Many Ukrainian writers and artists risk or lose their lives in the war with Russia and comparisons are already being made between Russian aggression against Ukraine and its national identity and the execution of the country’s most prominent authors by order of Moscow exactly 86 years ago.
“The current methods to destroy our culture are slightly different, in some ways ‘more modern’, but in the end what Russia always seeks is one thing: destroy Ukraine by all possible means,” Lidia Migalega, coordinator of “The stiletto and the pen”, an initiative that emerged in Uzhgorod.
Since 2018, the project has sought to create a space for young Ukrainians to create and share their work. One of its objectives is to counter what Migalega sees as the Kremlin’s years-long deliberate attempt to expand Russian culture to the detriment of Ukrainian culture.
At the beginning of the large-scale invasion many of the authors attending the evening poetry readings took up arms, among them Sviatoslav Kondrat and Kirilo Babentsov, who died at the front.
Others, like the writers Artem Chapeye and Artem Chej, or the film director Oleg Sentsov, also risk their lives in the Army. Chekh escaped death near Bakhmut and Sentsov was recently wounded for the third time in combat near Avdiivka.
A notable victim of the invasion is also Volodymyr Vakulenko, a children’s writer. He was kidnapped and later shot dead by Russian soldiers during the occupation of his village near Izium, in the Kharkiv region.
His diary written under the occupation, which he hid in his garden shortly before he died, was discovered and edited by Victoria Amelina. One of the rising stars of Ukrainian literature, she went on to document Russian war crimes after the invasion began.
She planned to publish her own diary with testimonies from Ukrainian women who lived under Russian occupation. However, her plans were cut short by a Russian missile that killed her in Kramatorsk this summer.
“It is a tragedy that the world knows about our writers through obituaries,” poet Halina Kruk said recently at a literary festival in Lviv.
When talking about the challenge that writers face in telling the story of the Ukrainian resistance, he also referred to the void left by the extermination of the Ukrainian creative elite during the Soviet regime.
There are still generations of Ukrainians who perceive this, says Tetiana Igoshina, deputy director of the Kharkiv Literary Museum.
A generation of writers, playwrights and artists in Ukrainian stood out during the 1920s, taking advantage of a brief policy of Ukrainianization in Soviet times. However, their independent thinking and critical attitude toward changes in Soviet society soon made them targets for the growing totalitarianism of the Stalinist regime.
They began to be detained in 1933 and the repression reached its peak in the fall of 1937, when some 250 members of the intellectual avant-garde were murdered in one week in the Sandarmoj forest of Karelia, Russia, in what is known as “the decapitation of the Ukrainian nation”.
Dozens of them were executed on November 3, including the founder of the Ukrainian avant-garde theater Les Kurbas and the writer Mikola Kulish.
His works were removed, which contributed to the assimilation of millions of Ukrainians during the Soviet regime, Igoshina emphasizes. Their heritage and even the location and circumstances of their deaths have been discovered only gradually in recent decades. Much data remains inaccessible in the KGB offices in Moscow.
The Russian invasion has increased public interest in this “lost generation” but has also endangered their current successors.
The residence of many writers of the “Executed Renaissance” generation, the Slovo Building, was damaged by Russian attacks on Kharkiv.
After it began hosting contemporary authors again in March 2023, Victoria Amelina became the first literary resident. Shortly before she was killed by a Russian missile she wrote in the prologue to Vakulenko’s diary: “my worst fear becomes reality: I am inside the new Renaissance executed.”