‘The world will remember this war not through reportage but through art’: the creatives on Ukraine’s frontline

Yaryna Chornohuz is a poised, thoughtful young woman with a sweep of long hair, elegantly manicured nails, and a military uniform. In 2019, she joined a volunteer unit as a combat medic, and is now a soldier of the 140th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion. At 29, she is also fast becoming one of Ukraine’s most celebrated poets.

From the perspective of a country unthreatened by direct military aggression, it is hard to grasp the extent to which the 10-year-long Russian war against Ukraine, which so brutally escalated on 24 February 2022, has consumed the nation’s young – not just those conscripted through a recent tightening of mobilisation laws, but the many motivated to volunteer, like Chornohuz. It’s a cruel twist of history for this generation of Ukrainians that war has cast its shadow over their lives. Chornohuz tells me that she likes being a soldier, but also has ambitions to study for a PhD at some point. “I feel it would be also very natural for me to teach literature,” she says. “If Russia hadn’t attacked us I am not sure I would be in the military.”

Young people from all walks of life have been sucked into the war’s greedy mouth, among them numerous creative artists: poets, actors, artists, playwrights, novelists, musicians. Artem Chekh, one of Ukraine’s best-known novelists, fought in the trenches in the years after the 2014 Russian-backed takeovers of Crimea and the Donbas in Ukraine’s east, and last year was part of the defence of Bakhmut. Serhiy Zhadan – poet, novelist, rock star and Ukrainian national treasure – was touring with his band Zhadan and the Dogs to raise money for the army until this spring, when he volunteered for the 13th Khartia Brigade, local to his home city of Kharkiv.

Being an artist should not, Chornohuz tells me, grant you a special status among your fellow citizens – some kind of immunity from putting your body at risk in defence of the country. The idea of a “cultural front”, at which artists might “fight” by continuing to make their work far behind the lines, had some currency at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, but is, by now, largely discredited in Ukraine: the bloodiness and terror of the actual combat zone renders the idea of a “cultural front” absurd to many. Chornohuz has little time for the notion that “there are people who are more useful in the rear and some who are more useful on the frontline… The life of, I don’t know, a guy, from a village who has been a farmer all his life isn’t less valuable than the life of an intellectual or poet, or a writer or politician, or anyone else,” she says.

And artists are being killed: among recent losses have been machine gunner and poet, Maksym Kryvtsov, who died in January this year, aged 33, after publishing his debut collection. Not all of these dead are combatants: Victoria Amelina, novelist turned war-crimes investigator, died after a missile attack on a pizzeria in eastern Ukraine last year, aged 37. It is a cliche of Ukrainian literary history, writer turned soldier Oleksandr Mykhed tells me, that Ukrainian writers don’t make old bones. The history books are littered with artists with “a promising debut, a first collection of poems, a second collection of stories” before being wiped out, he says – by Stalin’s purges, or by later repressions that saw poets such Vasyl Stus die in the gulag. Now, he says, it’s happening all over again.

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When the full-scale invasion started on 24 February 2022, Chornohuz was already on the eastern frontline of the war that has been grinding on since 2014. She was due for a rotation that never came. Instead, “we were thrown as infantry against a big Russian advance. That was when I lost my platoon commander, and some of the guys I served with, and we couldn’t even bring out the bodies.” At that time, she thought she’d never write poems again. But then she realised that she should – to keep her companions’ memory alive. “Poetry books have become monuments,” she says. They might also be a weapon. In one poem, she writes: “Sometimes it seems that I learned to kill with poems / dropping a grenade hanging from a drone.” She explains the image: “To express the sharp truth about our existence is actually deadly for our enemies, who are building this absolutely horrible world inside Russia. To write poetry that expresses the truth is dangerous for them.”

Chornohuz tells me she’s been reading the early poetry of Paul Eluard, who also served as a combat medic. Where Eluard’s direct experiences are somewhat occluded and encoded in his work, the Russo-Ukrainian war is being fought out in a different poetic and emotional age: often Ukrainian poets want to communicate their feelings while they are raw and immediate, rather than recollect them in tranquillity. The Russo-Ukrainian war is being documented perhaps more fully than any previous conflict. But poetry chronicles something particular, something fragile, evanescent and hard to capture by other means. “Poetry,” Chornohuz says, “is the documentation of feelings.”

Art may be a retreat, as well as a form of attack. For painter Vladyslav Melnyk – a young man from Dnipro, the tattoos on his face dating from a time in his life when “I decided to separate myself from society” – art was impossible during the early months of the war. “I couldn’t paint for nine months. I had some kind of block. I couldn’t do anything, I felt totally helpless,” he says. The feeling of impotence and anxiety got worse when a family member was made a prisoner of war at the end of 2022. It was after Melnyk volunteered that, paradoxically perhaps, he felt a sense of unlocking. “Only after four months in the army did I accumulate the energy, and something inside me changed. And now when I come back home and the paint is flowing, it brings me back to my childhood, to food on the table, to family. I can be myself. I don’t have to ask anyone for anything here, I don’t have to follow rules, I just dissolve in time.”

Melnyk works in air defence. “The work I am doing does not reflect the service,” he says, in his airy studio in an apartment block in central Kyiv, its walls decorated with souvenirs and reminders of the war, including a fragment of missile signed by its Russian “sender”. “It reflects that in the darkest time you can find light.”

A few days later, I meet a soldier-poet called Seraphim Hordienko, who walks into the meeting place of his choosing – a biker club in Kyiv established in honour of a fallen soldier – with swagger and a handgun tucked into his trousers. He has just published an anthology of writings by him and other young volunteers: one of the poems was literally written in the trenches, under artillery fire, by an injured soldier. “We understand that we won’t have a problem with this war being documented,” says Hordienko who, by spring 2022, was already on the frontline in the Donetsk region. “But depicting emotional states is a lot more complicated – and more important. Because everyone, as participants, will leave these emotional states behind and forget them. Things have to be written here and now while the feelings are real.”

A 19-year-old history undergraduate when he volunteered at the start of the full-scale invasion, Hordienko, who is from Odesa, is now part of a drone unit. “I was raised with a medieval knight’s vision of life, and a knight needs a dragon to fight,” he says, seeming, in that moment, simultaneously boy-like, and far too old for his years.

He describes the early days of the war, when he and a group of friends volunteered, and “every day felt like it could be the last”. The sheer enormity of their frontline experience meant that the teenagers began to reach for new forms of expression, to make it comprehensible even to themselves. “The extreme condition of the mind, when you accept the apocalypse is inevitable – that’s when thoughts appear in your head that were impossible before. They find their way out through poems, films, texts,” he says. There is, perhaps, also a need to claim a sense of control over the unfathomable events of war. “When you can describe the hardest thing you went through, it means that you can survive it,” says Yaryna Chornohuz. “Keeping silent about something – it kills you from within.”

Hordienko is launching an online platform to which soldiers can submit their work. “We can’t know whether the next Remarque will bring his novel to us,” he says, referring to the author of the first world war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, “but we are creating all the conditions that will enable them to do so.” He adds: “We are convinced that in 50 or 100 years’ time, the world will remember this war not through reportage, but through art.”

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It is a cruel paradox of the Russo-Ukrainian war that, while it is killing so many promising artists, it is also creating them. “It took a global cataclysm to turn me into a writer,” says Hordienko, with characteristic Ukrainian black humour. In Kyiv’s ancient Podil district, the Theatre of Playwrights, a recently established new-writing theatre, is proving his point. This month, the first veteran’s drama festival took place, staging, as well as recording for audio, short works by military personnel and soldiers’ partners. Maksym Kurochkin – one of the country’s leading playwrights, who volunteered for the army at the start of the full-scale invasion – is one of the organisers of the event, titled Theatre of Veterans.

Part of the impetus behind the festival was, he says, to foreground the authentic, unmediated voices of war. “The world hears us,” he says, backstage at the theatre, “but not very clearly. Information comes through various middlemen. Even so-called ‘good Russians’ tell the world how we feel. Our task is, first of all, to return the right to a voice to those who are usually silent – soldiers, veterans – and we need their voice to sound clear.”

After an open call for participants, 15 people, ranging in age from 19 to 55, were chosen to take part in a scheme that would propel them from theatre novice to performed playwright. “We wanted to find people who really wanted to tell their own stories. Not people who wanted to be a theatre star but those who had something to say,” says co-organiser Yuriy Matsarsky, a journalist in civilian life who is now part of a military media unit. “I believe that each person has enough material within themselves to write at least one play,” says Kurochkin.

Like many cultural projects in Ukraine, Theatre of Veterans is run on almost zero budget and a lot of hard work and goodwill. From early this year, Kurochkin called on the best of Ukraine’s theatre professionals, including the great playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit, to instruct the participants in the art of playwriting. Some had never used a computer before, outside the military. One joined by Zoom from the frontline in New York, a town (so named by its German founders in the 19th century) in eastern Ukraine, now under Russian occupation. Gennady Udovenko, a soldier originally from the Donetsk region, has written about his foot being blown off by a mine: the play, which runs at about 20 minutes, charts his medical evacuation, darting back in time to dramatise earlier episodes in his life.

Maksym Devizorov, an actor in civilian life but new to writing, has worked on a drama about a tender but sadly recognisable wartime subject: the collapse of a relationship. His breakup from his wife, he says, whom he married in May 2022, happened while he was in the combat zone. “We found ourselves unready for this long-term separation. My wife’s resource of being able to wait for me kind of ran out.” Devizorov’s professional experience in the theatre means he is also supporting fellow writers. “A play by one of the younger participants is about getting a conscription notice and his mixture of feelings of guilt and fear,” he says. The surreality of war, the way “normality” jostles up against the utterly unspeakable, is exemplified by the work of another writer, Alina Sarnatska, whose play has a woman “literally collecting body parts of her brothers-in-arms while taking a call from her children’s school”.

By working on the project, and hard – Udovenko says that Kurochkin pushed him to about 16 drafts of his text – the participants are also learning soft skills that should help them in their future life, whether or not they decide to pursue writing or the theatre. But there is also a deeper motive. As the Russo-Ukrainian war drags on, the gulf between people’s experiences of it is widening and deepening – between those at the front, those living under occupation, those internally displaced, those in exile abroad, those in grief. The plays come at least partly through a sense of how crucial empathy is, how fundamental it is to sense and hold the pain of others. “There is a struggle there, on the frontline, and a struggle here,” says Gennady Udovenko, the soldier from Donetsk. “It’s just the price paid there is higher. If people here could feel the price paid there, perhaps we could move on faster.”