05.01.2025 / Renaissance of resistance

Happy New Year, dear readers and friends! In the last months of 2024 I had to accept my inability to maintain a constant, full-scale presence in multiple virtual worlds and real-life places, communities and relationships at the same time. I regret not writing the few pieces that were percolating to share with you, but I don’t regret whatever I did instead. The year concluded with a brief trip to the Kharkiv region with members of PEN Ukraine to deliver new books to libraries in towns scarred by russia’s invasion and occupation — as well as some snow tires for the AFU’s 92nd brigade. What follows was meant to be an FB post about a sliver of that journey, but it grew into something between reportage, reflection and desperate plea. A fitting start to 2025.

On New Year’s Day, russian drones exploded in the center of Kyiv, shattering the 83 windows of the historic National Writers’ Union building (at 2 Bankova St.) and covering the floors in debris. The top floors of another nearby historic landmark were destroyed, and the Ukrainian parliament’s administrative building was damaged. Prominent biologists Ihor Zyma and Olesia Sokur and their cat were killed at home.

Last week I attended a public discussion in Kharkiv’s DerzhProm building, a monument to 1920s Constructivist architecture that sustained damage last October when russia bombed the city center. Addressing the full auditorium, Kharkiv Literary Museum director Tetyana Pylypchuk asked: Can we talk about the Ukrainian cultural figures being killed today in russia’s 21st-century war against Ukraine as a new “executed renaissance”?

DerzhProm, Kharkiv, 27 December 2024

This was not a theoretical discussion. Kharkiv was the center of Ukrainian artistic activity in the 1920s, encouraged by the cultural policy of the fledgling Soviet government, and the capital of Soviet Ukraine through the end of 1933. The writers, artists and public intellectuals whose brilliant artistic and literary experiments gave form to the turbulent energy of the early years of the Ukrainian SSR were brutally suppressed by the Soviet regime in the 1930s and later dubbed the “executed renaissance.” The Slovo (Word) Building, where many of them lived and worked, was just a few blocks from our discussion venue; it was damaged by a russian airstrike in March 2022.

Over the past three years of all-out war, a devastating number of Ukrainian writers, poets, artists, dancers, actors, photographers, historians, composers, museum directors, philosophers in their prime have been killed by russia. During this time, Kharkiv Media Hub, the Literary Museum and PEN Ukraine have fielded thousands of questions from international journalists. One that keeps coming up with increasing frequency is whether Ukraine is undergoing a new “executed renaissance.”

Our local hosts and speakers were adamant that “rhyming” today’s tragic loss of people making 21st century Ukrainian culture with the executed renaissance a hundred years ago was misguided. After all, those Ukrainian artists of the early 20th century consciously contributed to the creation of the Soviet regime that in the 1930s arrested, tortured and executed them. Afterward their names and works were suppressed, and the public began to learn about them, their ideas and works only many decades later.

Today’s Ukrainian artists are resisting russia (the legal and ideological successor state of the USSR) with weapons in hand. Instead of being murdered in remote forests or prison labor camps, they are killed in battle. Is it appropriate to consider poet Maksym Kryvtsov, killed at age 33 while serving in the AFU, part of a new “executed renaissance”? That would belittle the decision that he—and others like him—made to fight so that Ukraine may exist. Members of Ukraine’s armed forces are writing poetry and prose from their positions near the front lines, sharing it on Facebook, and receiving literary awards they are unable to accept in person.

In the midst of russia’s genocidal attack, Ukrainian culture is flourishing again. This culture of resistance—determined to assert itself apart from any ideological project—is becoming richer, more complex and durable. With a new sense of agency Ukrainians are avidly seeking out the writers and artists that were previously suppressed by the Soviet regime or overlooked after Ukraine’s independence for being too entangled with the Communist authorities. Members of the historic “executed renaissance” oriented toward Europe, both in their search for new forms and foundations (like Mykola Khvylovy translating Virgil into Ukrainian). Still, the intellectuals of the 1920s were more naive than Ukrainian artists today: they did not understand that russia is the enemy—not only of Ukraine but of the entire world. And Europeans ought to recognize that russia’s destruction of Ukrainian cultural and historical landmarks is russia’s attack on European culture.

Why do journalists from abroad want to think of today’s Ukrainian artists as another “executed renaissance”? The question echoed through my mind as the speakers discussed the fundamental differences between then and now. Is it romantic to imagine artists as victims? Who benefits from thinking that asserting your cultural independence is brazen, rash and a challenge to European stability? As if making art that ambitiously claims Ukraine’s status as part of European culture and history is too audacious to allow. By using a concept from another moment in history to interpret the present moment, does that not block our view of what is actually going on?

When writer Victoria Amelina talked about a new executed renaissance in March 2022, she was warning the world about what russia will do if it is not stopped. “Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs,” she wrote in an essay titled “Cancel culture vs. execute culture.” She was urging us to see the darkness that lies at the heart of russian culture. A year later, in the summer of 2023, a russian missile strike on the crowded Kramatorsk pizza restaurant where Victoria and the foreign journalists she was guiding through wartime Ukraine were having dinner took her life.

As the discussion in Kharkiv drew to a close, a local woman in the audience noted that the ultimate result of Ukraine’s executed renaissance—the mass murder of our cultural and intellectual elites and the removal of their work from public view—was the arrested development of Ukrainian culture in the 20th century. This is our neighbor russia’s primary method of asserting its power over the peoples (not only Ukrainians) that it seeks to subjugate in its evil empire. Pylypchuk summed it up: when speaking to people from abroad, who may not be familiar with Ukraine’s complex early Soviet history, the notion of the “executed renaissance” can best describe how russia acts to maintain its power.

Like its predecessor, the Soviet Union, russia aims to destroy any instances of cultural and political autonomy in the people it seeks to dominate—ruthlessly mowing down and silencing expressions of resistance and independent thinking. What you see it doing in Ukraine it has done in the past to numerous other peoples (the Crimean Tatars, Belarusians, Udmurts, Karelians, to name a few, and don’t forget the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring). No matter what you call it, you can be sure russia will try to do it again.

“Another? Executed? Renaissance?” — Discussion organized by Kharkiv Media Hub, Kharkiv Literary Museum and PEN Ukraine, 26 December 2024

Participants:

• Moderator: Tetyana Pylypchuk, director of the Kharkiv Literary Museum

• Iryna Starovoyt, literary scholar, poet, translator, lecturer at Ukrainian Catholic University

• Anya Morozova, director of the Maksym Kryvtsov Memorial Foundation

• Vakhtang Kebuladze, philosopher, professor at Shevchenko National University

• Serhiy Zhadan, writer, musician, member of the AFU

• Volodymyr Yermolenko, philosopher, writer, translator, president of PEN Ukraine

PS When professional Ukrainian philosophers have been traveling the country to deliver vehicles to the AFU and members of the armed forces have been publishing their existential reflections on Facebook for nearly three years now, it is impossible to ignore what I did not see before: the growth of a distinctly Ukrainian philosophy that is rooted in the land and people of Ukraine and individual action to take care of what is yours.

Vakhtang Kebuladze, Volodymyr Yermolenko and Tetyana Ogarkova, together with the PEN Ukraine community, are continuously raising funds to supply vehicles to members of the AFU. You can contribute to their mission by donating via PayPal: ukraine.resisting@gmail.com