A Year of War – Voices from and on Ukraine

»This morning, on February 24, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine. Explosions can be heard in many cities of Ukraine, and the enemy’s tanks and heavy artillery crossed the Ukrainian border from the north, the south, and the east. There already are casualties among Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including children. …«, thus begins an international message from our friends and colleagues at the International Book Arsenal Festival and Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv.

The war in Ukraine has been ongoing for years. But on February 24, 2022, it became a brutal all-out war of aggression that Russia is waging against the Ukrainian population, culture, language, autonomy. Through the crucial international media coverage and the renewed focus on this region, the literature of Ukrainian authors, too, is receiving great attention – and with it the books in which the conflicts have been anticipated and described for years.

»What does war change? War changes the vocabulary. It reactivates words we only knew from historical fiction. May that’s because war always reactivates history too. You can see it, taste it, smell it, usually it smells burnt.«
Serhiy Zhadan, Why I Am Not Online

And all of a sudden, the way we read changes as well. In the books by Yuri Andrukhovych and Serhiy Zhadan, by Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Katja Petrowskaja, in their poems, essays and novels, the situation of recent years becomes distinctly present. They write about people who discover their post-imperial history, be it in the Carpathians, in Galicia or Donbas – they write about a society that has fought for its freedom. Music, anarchy, laughter, rage, despair and the inexhaustible resource of a new language – all of this is what makes the literature from this Europe en miniature so powerful. An entire world that Putin wants to annihilate.

On this sorrowful anniversary, we would like to declare our continuing solidarity with the people of Ukraine and hope that through reading the voices of the country, people around the world will gain insight and empathy for their plight.