»A year ago, I concluded the opening speech at the poetry festival at the Academy of Arts in Berlin with the words that I was sorry that poetry doesn’t kill. This speech became a program. Translated into many languages, it was disseminated in many countries. Wherever I went afterward, my desire for a poetry that kills was the cause of conversations and interviews. My regret that poetry cannot be an instrument of punishment, not even a means of self-defense, was largely perceived in wealthy European countries as something threatening, something that transcends convention. After all, for generations, the civilized world has made every effort to establish rules and laws for peaceful coexistence and to insist on their observance, to draw red lines that, in the interest of the common good, must not be crossed. Aggression is not tolerated; war is relegated behind the fences of the European future, indeed, to the gates of the civilized world.

And suddenly it became clear that this repression and sweeping of aggression under the rug not only didn’t work, but worse still – it no longer allowed for any distinction between aggressor and victim, banishing them both equally behind border walls, the one who attacks and the one who defends. If you place both of these situations far removed from any normality and observe them from a safe distance, at a certain point you stop differentiating between who started it and who had no other choice, what was the cause and what was the consequence. When Russia uses the term “pacification,” to an educated person with a knowledge of Latin in their cultural background, it sounds like “pacification,” it sounds like “peacefulness” and peaceful tranquility, something that gently lulls you to sleep like the “Pacific” Ocean and is as politically correct as “pacifism.” We always judge others according to our own perception of the world and the landmarks of our value system. That is why the Ukrainians did not believe in a comprehensive Russian attack until the last minute, because they applied the standards of their own country, a liberal, democratic European country that cannot understand the logic and aggressiveness of an imperial war of conquest.

European pacifism seeks to recognize something spiritually related to Russian “pacification,” to see it as a method, admittedly with a somewhat brutal, colonial aftertaste, but one that nevertheless leads to the noble goal of peace. European pacifism seeks to hear something true in the slogan “We are against war” of the Russians who emigrated during the war, to discover something they can relate to, and expects similar statements from Ukrainians as well. On a purely conceptual level, if I don’t declare that I am “against war,” I am consequently “for war.” This level fails to take into account the fact that if Ukraine were “against war,” there would be no more war, but there would also be no Ukraine. Yet war is a horror that destroys everything humankind has to offer: the psyche, the environment, economic relations, absolutely everything. And so we’re being advised to reach an agreement, turn the other cheek, let an eye be an eye, a tooth be a tooth, and give up the Ukrainian territories Russia has conquered and occupies. Someone has to be the wisest, we’re told.

This is a good and humane admonition, one that we have all heard more than once as children from a loving mother when we did not want to share something with our siblings. Mother Europe loves us both equally; she tries to be dispassionate and objective. Her maternal love blinds Mother Europe: aggression and recklessness are seen by her as willpower and charisma, the desire to appropriate what is foreign as youthful exuberance that will grow out of, and the violation of boundaries as a natural consequence of greatness. The template of the large family, superimposed on the map of Europe, which is steeped in the blood of more than one generation, does not allow us to see the spectres of colonialism, totalitarianism and racism. It raises false expectations regarding the humanity, reasonableness and predictability of behaviour. And so it happens that what we Europeans are not prepared to see, what we have no instruments to describe, what we do not allow into our imagination – for us, it simply does not exist.

And so it came to pass that we Ukrainians found ourselves at the gates of normality, outside the civilised world, on the fringes of a history that thinks categorically abstract and general, and in which our losses are considered statistically negligible material. For the past 16 months, I have been unable to shake the feeling that we are candidates in a cruel and bloodthirsty reality show format, scripted according to all the rules of the art: the audience is kept hooked by constantly ratcheting up the level of violence and adding new aspects to the range of challenges facing Ukrainians. The plot is kept unpredictable, the resolution saved until the very end. It is an adrenaline-fuelled game of sheer survival, exciting for the uninvolved viewer, who is close to the victim, can be horrified by the scenes of death or doubt their authenticity, believe something or not believe it, debate, donate, look away, wonder whether it is already time to say ‘stop’. Oh my goodness, we failed to agree on ‘stop,’ it doesn’t work at all!

War is not a storyline that can be reset and rewritten so that it plays out differently or the dead are given new lives. War is not a reality show, not a LAN game, and certainly not a civilisational experiment. Your culture has become accustomed to shielding you from unpleasant things. Your social media can be configured to hide unsightly and sensitive content from you, which is supposed to keep your humanity intact. At the same time, cruelty and aggression continue to be in high demand in the entertainment market, as they provide thrills and adrenaline rushes, allowing the human animal to feel alive. The nature of violence and evil haunts researchers and artists, forcing them to look into the abyss of horror. But all this only as long as it remains at a safe distance, behind the plasma of a screen, in a past that will certainly never repeat itself. Until recently, we in Ukraine also lived in a world where war was considered part of the culture. It is never a real war.

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression, we have found ourselves in someone’s diabolical game, in an irreversible time, a reality that follows completely inhuman rules. We are mortally wounded, struck by an ever more monstrous and insidious evil. We too wish to distance ourselves from it, to be able to separate ourselves from this evil, not to have to participate, not to have to join in this game, to retreat behind a line where we are safe. But it has become clear that there is no such line for us. Pacifism and humanity cannot make this war cease to exist. They cannot prevent it from killing us. They do not save us from the death of our children, nor do they protect us from the ecocide of the deliberately caused global catastrophe of the blown-up Kakhovka dam. Events are unfolding in an unpredictable manner, sweeping away ever larger pieces of reality. I don’t want to scare you, that’s not my style. But as the Baroque poet John Donne once wrote: ‘Every clod that is washed away shrinks Europe – no man is an island.’ Hemingway revives Donne’s motif of the bell. His bell is one in times of war, tolling for each and every one of us.

In his ‘Lectures on the History of Philosophy,’ Hegel went so far as to suggest that there must be a war in every generation, since war purifies our thinking and straightens out our ideas about the world, gives us impetus for new things and, incidentally, also maintains the logical structure of our world. Leaving his world of impersonal theorising and turning to concrete realities, it is hard to deny that war is indeed an extremely painful form of purification and eradication of dead truths, empty concepts, outdated ideas and false values. Yes, it makes social change more dynamic, but at the high price of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees. We can theorise as long as we are at a safe distance, as long as no war affects us, as long as none of our loved ones die in a war. In war, in the midst of it, on its territory, it is impossible to theorise.

As an existential crisis, war puts people in situations where they have to make a choice, often without the time or opportunity to weigh up options, think things through or even distance themselves from the circumstances in order to assess them properly … In effect, this means making a choice without having a choice. When we were confronted with war, many people initially could not let go of their humanistic ideas. But war turned out to be thoroughly inhuman, cruel and unjust. For me personally, the first weeks of war and brutality were a time when I reflected on what I had learned from my grandparents’ generation and realised that the stories about the horror perpetrated by the Soviet NKVD in western Ukraine between 1939 and 1941 had not been exaggerated, as one might sometimes have thought. This is how we revise our ideas about war, or update them in return and develop a new understanding of our knowledge of the past. What can a person oppose to war – a specific person facing a specific threat to their life, a specific loss of a loved one, their home, their familiar way of life …?

The most effective mechanism that civilisation has devised so far to prevent people and societies from waging war is culture. Its influence is, of course, incomparably more complex than other inhibiting factors. Culture operates not only within the framework of a single generation and always under strict guidelines – namely, with the aim of curbing violence and resolving disputes peacefully and without hegemonic claims, usurpation or encroachment on foreign territory. Culture therefore bears responsibility. I remember numerous discussions with Russian authors in the past, in which I had to put up with the accusation that Ukrainian literature was too politically engaged, that our writers were overly ideologised and did not focus on pure art, but on social dynamics that did not deserve such attention. However, as we have come to understand, this Russian self-elimination from the sphere of preventive, humane influence on society and the process of the natural dissemination of the corresponding values has proved fatal. For us in particular, it has had terrible consequences.

In Ukraine, which has often been stateless, culture has served as a forum for expressing civic positions since the earliest days of Kievan Rus. The majority of Ukrainian Baroque authors, for example, wanted to see the chance for salvation or self-transcendence not only in people’s religious and spiritual practices, but also in their active support of civic dynamics, the assumption of a certain degree of responsibility and appropriate action. That is why we have poems by Hetman Masepa and Cossack chronicles whose authors understand the purely human dimension of history and illustrate that you cannot save yourself without also being good to your fellow human beings. A good example of this is Hryhorij Skoworoda: he lived in isolation, but with the awareness that everyone must follow their own moral imperative.

In my opinion, the poetry that emerged after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine is comparatively direct, devoid of artistic gimmicks, without allusions, metaphors or other poetic flourishes. It is poetry of emotional facts that deliberately strives for simple, concrete and unambiguous language. It has something documentary about it, transparent like the lens of a camera, which does not want to draw attention to itself. Nevertheless, this poetry remains anchored in the formal language of poetic expression, in which words relate to each other and mean more than they do in a journalistic or conversational context. The responsibility and weight of words have increased. For us, every word carries a great deal of meaning.

For the more extensive form of prose, however, more time and distance from the events are needed. A novel or a narrative requires the author to immerse themselves in the material until they have to detach themselves from it at the appropriate time, as they would from any factual reality, in order to then be able to relate to it as artistic material that no longer stirs up emotions or causes pain, triggers nothing, that can be shuffled like a deck of cards to determine the rules of the game and distribute the joker roles. But as long as your current reality is so intense and painful, you will not be able to distance yourself from your pain or put a stop to it with a ‘Stop!’, which is killing you. And as long as that is the case, you will not be able to write good prose. Most novelists are currently, consciously or unconsciously, gathering material by taking notes, writing diaries, experiencing things intensely and committing them to memory. Some unconsciously throw themselves with all their might into the maelstrom of events, because that is probably the best way to feel and understand what is happening. Many go where it hurts. Every impression is valuable. But in order to process this material and let it ‘dance’ into a coherent work of art, with a well-thought-out plot, a cast of characters and an artfully arranged conflict dramaturgy, inner resources are needed. However, our short-term and working memory is currently occupied with other things. In the midst of this war, we are operating on a survival level. Reality constantly forces us to pay attention to alarm signals, to adjust to sudden changes in our environment and in our own emotional state, and to cope with a multitude of situations for which there is no blueprint.

It is very difficult and usually impossible to remain emotionally unaffected when the news feed once again reports hundreds of deaths or heavy shelling. Something horrific happens or we watch a traumatic video, and suddenly we have forgotten the place within ourselves from which we previously viewed the world, so dynamically do we change. Great prose will therefore be something for the future, when we can concentrate again and analyse what has happened to us and how it has changed us. Then we will return to all our reflections and all the material that is currently stored at the edges of our consciousness and in the blind spots of our memory.

Between 2014 and 2022, a number of literary works about the war were published in Ukraine. Literature reinforced what media resources conveyed in terms of content and often served to reinforce and sharpen the arguments. It is sad that, with a few exceptions, this war literature is hardly present in the West. At the time, no one in Ukraine was quite sure how and to what extent this war could and should be addressed in literature. In literary circles, there were certain prejudices against ‘veterans’ literature,’ which was supposedly insufficiently professional. But it was more a case of the ‘professional’ literary scene not engaging sufficiently with the subject of war. It was difficult to find a publisher or an audience that really understood or appreciated war poetry, except for those who had fought in this war, done voluntary service or been directly affected by it. Today, the theme of war has tragically burst onto the literary scene. War is before the eyes of millions of people and has either updated or radically challenged everything we thought we knew about war from previous literature and art.

Literature cannot exist in a vacuum. It is not written exclusively for eternity, nor can it strive solely for purity. It cannot ignore social and political events, wars and historical challenges any more than it can ignore reality itself. Rather, literature must throw itself into the fray, put its finger on the wound, give meaning to what is difficult to comprehend, and answer the questions that require courage to ask. For, as it turns out, war is a touchstone for humanity and authenticity. In literature and art as well as in personal values.

With the start of the full-scale war of aggression, many of us were faced with the question of what is personally important to us, what we would never renounce, and how far we would go. Let’s not kid ourselves – everyone has their own scale of values, their own experiences and circumstances, and not everyone understands the decisions of others. But without exception, all of us (even those who left Ukraine immediately) have experienced the effects of the war in some form. Some have been affected more, some less, but we all have a lot of work ahead of us to transform this collective trauma into an experience that no longer hurts, where we can live with it and not retraumatise or hurt others… But the more traumatised we become, the harder it is to explain our trauma, the less we want to talk about it or even have to prove how difficult or painful the experience was and is. It is much easier for foreigners to understand the people in Russia and their problems with sanctions (you can’t go to McDonald’s, buy an iPhone or fly on holiday) than to comprehend the highly complex Ukrainian experiences (such as burying relatives in the courtyard of an apartment block, mass rape, the borderline experience of torture and the like). Only culture can make these experiences accessible so that they can be understood by others through literary, cinematic and artistic adaptation. Works of art filter out the salient aspects of difficult experiences. A single, eloquent artistic detail can encapsulate the full force of the tragedy and open the way to catharsis.

There is no such thing as absolute, faceless, abstract evil (or good). There is always a human dimension. There is always a specific person responsible. In Christianity, as in other worldviews, the decision between good and evil and the struggle for it takes place within the human being – constantly, every second anew. It is important to be vigilant at all times and to examine whether one is choosing the good. The values realised in our culture remind us of the possibility of making this decision anew every day. When we move to the level of abstraction, take a neutral position, rise above the situation and want to remove ourselves from the conflict or confrontation, we are in fact claiming the position of God or the standpoint of a pure moral imperative. But in doing so, we lose our very personal inner struggle between good and evil. Every ‘that’s none of my business’ acknowledges the right of the stronger and means washing one’s hands with reference to hygiene purposes.

War tests literature for its authenticity and casts doubt on its raison d’être. But the power of literature lies precisely in the fact that it helps to preserve what is human in people and helps them to resist and oppose evil. Literature also has the power to be a refuge for the desperate and a source of hope for those who have lost more than they can muster in inner strength. Literature can be a home for someone who has lost their home, it can be the cross on the grave of someone whose body was never found to be buried. It can bear witness to a miracle and bear witness for those who were not there. In times of war, this power of literature grows among the people who are living through the war. Sometimes the artistic response is the only possible way to relate to a reality that undermines the foundations of bare existence.

Like most of us, I cannot yet relate to this war as if it were just any other subject matter; I cannot yet detach myself from it. We are all in the midst of this war; we are all affected by it. We therefore have a very subjective and specific inner perspective that just manages to capture what is happening. The most important thing for us right now is to get through it. We are living in a mode of struggle and survival. This is not exactly the most suitable state for artistic distance or reflection. It is difficult to analyse an image that you cannot see in its entirety, but only in part, highlighted, fragmented or blurred. The human brain sets about searching this image for signs of normality, somehow trying to make sense of the exceptional situation. Because it is the only way to survive.

At the same time, I am witnessing how our literature is returning to very primitive, basic functions. These are not aesthetic functions, nor are they functions of enjoyment or entertainment, but rather forms of prayer, incantation, curse, confession or remembrance of the dead. All of these are phenomena and functions that were also familiar to the original, syncretic poetry. What has atrophied in the course of the further development of societies and the differentiation of cultures reappears in times of war. Ukrainian poetry is gaining unexpected strength in this war, allowing it to speak of the fundamental and archetypal, of the depths of the human spirit and human existence, into which professional poets have long since dared not venture.

I would also like to mention that Ukrainian poetry is currently extremely rich in forms and images and is experiencing an extraordinary upswing. Everything that Ukrainian literature is currently producing, from the strongest and highest-quality texts to pure, simple, confessional outcries, bears witness to unique processes that will shape our literary output for decades to come. People who have never written anything poetic before are now beginning to write poetry, and often their works are particularly powerful. They may be far removed from any sophisticated formal language and be mere confessions, but their sincerity and spontaneity make one forget their weaknesses and lack of professionalism. These spontaneous poetic forms will later enable us to understand how literature in general, and poetry in particular, develop in the extraordinary and difficult times of war.

Our reality now provides us with a wealth of material for observing others and ourselves, especially how people behave in times of war and crisis. War changes people, often in ways that cannot be reversed. For me personally, the traumatic quality of what we are currently going through is at the forefront. Words have a direct impact on traumatic experiences by calling things by their name. In one way or another, this war has traumatised each and every one of us psychologically, not to mention those it has also injured physically. A literary text can show ways out of trauma.

And so I would like to conclude with a poem about what literature means to me, because the last word should belong to poetry.”

Can I still take those two steps or should I stay here –
above the bodies scattered in unnatural positions
above the gaping holes in the rust of a burnt-out car
from bullets too big to kill anyone in particular.

The unprofitability of artistic resources, the world won’t believe any of it.
The lack of a coherent motive, explain to me why they kill you, you say,
there must be a reason. Such a plot would never make a book.
As long as it is still literature, there is always the possibility of stopping in time,
of not getting too close, where too much would be revealed to the eyes –
how they look, the broken nail on the well-manicured woman’s hand,
the child’s shoe among the remnants of a household.

Literature should be there to prevent what happened from happening in the first place –
to focus on prevention, to prevent the worst, to change the one
who could cause irreparable damage.

It is not there to make us believe afterwards
that a lonely child’s shoe has nothing to do with a child’s foot,
and that the woman’s broken nail is just her broken nail, no big deal.

Stop in time, don’t get too close, don’t look.
The saving distance of art, the guardrail of credibility, up to which everything
can still be a far-fetched plot, the forbidden spawn of a fantasy
in a mood of catastrophe.

Literature is no longer an escape route, it is a sidetrack,
from there you can’t go anywhere. You get on the train, pick up a book –
and understand: this train – doesn’t leave, doesn’t go to its destination, doesn’t arrive
there in the human being, where he can still make decisions –
leave forever and never come back
or pull the emergency brake and go all out.

Once, in times of need, you will revive the track,
you will dismantle the battering rams, you will allow yourselves to look.
In a world where literature is not there to kill, and not there to pay bills
​​​​​and not there to flood with spam, and not there to remember everything down to the last detail,
and not to fix reality in its most repulsive forms.

Literature like that is good for nothing, you hear.

The child’s shoe that flew through the air with the child when both were swirled up with shattering glass
and concrete,
the broken nail on the woman’s hand under the rubble, unpixelated,
what remained of the body,
the children’s book you stare at so as not to notice the rest,
so as not to imagine the rest that was there between the book and the hand,
between a family’s Saturday morning and the next image.

If you get too close, the reinforcing steel pierces you
with someone’s stifled cry under the rubble:
‘I don’t want to die.’ Literature is there to clear away these rubble in time.

Literature is there to show us how we can go on living,
with this scream in our ears, with the woman’s hand, the child’s shoe in close-up,
knowing what was behind it in the uncensored version of reality,
which no artificial intelligence softens for us.

For this. Literature has always been there for this.