Sky Above Kharkiv

This volume contains a selection of texts that Serhiy Zhadan has been publishing on Facebook since the start of the war on February 24, 2022.

He doesn’t have time to keep a diary. He is on the go in Kharkiv, day and night, to evacuate children and the elderly from the suburbs that have come under fire; he sends list of medications to the West, coordinates food deliveries, collects money for military equipment, cares for pets and organises concerts. We see him pose in front of three Nobel Prize winners that went to the same university he attended that will be but rubble only weeks later; or with his »literary mother«, on whose typewriter at the publishing house he was allowed to type his first manuscript; today she cooks for volunteers.

He introduces Oleg Pyrotechnics, his secret bodyguard, who accompanies him on the dangerous trips to visit the soldiers. He posts a selfie with Cyril and Timofey. Aged only eight and eleven, they mind the youngest of those who hold out for weeks in the subway stations turned into bomb shelters with their families; they are brave, they want for nothing but when probed they ask him for carpets because the floor is so cold.

Pictures of the open sky are interspersed – an allegory of beauty and transcendence, of threat and vulnerability. He shows the people of Kharkiv how beautiful their city is – still. The pictures of the book shop – destroyed, of the popular café Old Hem – destroyed, of the Slovo House, an icon of early Soviet architecture that used to house the writers’ association and in which Zhadan recorded his latest album just this past autumn – in ruins. He juxtaposes these images with his defiant credo: We are going to rebuild everything, we are going to improve it, »everything will be Ukraine.«

The city is emptying out. Friends are killed. Death is omnipresent, hate is growing. When images of Bucha travel around the world, his voice falters too. »There are no words. None at all. Persevere, my friends. Now there is only resistance, fight and mutual support.«

Zhadan is committed to the survival of Kharkiv and its citizens. His messages, usually posted multiple times a day, often end with the line: »Our flags fly above the city. Sleep well, dear brothers and sisters, tomorrow we will be one day closer to victory.« This book is a chronicle of ongoing events, the testimony of a person who enters into a new reality as he writes and who breasts the destruction of everything. Not a lone observer, but an active civilian in a society that has, over the past eight years, learnt what it means to be strong together.

»[A] personal record of the first four months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, recounting the shelling and killing but also resistance in Kharkiv.« New York Times Book Review

»Language may not overrun mercenaries or shoot down missiles, but it can — when wielded by writers like Zhadan and so many of his compatriots — help defeat prejudice, ignorance, and skepticism, with words as well as arms bringing Ukraine one day closer to victory.« Cory Oldweiler, Boston Globe

»A wrenching, nearly day-by-day account of the first four months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. … Intimate, resolute, … inspiring.« Publishers Weekly

»Zhadan's Sky Above Kharkiv captures both his works of aid and resistance and what it felt like living for four months in a city under furious siege. ... Portrayed unflinchingly, but frequently filtered through a lens of hope.« Preston Gralla, Arts Fuse

»This powerful book from Ukraine's iconic poet-activist is at once a moving testament to the spirit of a nation that will not back down, an indictment of a bloody and unnecessary war, and a call on the rest of us to defend the principles of freedom and democracy wherever they are threatened.« Anne Applebaum

»In this, his ›diary for everyone,‹ poet Serhiy Zhadan turns his Facebook posts into urgent wartime communiques in a language that digs through debris, sweeps up broken glass and records the valor of a city organizing to defend itself. His daily missives call for supplies, offer advice, issue warnings and preserve for posterity a record of ›the chimerical, tenuous nature of danger and vulnerability.‹ It isn't meant to be poetry but poetry is everywhere within it. This is language with its breath held, language that, as the poet hoped, ›stands up to silence and death.‹ As Zhadan says of Ukrainian poetry, Sky Above Kharkiv ›stitches up the body of history, holds everything together, doesn’t let us forget a single thing.‹« Carolyn Forché

»The indefatigable Serhiy Zhadan is writing against death. His love-letter-in-posts to the people of Kharkiv will live far longer than Putin's regime — as well as — let us all desperately hope — his example that real toughness does not emerge in coldness and cruelty, but in solidarity and kindness.« Marci Shore

»Sky Above Kharkiv conveys the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainians – revealing why they did not surrender, and why they will win.« Serhii Plokhy, author of The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History

»A series of rough, unpolished sketches, written in the moment, which one reads breathlessly in their laconic urgency.« Sandra Kegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Suhrkamp Verlag has now published Zhadan’s war diary of the first five months of the war, and what can I say, it is at the same time the saddest and most gratifying thing that can be read about this war so far.« Felix Stephan, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»A testament to humanity.« Die Zeit

»In Sky Above Kharkiv it becomes evident that Zhadan, a man of many qualities, has grown through this war in at least one role. He is a chronicler of the war. ... But he is also one who keeps morale high.« Jurek Skrobala, Der Spiegel

»[Zhadan's] Facebook diary is much more than just a chronology of the events.« Ulrich M. Schmid, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Sky Above Kharkiv is a book that attests to Zhadan’s love for his home, but it is also a polemic, a collection of texts that all make a plea for resistance and for perseverance.« Tobias Lehmkuhl, Deutschlandfunk

»More, perhaps, than any other writer from the post-Soviet era, Serhiy Zhadan speaks to this experience of national and personal upheaval ... « The Times Literary Supplement

»A literary master of enormous force.« Ilya Kaminsky

»Serhiy Zhadan is one of the most important creators of European culture at work today.« Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

»Zhadan’s prose is so poetic, his free verse so prosaic. It is difficult to assign a genre to his work: memoir, travelogue, timely or untimely meditation – or a mixture of all these, centered on the themes my generation and our epoch.« Rostislav Melnikov and Yuriy Tsaplin, New Literary Review