day about what had changed for her since the fullscale invasion of Ukraine: she had set aside thoughts of a new novel to retrain as a war crimes investigator, and was researching a work of nonfiction, because, she said, “I see all those real people around me, and their stories have to be told.”
She told me about her fellow writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who had been disappeared by the Russian occupiers; and how she had dug up the diary he buried beneath the cherry saplings in his garden. And she told me how, when Kyiv was encircled and bombs were raining down on Kharkiv – when she wasn’t sure how many of her writer friends would survive – she had thought a great deal about the “executed renaissance”.
I had never heard that phrase before, but, as I met more Ukrainian cultural figures, I soon would, repeatedly. It refers to a generation of modernist novelists, poets, essayists, playwrights and directors working in the 1920s, mostly in the eastern city of Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. Under the Leninist policy of “Ukrainianisation” they initially flourished – they were even housed in their own elegant apartment block in Kharkiv, called Slovo House (“word house”). But under Stalin’s enforcement of a homogeneous, Moscow-centric Soviet culture, they were arrested in the early 1930s and killed, hundreds of them, in the great purge of 1937.
Their works were officially obliterated from the record – destroyed on printing presses in some cases. Much has been lost. What survived did so through the efforts of a few exiled keepers of the flame, or in archives opened after 1989, or in precious copies or typescripts concealed through the Soviet years. The tag “executed renaissance” comes from the title of an anthology published by dissidents in Paris in 1959. A plaque outside Slovo House – the building is still standing, despite the scar from a rocket that hit it last spring – records the names of the murdered writers who once lived there.
This brilliant flowering of Ukrainian-language art and literature, which surged up briefly in the cracks between the repressions of the Russian empire and those of the Soviet Union, represents a living tradition that directly feeds today’s generation of postMaidan writers and artists. The poet and pop star Serhiy Zhadan wrote his doctoral thesis on the futurist poetics of Mykhailo Semenko, a writer whom fellow poet Lyuba Yakimchuk also reveres: “He is my relative, but not by blood – rather, by literature,” she has said.
The author Oksana Zabuzhko has written in similar terms about the novelist Valerian Pidmohylny, whom she calls “a prose writer of ‘my blood type’”. At the time of his killing, aged 36, “he was only gaining momentum, only just showed his potential”, she has written. The scholar Bohdan Tokarskyi paints a vivid picture of the unruly, hybrid work of the generation: “They were symbolist here and expressionist there, baroque in one place and modernist in another; one moment they conformed to the Soviet rulebook, and the next they broke the rules.”
One of the apartments in Slovo House is now home to a writers’ residency. Amelina herself stayed there for a week last summer. She told me, with characteristic wry humour, that there hadn’t exactly been a long queue to do it, less than 20 miles from the Russian border. “People were worried about me, but I said: ‘The building has already been hit, and it won’t be hit twice.’” Then she joked that if she got killed, the memorial plaque would be ready and waiting for her name.
The irony of this seems almost unbearable now. She was blooming as a writer: she had recently been offered a UK publishing deal for her 2017 novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom; she was writing poems; there may yet be a way for her unfinished nonfiction book, Looking at Women Looking at War, to make its way into the world (in June she messaged me, excited that she had 50,000 words already). But those who encountered her mourn not just a remarkable individual, but the many books that will remain unwritten in the endless, cruel present tense of her death.
In April, I visited Slovo House and the Kharkiv Literary Museum, whose collection of precious 1920s manuscripts and early editions had been spirited away to safety against the danger of a second obliteration. The museum director, Tetiana Pylypchuk, told me two things worth holding on to now.
The first was how the writers of the 1920s “were thinking about the future – and we have to think about the future, even in the darkest times. They realised the role of culture in building the future, and we do too.” The second was about her own relationship with the literature of the 1920s. She discovered it as a student in the 1990s and it opened a door towards her sense of Ukrainian identity. “The first thing you feel about the writers of the 1920s is the shock of the scale of the loss,” said Pylypchuk. But then she added: “You have to talk about the scale of their achievements.”
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer