Blair A. Ruble: THE ARTS OF WAR: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year One

Blair A. Ruble

THE ARTS OF WAR Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia Year One

Blair A. Ruble

THE ARTS OF WAR Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia Year One

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover picture: © copyright 2022 by Alex Zakletsky

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Table of Contents Author’s Note......................................................................................... 9 1:

Heroic Arts: The Remarkable Story of Ukrainian Artists Confronting Russia ...................................................................... 11

2:

Ode to Odesa ................................................................................ 15

3:

The Power of Ukrainian Song .................................................... 19

4:

Who Gave Us the Right to Peace and Quiet? .......................... 23

5:

The Musicality of Kyiv ................................................................ 27

6:

Dancing from Armageddon ....................................................... 31

7:

Reclaiming Ukrainian Streets through Art .............................. 35

8:

Donbasrock ................................................................................... 37

9:

Puppets, People, and War .......................................................... 41

10: Opera in a Ukrainian Embroidered Shirt ................................. 45 11: Chernivtsi Philharmonic in Shelter ........................................... 49 12: Kyiv’s DakhaBrakha in New Orleans For Cities, Diversity Counts ........................................................................................... 53 13: Ukraine, Eurasian Theater’s New Leader ................................ 57 14: Exchanging Camouflage for Tutus in Lviv .............................. 61 15: Chernihiv Artist Reporting War Atrocities on TikTok ........... 65 16: Uzhhorod Songs .......................................................................... 69 17: In Kyiv’s Podil .............................................................................. 71 18: Odesan Writers on War .............................................................. 75 19: Renaissance at the Lesya Ukrainka Theater ............................. 77 20: Mozart in Wartime Lviv ............................................................. 81 21: Kharkiv Sketches ......................................................................... 85 22: Finding a “European Way” Kharkiv’s East Opera ................. 89 23: The Healing Potential of Community Theater as Seen in Ukraine’s Lutsk ............................................................................ 93 24: Taking Out the Trash in a Time of War .................................... 97 25: The Artists of Kyiv....................................................................... 99 5

26: Jazzy Nights in Kyiv.................................................................. 101 27: Providing Humanitarian and Creative Sanctuary for Artists in Ivano-Frankivsk ........................................................ 103 28: Ukrainian and Polish Dancers Respond to the Pain of War 105 29: Maestro Earle and Ukrainian Music at the Berliner Musikfest...................................................................... 109 30: What’s Up with Ukrainian Rap? ............................................. 113 31: Folk Art ....................................................................................... 115 32: Ukrainian Odyssey .................................................................... 119 33: Turning to (Street) Art for Meaning ........................................ 123 34: Battle-Worn Ballerina ................................................................ 125 35: The 100th Heroic Season of the Mykolaiv Theater............... 129 36: Pulling Strings to Life Spirits ................................................... 131 37: The Sound of Resilience ............................................................ 133 38: Artist Soldiers ............................................................................. 135 39: Hong Kong Celebrates Wartime Ukrainian Theater ........... 139 40: The Lviv National Opera’s Remarkable Wartime Season, Exhibiting Life “Full-Face” ...................................................... 143 41: A Portrait of Artistic Defiance in Kherson ............................. 147 42: Amplifying Opera in a Time of War ....................................... 151 43: A Twelve-Year-Old Ukrainian Girl’s Wartime Diary to Appear......................................................................................... 155 44: A Musical Homage for Izium’s Ancient Stone Figures and Recent Lost Souls ....................................................................... 159 45: Kyiv’s Puppet Company Provides New Year’s Cheer ........ 161 46: Ukrainian Women Artists Set Their Own Paths in a Time of War ............................................................................. 165 47: Coming to Terms with Putin Requires a “Process”, Not Just a “Trial” ....................................................................... 169 48: Returning Home: The Odesa Philharmonic Celebrates a New Year in its Old Home ................................ 173 49: Acting Out Wartime Emotions ................................................ 177 50: Whack-a-Mole Culture.............................................................. 181 6

Acknowledgments............................................................................. 185 About the author ............................................................................... 187 Index .................................................................................................... 189

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Author’s Note These essays all appeared in the Woodrow Wilson Center Kennan Institute’s Ukraine Focus blog (https://www.wilsoncenter.org/collection/arts-war-ukrainianartists-confront-russia) over the course of the year beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The series grew from my need to respond to the horrendous events unfolding before me. Previous work relating the arts to social and political developments in Ukraine and Russia led me to turn to the work of Ukraine’s artistic creators to better understand what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen.

I, like many, have been astonished by the steadfastness of Ukrainians in the defense of their country. The stories presented here highlight the ways in which they have long explored the meaning of their country and culture through the arts, and the manner in which the arts and their creators have empowered Ukrainians to confront the Russian invaders. They also offer intriguing clues about the culture, society, and politics of a postwar Ukraine.

These essays represent my attempt to provide Ukrainian artists a place where they can speak for themselves. I have been fortunate in being able to collaborate in the preparation of these articles with several of the artists mentioned here. Aside from the introductory and concluding essays, I have striven to keep my own voice in the background. I purposefully follow a variety of performance and visual artistic endeavors in a range of regional settings to capture the expanse of Ukrainian creativity. The fifty pieces here follow the course of the war’s first year, with initial shock giving way to a search for comprehension, followed by a profound resistance to the invasion. By the end of the year, the tales reveal a deep reinvention of various art forms as a distinctive Ukrainian artistic voice consolidates.

The essays may be read chronologically, or by artistic genre: music, dance, theater, video, the visual arts, etc. Readers may turn first to those set in specific locations: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa, etc. Alternatively, readers may direct their attention to the multiple 9

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connections, financial and creative, that have emerged between Ukrainian artists and the international community. Or search out the many moments when Ukrainian civilian and military authorities have endorsed the performing arts as a means of advancing their country’s fortunes. However approached, I am confident that even the most informed readers will discover a depth and creativity to the Ukrainian artistic scene that they hardly suspected existed prior to the Russian invasion.

Blair A. Ruble Washington, DC February 24, 2023

1: Heroic Arts: The Remarkable Story of Ukrainian Artists Confronting Russia November 4, 2022 Today’s Ukraine, like all states, is a product of history, economics, geography, demographics, and culture. As is often the case with large countries, Ukraine has at times fractured along these lines. As is also often true with large countries, such divisions do not necessarily destroy the state.

Heroically, Ukrainians have demonstrated a steadfast commitment to Ukraine despite all the factors that may distinguish them one from another, and they have not left their country’s fate to the actions of others. They have put their lives on the line multiple times for a Ukraine that embraces a pathway westward.

For many analysts, Ukraine prior to 2022 appeared to be a “failed” state. Divisions of language, ethnicity, religion, economic viability, political ideology, and generation—amplified by rampant corruption—seemed at times to render Ukraine hopeless. Political parties came and went seemingly overnight. Major civil unrest brought down governments in the Orange Revolution (2004–2005) and the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity (2014–2015). Breakaway provinces in the east and the Russian annexation of Crimea initiated a protracted war with Russia in 2014. These events seem to track a fundamental historic division along what was once the eastern border of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1385–1795).

As powerful as these events seemed, none explain the past year in Ukraine. No matter what Vladimir Putin and his armed forces have done, Ukrainians have remained united and unwavering in their commitment to their country. We must look beyond politics to the arts to appreciate how and why this is so.

Over the past thirty years, young Ukrainians have grown up with no memory of the Soviet Union, secure in the notion that Russia is a different—and unattractive—country; fluent in the Ukrainian language even if they speak Russian, Tatar, or some other language at home; and drawn to the economic well-being and values 11

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of Europe. They have created a vibrant, new Ukrainian culture and identity. The effervescent Ukrainian pop music and hip-hop scene, accompanied by sassy media and dynamic art, reflect a population that has charted a fresh path following independence. This is the Ukraine that coalesced to withstand Putin’s misguided efforts to fold the country back into his “Russian World”. (Multiple “Russias” exist within the Russian Federation as well, but that is a topic for a different essay.)

Russian apologists have pointed to electoral maps from the 2000s and 2010s to demonstrate that Ukraine is a divided state. In so doing, they have ignored the country’s foundational map showing the results of the 1991 referendum on independence, in which over 91 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots for independence, with landslide results in every region. More telling is the 2019 presidential election map, which shows Volodymyr Zelensky sweeping to victory throughout the country.

Analysts disparaged Zelensky’s remarkable triumph, comparing it with the elections of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Donald Trump in the United States. Like his Italian and American counterparts, they argued, Zelensky won because of the name recognition garnered through his starring role in a popular television show, Servant of the People. Perhaps this was so, but the show’s popularity throughout the country reveals the emergence of a single Ukrainian media space that enabled Zelensky to win fans across Ukraine.

The essays which follow highlight the ways in which Ukrainians have long explored the meaning of their country and culture through the arts, and the manner in which the arts and their creators have empowered Ukrainians to confront the Russian invaders.

This shared post-independence cultural exploration nurtured the foundation of a successful, rather than a failed, state.

The essays grew organically out of the response to the war itself. They show Ukraine’s creative community leading the way towards a united Ukrainian culture consisting of diverse elements.

They reflect the wide variety of cultural forms and the regional variance that mark the country itself.

Three major themes run through the stories that follow:

HEROIC ARTS 1.

2.

3.

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Russia is not Ukraine. Almost immediately following the arrival of the Russian occupation forces, the distinctively Ukrainian letter “Ï” (“ee”, as in “Kиїв”) assumed an expanded meaning. The Cyrillic letter “Ï” exists in the Ukrainian, but not the Russian, alphabet. The letter became a potent symbol of resistance in Russian-occupied territories, easily splashed on walls, sidewalks, and official signage, as its existence denies the notion that Ukraine is nothing more than a subset of Russia.

The Ukrainian and Russian alphabets share many letters, but are not identical. Similarly, their languages and cultures share a considerable history. Russian influence on Ukraine—some of it welcomed, much of it not—can neither be denied nor “cancelled”. Yet that influence was filtered through experiences distinct to Ukraine and Russia. The result was differing experiences, values, and conceptions of the human condition. Ukraine and its culture cannot be subsumed under a grandiose and false concept of a “Russian World.” As the essays presented here reveal, Ukraine is not Russia. Ukrainians appreciate their difference, embrace it, and, through artistic expression, have sought to strengthen it.

Youth culture matters. Over the past three decades, young Ukrainians have created a lively and distinctive popular culture through music—including their own brand of hiphop—and social media. Ukrainian youth culture has triumphed over internal differences across the country.

Ukrainian is the language of that culture. Whether cultivated by official and commercial outlets—The Simpsons appeared in Ukrainian rather than Russian translation—or homegrown social media-produced formats—this new culture has remained, first and foremost, fun.

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4.

Several of the essays presented here demonstrate how a distinct Ukrainian youth culture extends throughout the country, reshaping society and its culture. As some Russian-language rappers from Eastern Ukraine came to realize, the Russian scene was considerably less relevant and compelling than what was happening in the rest of Ukraine. They switched to relying on Ukrainian for self-expression because it better communicated their emotions and worldview, rather than out of any sort of political agenda.

Art endures; politics is fleeting. Renowned tango historian Robert Farris Thompson once observed that culture is forever; it is politics and ego that fade. The search for an understanding of the human condition, for shared identity and values, and creative expression evident in all of the stories presented here points to a contemporary Ukraine poised to resist and sustain itself in the face of the Russian onslaught. Ukrainians have created their own particular society and culture. That culture’s individual components may at first appear modest, but combined, they emerge as heroic. The arts have reshaped the course of Ukrainian history and will frame the country’s future as well.

The Ukrainian response to the 2022 Russian invasion has inspired a new appreciation for the country, both within and outside Ukraine. The steadfastness of Ukrainians in the defense of their country has surprised many. The stories presented here highlight the ways in which Ukrainians have long explored the meaning of their country and culture through the arts. They show the way the arts and their creators have empowered Ukrainians to confront the Russian invaders.

2: Ode to Odesa March 2, 2022 On Saturday evening, February 12, 2022, with Russian troops poised to pounce not all that far away, hundreds of Odesans gathered at a concert of the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of its longtime conductor, Venezuelan-American Hobart Earle. As the concert wound down, Maestro Earle raised his baton for a surprise encore: a rousing rendition of the overture to Mykola Lysenko’s opera Taras Bulba. The audience rose to its feet in patriotic fervor. No one in that hall doubted what country was home: Ukraine.

Odesans’ embrace of Ukrainian independence had remained ambiguous until recently. The city’s unique history and character have from the beginning transcended nation. Odesa demonstrated an exceptional embrace of freedom, albeit at times anarchic.

Traveling throughout my adult life to that part of the world once known as the Soviet Union opened up a multitude of wondrous opportunities. The region is full of natural beauty, exciting cities, and large personalities. Yet even in the carnivalesque wreckage of the region’s collapsed political system, nothing quite compares to the city of Odesa.

Odesa is not just a place, of course. It is more a state of mind— or, at the very least, a virtual Odesa, appearing on websites, that exists in the imaginations of the thousands of former residents who have moved to places as varied as Moscow, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Toronto, and Brooklyn. This Odesa cannot be conquered by tanks and rockets.

The “real” Odesa exists as much in the ironic short stories in Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel, who was arrested and shot by Stalin’s NKVD, as it does in the compelling stage productions of Babel’s grandson, Andrei Maleev-Babel, who teaches acting in Florida.

Odesa, in other words, is not just a city with a promenade and a famous set of steps overlooking the Black Sea. Psychically, it extends from Siberia to Sarasota. It does so because, throughout its 15

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brief yet extravagantly tawdry history, Odesa has inspired people to create.

Odesa was officially established in 1794, and Catherine the Great’s frontier settlement and Black Sea port quickly displayed a vibrant mixture of nationalities and cultures. This has remained.

The city took shape in the mind of a Neapolitan soldier of fortune, José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons (Osip Mikhailovich Deribas), before it assumed a physical presence. De Ribas was the child of a Spanish consul and his aristocratic Irish wife. Following the final Russian victory over the Ottomans, De Ribas convinced Catherine that a patch of land near the mouths of four major European rivers—the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, and Bug—would make an excellent location for a city.

Following the Russian practice with settlements in the empire’s recently acquired lands in the south, an area that became known as New Russia (on the pattern of New England, New France, and New Spain), De Ribas’s town was to be named after a classical Greek hero. In this case, the name of Odysseus was feminized to Odesa to honor the empress.

De Ribas set out to create a newer and more orderly version of his hometown, Naples. However, Odesa’s sketchy origins—relying on a multitude of fortune hunters and adventurers coming from all corners of the late eighteenth-century world—made coherence difficult to achieve. In some ways he succeeded, as the city grew outward along a logical grid. Nonetheless, there was nothing well-ordered about the people who filled it. The new city’s residents came from a variety of backgrounds, drawn together by the imagined opportunity to get rich quickly.

Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, replaced De Ribas as Odesa’s “city chief” (gradonachal’nik), along with a French aristocrat, the duc de Richelieu (a great-nephew of the famous Cardinal Richelieu). De Richelieu was on the lam at the time, fleeing revolutionaries in Paris. As the governor of New Russia, he transformed Odesa into the city of Russia’s least respected “estate” (soslovia, social class), the petit bourgeoisie (meshchane). Semiskilled workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, former serfs, Jews, and outcasts came seeking a new life, and they found it. Mark Twain, on visiting the

ODE TO ODESA

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city in 1867, declared that he had come home to America after tramping across Europe. I felt this same sensation a century and a half later.

The twentieth century was not as kind to Odesa as the nineteenth had been, with often tragic consequences: revolution, the brutal Romanian occupation during World War II marked by horrific ethnic cleansing, and massive Jewish emigration during the Brezhnev years all took their toll.

Throughout its history, Odesa as a place—as a city—has juxtaposed different historical, cultural, and political fragments of past and present. Like its Mississippi doppelganger New Orleans, Odesa absorbed influences from everywhere to create a unique urban culture. And like other similar mixing bowls of culture, Odesa cultivated a vivid literary scene in several languages. By the midtwentieth century, Odesa had established a vibrant cinema scene, home to one of the Soviet Union’s major film studios.

Italian musical culture joined with Jewish musical traditions to create a distinct musical sound. Stalin’s propagandists claimed that Odesa, not New Orleans, had given birth to jazz. Hyperbole aside, homeboy Leonid Utyosov became the Soviet Union’s first major jazz star. David Oistrakh, Nathan Milstein, and many others drew on the same aural sources to develop a world-renowned school of violin playing.

Odesa prompts its residents to seek new meaning in endless layers of cultural, religious, ethnic, political, and class differences.

The city encourages melding, reconciliation, and reciprocal borrowing of diverse cultural expressions and traditions to produce ever-new amalgams. Over the past three decades, that fusion has added an independent Ukrainian identity.

As the wild applause for the Odesa Philharmonic’s encore began to fade last February, a bass voice boomed out over the crowd, shouting “spasibo!” Odesa is a city where most residents speak Russian. Freedom, however, knows no linguistic boundaries.

3: The Power of Ukrainian Song March 14, 2022 The world was moved by images of a young Ukrainian girl singing “Let It Go” in a basement bomb shelter; by newly arriving Ukrainian refugees sitting down at a piano outside a Polish train station to play “It’s a Wonderful World”; and by gatherings of Ukrainian heroes belting out their national anthem. Music provides solace and courage in a world turned upside down. These responses to the chaos of war are powerfully human. As Ukrainians have long understood, music and the arts declare who we are.

Readers who looked at a powerful new wave of post-independence Ukrainian literature—written in Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages—appreciated the depth of a new Ukrainian identity that was finding expression on the printed page. Enthusiastic concertgoers turned to local symphony orchestras and opera houses for emotional grounding. Ukrainian hip-hop provided the soundtrack to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Euromaidan uprising. TV melodramas and comedy series uncovered new national leaders. Researchers and artists associated with the Ukrainian Academy of Arts’ Contemporary Art Research Institute set out to redefine the arts in accordance with what was happening elsewhere. Much more than Ukraine’s often fractious political system, the arts quietly and profoundly defined a new Ukrainian nation.

I witnessed the power of the arts to proclaim Ukrainian national identity firsthand nearly a decade ago, when a night at the ballet turned into a lesson in Ukrainian self-assertion. On April 13, 2013, rhythmic hip-hop-like chants of protest exploded just as the final curtain came down on the flower-laden ballet dancers and the musicians who had performed with them. Within seconds, the bright lights of the TV crews who had forced their way into the orchestra seats overwhelmed the still dim house lights. Suddenly—as if on a cue from a cameraman—four white banners unfurled from the fourth-tier balcony, enveloping the hall below.

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To ever louder chants of “Hanba! Hanba! Hanba!” (“Shame!

Shame! Shame!”), streamers cascading from the upper balcony demanded that the National Ballet of Ukraine retain the company’s artistic director, Denys Matvienko. The sumptuous Kyiv Opera House exploded into chaos after a stunning performance.

The political decision to replace Matvienko remained. However, the temper of the times had changed. The National Ballet of Ukraine managed to remain a national treasure despite all the political, financial, and artistic upheavals of the past three decades.

Like many other Soviet companies, the Kyiv ballet needed a dusting off once the country fell apart and cultural institutions long dependent on state munificence were tossed into the international arts marketplace.

The company’s ballet school continued to produce a steady stream of world-class performers—especially male dancers—who headed out across the globe. Often, they signed with international companies. New York’s American Ballet Theater hired numerous Kyiv-trained soloists and corps members of note. Kyiv dancers nonetheless returned home whenever their schedules permitted them to take time away from leading companies in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, and New York. The company became, as former US ambassador to Ukraine William Green Miller once quipped, “the best company money can’t buy”.

Denys Matvienko was among those who chose to return. A native of Dnipro, Matvienko spent his career dancing in Kyiv, while serving as a leading soloist in Moscow, St. Petersburg, New York, Tokyo, and Milan. Approaching his mid-30s, he was lured back to Kyiv in November 2011 to serve as the company’s artistic director and to perform whenever possible.

Matvienko set about introducing contemporary ballets into the company’s repertoire. He added verve to the standard repertoire. For example, he replaced Marius Petipa’s worn choreography for Ludwig Minkus’s La Bayadère with a more modern and energetic 1980s version choreographed by Natalia Makarova for London and New York audiences. Simultaneously, Matvienko invited innovative contemporary artists to bring their work to Kyiv, including Edward Clug, a Romanian dancer whose striking choreography made

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the Slovene National Theater one of the most exciting companies of its size anywhere.

Matvienko’s leadership symbolized everything that post-independence Kyiv youth wanted for their country: something fresh, high-energy, edgy, and internationally appreciated, especially in the West. They welcomed his regime as the symbol of a new Ukraine that would be in their grasp if only their country’s boorish, traditional-in-a-Soviet-sort-of-way, and corrupt leaders would just get out of their way.

A couple of days before the April 13 eruption inside the Kyiv Opera House, the leadership of the theater and their masters at the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture—run by particularly distasteful cronies of the country’s convicted criminal turned president, Viktor Yanukovych—“fired” Matvienko as the company’s artistic director. Citing artistic and personal differences, the Opera Theater’s management revealed, in a bizarre announcement, that Matvienko had never been “hired.” Evidently, once Matvienko signed his contract in November 2011, management sent his employment documents to superiors, who never bothered to countersign.

The raucous upper balcony protestors in Kyiv that evening, and their sympathetic supporters in the lower tiers, went far beyond showing support for their dismissed idol. They were proclaiming their collective disgust with the incompetent and corrupt state officials who forced him to leave.

After happening to witness this visceral rejection of a pro-Russian Ukrainian regime by attending the ballet that evening, I was not at all surprised when that regime crumbled a few months later.

I am also unsurprised by today’s brave resistance to Russian invaders. I now understand, better than ever before, that the arts give voice to our deepest emotions, often revealing them to ourselves and to others before they find formal expression through more purposeful words and deeds.

Perhaps hard-nosed observers consider music little more than white noise, or a human interest side note to reporting on a brutal war. But they miss the much larger story of social and political change. The performing arts, as communal and social activities, bring humans together, in all their agreements and disagreements.

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They express some of the deepest human emotions and, in response, our innermost passions intensify. What happens when performers and their audiences meet signals how we see ourselves and our future; and whether we like what we see, or not.

The Russian army, more than many political commentators, recognizes this truth. Russian rockets have targeted the Kharkiv Opera House; the defenders of Odesa understand that their historic and internationally renowned Opera House may be next.

A night at the theater, the concert hall, or a nightclub is always more than an entertaining backdrop to the political and economic forces that really matter. As Robert Farris Thompson tells us in his masterful Tango: The Art History of Love: “First, culture is forever. It is politics and ego that fades.” A lesson Putin’s Russia needs to learn.

4: Who Gave Us the Right to Peace and Quiet?

March 23, 2022 Yelena Astasyeva’s namesake character Yelena, in her new play A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, muses that “it’s like finding myself in a film about war, it’s a nightmare. You go to bed, and you fear your home will be bombed that night. There’s nowhere to buy food or medicine. And when you write about all of this, your Russian friends answer that it’s fake news. What do you think, how do I feel?”

Astasyeva is one of more than three dozen Ukrainian writers and playwrights participating in an international initiative to bear witness to the horrors of Putin’s war on Ukraine through theater.

Originating with the Ukrainian component of the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project, formed in 2020 in solidarity with the beleaguered Belarus theater community, the project presents works which bring to light the corruption and brutality of authoritarian regimes.

Theater critic John Freedman, curator of the Ukrainian component, moved quickly at the outset of the Russian invasion to bring new Ukrainian dramatic works to global audiences. Working with Philip Arnoult at Baltimore’s Center for International Theater Development, Maksym Kurochkin at Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights, Noah Birksted-Breen at London’s Sputnik Theatre, and others, the project arranged 70 pledged readings and fundraisers in fifteen countries and in twelve languages. Events have already taken place in Hong Kong, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Germany, and Austria.

Like Astasyeva, several of the authors express initial disbelief that war was really happening.

Many of the writers try to capture the unreality of the war by exploring the initial search for food and safe shelter. Oksana Gritsenko recalls in The Peed-Upon Armored Personnel Carrier: “The

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first thing to disappear in the village was bread, followed by medicines from pharmacies, and then Ukrainian national television. After that, the Russians (in this village they were always informally referred to as Goats or Butchers) stripped the mobile communication wires off the TV tower and set up tension wires around it. The villagers felt as though they were on an island, cut off from the world”.

Writing about the war’s first days in Kherson, Natasha Blok, in Our Children, describes reaching a temporary shelter for Ukrainians. “There were mothers with their children”, she writes. “The children asked questions, like ‘Why is Putin bombing us? That’s not fair, Mom. His country is bigger. What does he want from us? Why are they killing us?’”

Others—such as Natal’ya Vorozhbit in Bad Roads—explore the protracted degradation of the human spirit after eight years of war against the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. “The separatists wanted to take the airport in time for Putin’s birthday as a present for him”, she writes.

They were going to use this rocket launcher, Buratino; it’s like a weapon of mass destruction, it destroys every living thing within a radius of three k[ilometers]. Our commanding officers weren’t confirming this openly, but they weren’t denying it either. But we were pretty convinced by the way the separatists were evacuating weapons and people from the airport. In just a few hours, the airport, which had been under fire and siege for months, was no longer surrounded. It’s like, there’s this terrible silence all round. The first silence in that airport. All night we were preparing for the end. I rang my daughter. I helped her do her homework over the phone. . . . But actually, no basement would have saved us from Buratino and that kind of consoled us. At dawn they began storming the building with tanks. You cannot imagine how ecstatic we were. It meant they weren’t going to use Buratino.

Hanging over most is the agonizing decision of staying or leaving.

In a “farewell monologue to the Donbass”, Neda Nezhdana—in her play Pussycat for Memories about Darkness—recounts a final night before departure: I came home and told my husband: “Myhas, let’s collect our bags and run away.” He persisted at the beginning, but I prated and shouted and cried— and he retreated; for [our] daughter he was ready to go through water and fire. I began to gather things, threw some in, took them out, put others in,

WHO GAVE US THE RIGHT TO PEACE AND QUIET?

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suitcases would not close, tears flowed. . . . And then our cat started to give birth. The whole night was spent giving birth to three kittens; one was gray, the second was white, and the last was black, pretty small. Wallydrag, as my mother said. In the morning I fell asleep. I woke up at seven, kittens were mewling under my side—she had entrusted them to me. Now I understood—I’m not going anywhere. “Myhas, go alone, save [our] daughter”. I persuaded him.

Once fondly recalled, relations with Russian relatives, friends, and colleagues vanished forever, often to be replaced by pure hatred.

For example, one of Julia Gonchar’s characters in A Foretaste of War says, “My family got broken by all this Russian aggression and no one is left in Moscow really; only my aunt and she has cancer”.

Some authors—such as Vitaly Chensky in his play Robinson— detect opportunities for innovative stage work. Trying to remove himself from the new realities of war, Robinson turns to a book of Dostoevsky tales. “The general”, Robinson reads, “when he didn’t like something, was not shy before anyone: he squeaked like a woman, cursed like a coachman, and sometimes, ripping and scattering cards on the floor while driving his partners away from him, he even wept with annoyance and anger.” But “at that very moment”, Robinson records, “a Russian rocket flew in my apartment window. . . . Not the subtlest plot twist, of course. Rather poor dramaturgy. But, generally speaking, there will be nothing better in the coming years”.

In the end, the weight of history is inescapable. As Andriy Bondarenko’s chief protagonist in Peace and Tranquility understands, “I grew up with a sense of peace and tranquility. I saw it as an inalienable right. I was a child of the ’80s. . . . Now I understand how naïve this feeling was. A mistake because of being born in a brief period of peace and tranquility. In the area where I was born, no one ever gave anyone the right to peace and quiet. And we, the Ukrainian children of the 1980s, had no privileges or rights. None.

Who gave them to us? No one”.

The stage holds up a mirror to the life around it, at times revealing truths which cut closer to the bone than everyday reality.

This is the moment to ask, “What are your values? What is it you value above all? Is it freedom? Is it democracy, justice, human life,

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dignity. . . . If you have values, are you ready to pay for them? With what? Money? Work? Freedom? Health? Life? The life of the people close to you? This is the most terrible. I’m definitely not ready for that”, Ania says in Neda Nezhdana’s Maidan Inferno, or the Other Side of Hell.

Living through the hell of Putin’s war, Ukraine’s writers demand that we weigh such questions. Should there be a reading taking place near you, go and hear how the Ukrainians are answering.

5: The Musicality of Kyiv April 1, 2022 Among the many astonishing images flowing out of Ukraine since the beginning of the war, one remarkable video proclaimed the resilience of the human spirit through music. Several members of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra took advantage of a brief ceasefire in the otherwise unrelenting Russian attack on their city to provide a surprise concert for their beleaguered neighbors in the capital’s central Independence Square. Led by conductor Herman Makarenko, the hearty musicians played a selection of uplifting music, including the Ukrainian national anthem and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. This inspiring performance proclaimed louder than words that Kyiv still lives.

Such an outpouring of music might have been surprising in many cities around the world, but not in Kyiv. Kyiv has had a vibrant music scene revolving around all levels of musicianship and in every genre. The city long has been a place where music lovers can find whatever they are seeking.

Formally, the city has always provided plentiful opportunity for young musicians to share their craft with others. Bartolomeo eighteenth-century Rastrelli’s Baroque masterpiece—St. Andrew’s Church—towers over the city’s skyline from its perch on the steep slopes of its namesake, Andriivskii Descent. Its weekly concert series offers an exquisite setting for up-and-coming classical musicians to win over an audience.

Kyiv’s very identity, however, is infused with musicality.

Bring a few Kyivians together and music is not far behind. I had firsthand experience of the ubiquity of music in Kyiv a while back when I was exiting the central Teatralna metro station.

A major transfer point between north-south and east-west subway lines, the station bustles in peacetime, with passengers scurrying about to catch their trains to exit downtown. Dating from the 1960s, the station boasts many of the features that marked the

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Soviet metro systems of the era, which favored grandeur over efficiency. But the main ticket hall of granite and marble offers a perfect dance hall as well.

While exiting the station one Monday evening, I began to hear Ukrainian folk music. As I was riding the escalator up from the platforms to the turnstiles, I didn’t pay any special attention, as performers frequently appear in Kyiv’s subway system to earn some cash. But the music began to sound rather different from what I normally would hear on the metro. As I stepped through the turnstiles into the ticket hall, I found myself in a music hall.

The band consisted of five musicians playing an accordion and various accompanying instruments. Around them danced about forty couples, nearly all of whom were of pensioner age. Pensioners can ride the metro for free, and the station’s various lines enable them to travel from all corners of the city to meet. Obviously, everyone had come knowing there would be a party and everyone was having a good time. Other riders—intent on getting home or to some appointment or other—passed through the crowd of dancers effortlessly.

Moving around the city, I often stumbled across musical happenings of all sorts. The sound of bagpipes emerged from central metro stations from time to time, while Peruvian musicians added a touch of the Americas to central Kyiv streets. Free pianos near the entrance to the funicular running down to the lower city always seemed to attract skillful players. In the hipster neighborhood of Podil, the instrumentation might be electrified. An assortment of string instruments might accompany fine weather in Mariyinsky Park. There might be saxophones near the Golden Gates. Kyivians have not just turned to music for entertainment, remembrance, or celebration. They live carrying music around with them in their daily lives, ready for any occasion.

The city’s musicality provides an important spiritual resource that requires no official or commercial sanction. Music is there—in the middle of a brutal invasion—to provide courage, encouragement, and solace. This musicality also explains Kyivians’ ability to reach out to each another despite whatever separates them. Music becomes an essential bond that transcends difference.

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Music’s power is within us all and can be felt everywhere. In cities like New Orleans, Vienna, and Buenos Aires that are fortunate enough to have defined their identity through music, performance becomes a core strength, able to withstand the worst of times. Such music reminds us of the past, but it can also remind us that what might seem irrevocably lost may be found again.

6: Dancing from Armageddon April 8, 2022 On March 10, a dozen artists from the Kyiv Modern Ballet Theater (KMBT) joined together to post a powerful video on Facebook and other social media urging their Russian theater colleagues to speak out against the carnage being carried out in their name in Ukraine.

Speaking in Russian, their chiseled dancer faces rendered haggard by exhaustion and stress, the artists spoke quietly and passionately, directly into the camera. They forcefully urged colleagues with whom they had shared stages, practice halls, the intimacies of dance, and sessions of sweat to acknowledge the horrors being inflicted on their city and country, and not to hide from them. Their heartfelt appeals were punctuated by gruesome images of the terror being inflicted on Ukraine.

Only a few weeks before, these same dancers were celebrating their superb performance in the company’s strikingly modern production of Swan Lake. Like millions of their compatriots, KMBT artists were living through the abrupt transition from peacetime to war.

Renowned choreographer Radu Poklitaru founded the KMBT in December 2005. KMBT has become an important presence on the Kyiv and international dance scene. The company of some two dozen dancers has presented a mixed repertoire of new works— including Women in D Minor, The Long Christmas Dinner, and The Little Prince—and more traditional ballets, such as Carmen, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty, recast in a sleek, stripped-down, contemporary setting. The company has provided numerous opportunities for young Ukrainian choreographers to hone their skills. Both the company and its dancers have enjoyed considerable success touring throughout Europe and Asia. As with performing arts organizations worldwide, the realities of COVID prompted KMBT to launch a vibrant virtual presence online.

Born a half-century ago in Chişinău, Moldova, to a family of ballet dancers, Poklitaru trained in his hometown as well as in 31

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Odesa, Moscow, and Perm. He landed his first performance opportunities in Minsk. Poklitaru eventually settled on Kyiv as his professional home and formed his new company, together with several other young dance artists who were making the city their home. In addition to talented dancers, he teamed up with scenographer Andriy Zlobin, costume artist Hanna Ipatieva, lighting designer Olena Antokhina, and others to create a dynamic, all-Ukrainian company dedicated to innovation.

Kyiv-born Canadian-American choreographer Stephanie Noll’s 2021 one-woman performance at the Miystetskyi Arsenal, celebrating the art of the twentieth-century avant-gardist Oleksandra Ekster, exemplifies the Kyiv dance community’s groundbreaking approach to performance. Ekster was a leading figure in both the Russian/Ukrainian and Parisian avant-garde communities, helping to invent Cubo-Futurism and Art Deco. Her Kyiv studio on Funduklievskaya (now Khmelnytsky) Street became a gathering place for the writers and artists who would come to define the new art of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Her influence grew after she relocated from Kyiv to Paris in 1924. Legendary twentiethcentury Broadway set designer Boris Aronson, son of the chief rabbi of Kyiv, was among her many influential protégés.

Noll’s work combines archival materials in New York and elsewhere with Kyivan sources to celebrate Ekster’s aesthetic influence on twentieth-century dance. Her recreation of Ekster’s once revolutionary sets and costumes connects the vitality of early twenty-first century Kyiv with the city’s artistic dynamism in the early twentieth century.

Dancer-choreographer Bronislava Nijinska was one of the protean artists who shared Kyiv’s artistic scene with Ekster. In 1910, Nijinska joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, together with her brother, Vaslav Nijinsky. Born in Warsaw into a prominent dance family, both Bronislava and Vaslav toured the Russian Empire with their family’s troupe as children. Both signed on to Diaghilev’s celebrated company and left after the impresario’s jealous fury led to Vaslav’s dismissal in 1913. Bronislava and her new husband, Alexandre Kochetovsky, relocated from London to Kyiv following the outbreak of World War I.

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Soldiers of the Bolshevik, White, German, and Ukrainian armies occupied Kyiv sixteen times in succession between late 1918 and August 1920. Remarkably, this was the precise moment that Nijinska opened L’Ecole de Mouvement (School of Movement), extolling the flowing movement, the free use of the torso, and a quickness of step that introduced her groundbreaking approach to movement. Despite the battles raging in and around Kyiv at the time, she managed to stage solo performances of her new works, which now are recognized as among the first “plotless” and “abstract” ballets of the twentieth century.

The Soviet secret police eventually forced Nijinska and her children to leave the country in 1921, leading her to wander to Paris, Monte Carlo, London, and Buenos Aires before settling in Los Angeles in 1940 (where she died in 1972). During these years, she helped invent a new twentieth-century ballet and modern dance, and her cutting-edge aesthetic and kinetic philosophies transformed Hollywood films.

Nijinska’s story offers strong parallels to those of Poklitaru and his KMBT colleagues. In both instances, Kyiv provided a congenial home to innovators and their pioneering artistic forms. In both instances, neither the drums of war nor authoritarian invaders could squelch the power of ideas. Perhaps both, tempered by war, will cast a similarly profound influence on the dance world at large.

7: Reclaiming Ukrainian Streets through Art April 15, 2022 As the battles for Bucha and Irpin raged just outside town, wellknown Ukrainian street artist Sasha Korban turned a bleak Kyiv wall into a powerful statement proclaiming the enduring presence of an independent Ukraine. Korban painted a moving street mural depicting two gaunt hands gently sewing together a tattered Ukrainian flag.

Korban presented his wall painting on the internet with an appeal to the international community to support his war-ravaged country. “Ukraine. War. The 40th day,” Korban wrote. “I’m speechless. So many people died. So many innocent kids have been killed.

So many souls have been crippled. Thanks to the incredible efforts of our soldiers, army, volunteers and all the Ukrainians who have united, we are holding back the enemy so that he cannot tear apart our homeland”. Korban’s powerful statement in both words and paint exclaims the deep determination of Ukrainians who are refusing to back down in the face of Russia’s war machine.

Now in his thirties, Korban achieved international recognition for his potent street art long ago. A native of Kirovske in Ukraine’s now-contested Donbas region, Korban worked as a miner before turning to painting. At the start of this century he began, as many street artists do, painting graffiti. He became particularly fond of creating portraits with spray paints on canvas. He developed his aesthetic sensibility by borrowing techniques from various styles and modalities to produce a distinctive personal style.

Painting on walls might seem an especially frivolous endeavor at a time of fierce war; yet it is a dangerous one. Artists such as Korban face Russian bombardments, air raid sirens, curfews, severely limited public transportation, and a lack of materials. Some have joined to fight with the Ukrainian army, others have volunteered for Territorial Defense units in Kyiv and other cities. Nonetheless, for some time now, street art has been thoroughly integrated with political activism throughout Ukraine.

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Artists claimed the Ukrainian capital’s streets for pro-Western supporters during the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity. Muralists created a vibrant energy throughout the city’s public spaces at that time. Their paintings proclaimed the beliefs, identities, and political positions animating the demonstrations of the era. As in the past, the arts became a substitute for politics in a nation that was denied a state for too long. Artists turned to several artistic mediums— poster art, photography, sculpture, painting, art associations, cinema, music—to proclaim their, and their compatriots’, presence.

Their creations inspired activists and ordinary citizens to see the uprising through to a successful conclusion. Looking forward, we can anticipate that street art will similarly reclaim streets for Ukraine.

Street art flowered in Kyiv and other cities following 2014.

One Kyiv murals website chronicled more than 170 artworks by thirty-five artists spread across the capital on the eve of the Russian invasion. Often gigantic, some murals highlight local identities, others fables and fairy tales. Paintings honor heroes, such as Armenian-Ukrainian activist Serhiy Nihoyan, who was the first person killed in the 2014 Hrushevskoho riots; and they present allegories of contemporary Ukrainian politics, such as a Ukrainian St. George slaying a two-headed dragon representing Russia. Painted by Ukrainian and international artists alike, these works brighten an at-times dreary post-Soviet cityscape. Residents take the local mural to heart, identifying more powerfully with their neighborhoods, city, and nation.

The street art produced in response to the Revolution of Dignity reflected the compelling creative artistic diversity that was emerging in Kyiv. It forever imprinted the heart-rending memories of the harsh 2013–2014 winter of rebellion. Korban’s latest masterpiece both preserves the sorrow of a city and country plundered by a ruthless invader and proclaims a resilience of spirit that promises to hold Ukraine together. As has so often been the case in Ukrainian history, art preserves the tragedy of this moment while revealing a path forward.

8: Donbasrock April 21, 2022 The Ukrainian progressive rock trio Sinoptik has enjoyed international success, in addition to a fervent following in Ukraine, since emerging on the rough-and-tumble Donetsk rock scene over a decade ago. Dmitry Afanasiev on guitar and keyboards, Ruslan Babayev on drums, and Aleksandr Savin on bass have taken their unique blend of emotional guitar riffs, the cosmic sounds of synthesizers, and philosophical lyrics far and wide to win fans over in small settings and 80,000-seat stadiums. Their victory at Berlin’s Global Battle of the Bands, followed by the success of their album Interplanet Overdrive, ensured an ever-expanding audience.

Their most powerful performance, however, could well be their simple a cappella performance of “Save Ukrainian Children!

Stop the War”, recorded during the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scattered without their instruments to different sites surrounding Kyiv, the trio came together on YouTube to record, in parallel, a compelling appeal to help Ukrainian children.

The contributions it garnered have helped provide for Ukrainian orphans and displaced children.

Ukraine has been a hotspot for many forms of rock since well before independence. The first Soviet rock ’n’ roll bands began to appear in Estonia and Latvia—and eventually in Moscow and Leningrad—during the early 1960s. The new music took off by the middle of that decade with the arrival of the Beatles over shortwave radios and, eventually, contraband cassette tape recordings. By the 1970s, Soviet rock bands had found their own worldview. The genre swept the country, with homegrown groups such as Mashina Vremini (Time Machine), Akvarium (Aquarium), and Zvuki Mu (the Sounds of Mu) grabbing large followings.

A quasi-underground Soviet rock scene thrived in the dark shadows of official institutions such as those attached to Donetsk’s massive factories—in restaurants and workers’ clubs, in palaces of

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culture, and on festival stages often controlled by Young Communist League (Komsomol), trade union, and factory officials. By the 1980s a robust, complex, and varied rock music culture had taken root, ranging from ubiquitous disco groups to punk and everything in between. Rock dominated the youth culture of the Soviet Union’s largest cities, including Donetsk.

This Soviet-era rock explosion opened the door for a dynamic and raucous music scene in post-independence Ukraine. New groups performing in Ukrainian, Russian, and English toured the country and abroad. Sinoptik’s Berlin success was far from unique, as Ukrainians began to find a distinct musical voice.

Rock—the heavier the better—fit the personality of Sinoptik’s hometown of Donetsk. During the late nineteenth century, Welshman John Hughes transformed Aleksandrovka, a sleepy administrative imperial outpost, into the coal and steel powerhouse Yuzovka (Hughesovka). The Russian Empire’s Manchester or Pittsburgh, the city was the kind of place where those who owned the mines and factories became fabulously wealthy off the labor provided by armies of underpaid and overworked workers toiling in dangerous conditions. Renamed Stalino during the dictator’s forced industrialization campaigns of the 1930s, Donetsk (so renamed in the de-Stalinization campaigns of the 1960s) was Steeltown, USSR. By the late 1980s, the region’s militant independent miners’ unions had become an important phenomenon, auguring the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Vicious gang wars for control of the city’s massive industrial enterprises and their resources followed the Soviet collapse. Several mine disasters tied to lax safety procedures darkened the region’s already gloomy reputation, as did a poisonous conflict over language rights in this predominantly Russian-speaking region. The 2014 proclamation of an independent Donetsk People’s Republic, tied to Moscow, sparked the war, which continues to this day.

An aggressive style of rock reflected the proletarian angst that spilled over into Donetsk culture and politics. Like Sinoptik, the early twenty-first century ascent of Napalm Records’ Jinjer and the “nu metal” group Agregate on the Donetsk scene captured the era’s

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ethos. The city’s violent separatist turmoil, combined with the dynamism of Kyiv’s music scene, would lead Afanasiev, Babayev, and Savin to decamp for the Ukrainian capital. Their simple yet powerful plea to save the children and stop the war could well be their most important work yet.

9: Puppets, People, and War April 25, 2022 As Russian tanks streamed across Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders in February and hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees from eastern Ukraine fled west to find shelter, Lviv’s People and Puppets Theater offered up its facilities as a haven from the terror outside. Some company members left to fight; others did whatever they could to aid the war effort from Lviv. Several theater artists began using their sewing skills to make camouflage netting to protect the troops, at times ripping up clothing they had brought from home. Others provided succor to those from the east who were now living in the theater.

Over time, children on the run began to reveal the deep psychological trauma of their sudden flight. Theater artists started presenting pop-up puppet shows for children, with an eye to giving the gift of joy to those in greatest need. The performers would act out tales from Ukrainian folklore, often already well-known to the children, and invite the children to join in. For a brief moment, tears would turn to laughter.

Puppetry’s magic was enlisted in Lviv before, to bring delight in wartime. A puppet theater was among the very first cultural institutions to open in 1945, as the Wehrmacht retreated from the city.

Even the city’s postwar Soviet occupiers understood the need of adding a touch of beauty and delight at a time of unthinkable destruction.

Puppetry has a long history in Lviv, and in Ukraine more generally. Puppetry grew out of the local vertep tradition, the depiction in puppetry of the Christian Nativity story and of mystery plays.

For 500 years, Ukrainian puppets with painted faces mounted on sticks portrayed the Nativity story to the accompaniment of Ukrainian song and improvised narration; a similar tradition exists in neighboring Poland and Belarus. The plays were often presented

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on boxlike stages that were divided between an upper level, the celestial, where the biblical story was presented, and a lower level, representing local life.

Over time, the religious meaning began to peel away, leaving a lively secular puppet tradition that embraced both puppets and human enactors. Satirized characters based on national stereotypes, such as a Pole, a Zaporizhian Cossack, and a priest, were joined by supernatural characters, such as the Devil and Death, to poke fun at everyday life while reinforcing core religious and social values.

After the Bolshevik Revolution (when Lviv was part of a newly independent Poland), Ukrainian puppetry took on a political purpose. Commissars used puppetry to spread Bolshevik ideology through agitprop. Distinctive forms of Ukrainian puppetry took shape in the East, especially in Kharkiv. The puppet stage inspired the creators of modern Ukrainian theater.

Soviet authorities detected inappropriate political messages in the puppets’ antics and began to rein them in. By the 1970s, KGB officials in Lviv were arresting actors and audience members for celebrating the Yuletide season with vertep puppetry. Ironically, these efforts emboldened oppositionists to recreate the art form as a forum for underground political commentary. In 1989, for example, a puppet resembling Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took on the role of Herod in a particularly pointed retelling of the Easter story in Lviv.

The local cultural scene came back to life after independence, as European tourists with discretionary funds for supporting the arts discovered a previously forgotten Hapsburgian jewel of a cityscape. Perhaps more than its famous opera house, which must have reminded Viennese civil servants of home as they administered their provincial corner of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, puppetry seemed to speak to local hearts while attracting tourists looking for a good time. With independence, the People and Puppets Theater (“I Liudy, I Lialky”) was established and quickly gained an international following. Its success helped turn Lviv into an international puppetry center that embraced touring puppet troupes, hosting international puppetry festivals since 2015.

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Puppetry has flourished in Lviv and elsewhere in Ukraine for five centuries through its ability to reinvent itself and its purpose in response to changing political fortunes. Whether sacral, satirical, political, or commercial, Lviv vertep thrives because of its unending ability to delight. For just a moment—as the artists at Lviv’s People and Puppets Theater understand—the magic of puppetry has the power to transport a terrorized child to a safe imaginary world.

10: Opera in a Ukrainian Embroidered Shirt April 29, 2022 On April 5, with the city aboveground ravaged by Russian rockets, baritone Volodymyr Kozlov of the Kharkiv National Theater of Opera and Ballet descended into a nearby subway station to serenade those who had sought shelter there. Operatic tenors almost always get to play heroes; baritones and basses, not so much. The lower the vocal range, it seems, the greater the villainy. On this occasion, Kozlov was the greatest hero of all, comforting those who needed it most, accompanied by a dozen stringed instruments as he dug into his repertoire of Italian operas.

Kozlov began his career with the opera in 2008, following his graduation from the local Kharkiv National University of the Arts.

He rose steadily through the ranks, from the chorus to leading roles, and extended his appearances into Europe and China, earning the honorarium “Honored Artist of Ukraine”.

The Kharkiv National Theater traces its history back to the first permanent opera companies in the city in 1876. Formally, the theater was established in 1925, when Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The company earned particular notice in the years prior to World War II for its presentation of more than thirty operas and eleven ballets on Ukrainian themes. The theater recovered from the war, though by the 1970s, in response to Soviet de-Ukrainianization cultural policies, the number of Ukrainian works in its repertoire was severely reduced. The company seized on the new opportunities unleashed by independence to promote new Ukrainian works.

During the brief interlude between the COVID epidemic and the Russian invasion, the company staged one of the most ambitious new Ukrainian operas: Vyshyvaniy. The King of Ukraine. This large-scale work tells the remarkable story of the Hapsburg Archduke Wilhelm of Austria, who donned a Ukrainian embroidered shirt—the vyshyvanka—and fought with the Ukrainian partisan Sich Riflemen (Sichovi Striltsi) against Nazi and Soviet occupation.

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Wilhelm was arrested in the American zone of occupied Vienna in March 1947 by Austrian police responding to complaints about a loud birthday party. The police turned him over to Soviet authorities. He died at the age of fifty-three in Soviet detention, in August 1948.

The October 2021 production featured modern acoustic and electronic music composed by Alla Zahaykevych, with a libretto by Serhiy Zhadan, and was directed by Rostyslav Derzhypilsky. The staging featured some 300 characters performing the contemporary choreography of Olya Semyoushkina on stage sets designed by Olesya Holovach. Zahaykevych is among Ukraine’s most successful classical composers and Zhadan is one of the country’s leading writers. Zhadan frequently collaborates with Kharkiv-based musicians in a number of genres and is a leading figure in the city’s postindependence cultural renaissance.

Founded as a fortress imperial settlement in 1654, Kharkiv grew into a major industrial and cultural center during the nineteenth century. Its university, founded in 1804 as one of the Russian Empire’s earliest institutions of higher learning, soon became a center for promoting Ukrainian literature. The Bolsheviks, unsure of their control over the rest of Ukraine, named Kharkiv their Ukrainian capital in December 1919. The city remained a major center of industry and education following the relocation of the capital to Kyiv in January 1934. It continued to be a major military defense industrial center throughout the Soviet period and grew into a metropolitan region, home to over two million, before Russia’s current invasion.

Independence-era Ukraine created fresh opportunities for Kharkiv to flourish intellectually and culturally. Karamzin University became just one of the city’s several specialized universities, among the most innovative in Ukraine. The literary scene, featuring Zhadan and dozens of other authors, rivaled that of many cities across Europe and Eurasia. Music thrived amid the wreckage wrought by the Russians. Immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East contributed to the increasingly diverse and innovative cultural scene as well.

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Kharkiv and its cultural institutions endured too many invasions to submit to Russian brutality. The city and its culture will emerge again, producing inspiring creative works like Vyshyvaniy.

The King of Ukraine. And when that happens, the heroic baritone Volodymyr Kozlov will undoubtedly be a stage villain once more.

11: Chernivtsi Philharmonic in Shelter May 4, 2022 At the outset of the war, the Chernivtsi Regional Philharmonic— joined by musicians displaced from other regions—began performing in bomb shelters and other sanctuaries. Now posted on Facebook and YouTube, videos from these impromptu concerts have been used to raise money for refugees and the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Home to around a quarter of a million residents prior to the war, the southwestern Ukrainian city has provided sanctuary to tens of thousands displaced from eastern Ukraine. Some—though not all—travel farther, to find safe haven in nearby Romania. Meanwhile, musicians from the local orchestra have dedicated themselves to providing moments of relief from the turmoil swirling around them.

More recently, as it continues the current concerts, the orchestra began reaching into its video archive to put up segments of earlier performances. The joyous abandon of Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, captured in an April 2019 performance under the baton of Robert Trocina, recalls a world now lost.

Conductor Trocina has enjoyed an international conducting career from his home base in Atlanta, where he has become a mainstay of several musical ensembles and organizations. He came to Chernivtsi in April 2019 to serve as a guest conductor for the local symphony orchestra. His choice of Copland’s music offers a sharp contrast to the suffering of the pandemic and the war that was to follow.

Known during his lifetime as “the Dean of American Composers”, the cosmopolitan Copland is best remembered today through the sparkling Americana oeuvre of his “populist” or “vernacular” period: ballets, film scores, and orchestra works such as Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Symphony No. 3, and the magisterial “Fanfare for the Common Man”. Copland deliberately intended these pieces to be approachable, in response to the hardships of the 49

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Great Depression and World War II. They marked a surprising departure from the abstract modernism of his earlier career, which included a three-year stint studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Their connection to Chernivtsi is not as remote as it might seem at first glance.

Chernivtsi—once Czernowitz—has been an important crossroads for Slavic, Byzantine, Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Romanian peoples since the second century CE. A publishing center, the city became a home to Jewish, Romanian, German, Polish, and Ukrainian intellectual life. In 1908, Nathan Birnbaum organized the first international conference promoting the Yiddish language, which brought together many theater artists as well as other religious, literary, and intellectual leaders. The city’s Jewish community gave birth to Yiddish theater and remained a focal point of Jewish life in the Bukovina region until World War II. Romanian, Russian, German, Polish, and Ukrainian forces fought over the city after the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918. Czernowitz eventually fell to the Romanians, as part of the postwar settlement. Long a university town, the city became one of Romania’s major intellectual centers. The 1930 Romanian census gave the city’s population as 112,400, of which 26.8 percent was Jewish, 23.2 percent Romanian, 20.8 percent German, and 18.6 percent Ukrainian, with Poles and other groups constituting the remainder. More than half of the city’s, and the region’s, Jews perished in the Holocaust. Deportations followed the transfer of the city and the region to Soviet Ukraine, virtually eliminating the city’s vibrant Yiddish life.

Yiddish culture extended well beyond any single center, however. Copland was born in 1900 into a Brooklyn Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origins. He could not have avoided New York’s vibrant Yiddish cultural life of his youth, even as he may have strived to move beyond it. The same theatrical traditions that had stirred Birnbaum to action in Czernowitz churned away in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

That cultural explosion reshaped American popular theater, song, and film through some of Yiddish culture’s most masterful artists, such as Irving Berlin in pop music, Stella Adler and Lee

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Strasberg in theater, the Marx Brothers in Hollywood, and Shalom Aleichem in literature. These artists moved from their beginnings along Second Avenue’s “Jewish Rialto” into the American mainstream. Superstars Boris and Bessie Tomashefsky’s grandson, Michael Tilson Thomas, is arguably now the “dean” of twenty-first century American classical conductors. Like Copland, these artists transcended their immigrant backgrounds to capture an intangible spirit in American culture. Copland’s homage to the American West is as quintessentially “cowboy” as any music composed west of the Mississippi.

Though not immediately obvious, the trail from today’s somber migrant bomb shelters in Chernivtsi to Copland’s joyful dancing cowboys is direct. Such connections become obscure when we build walls and barriers between ourselves and those whom we deem to be unlike us. Culture ignores such walls, flowing over, though, and under human-made obstructions to generate something new and startling. Such eruptions have animated Chernivtsi in its various incarnations for two millennia—and continue to do so, despite Russian bombs and rockets.

12: Kyiv’s DakhaBrakha in New Orleans For Cities, Diversity Counts May 12, 2022 Cities have nurtured the creative explosion of unanticipated propinquity ever since humans began to gather in permanent settlements more than nine millennia ago. This phenomenon is especially true in cities that take shape on the borders of once distinct nations and cultural systems. Memorable art often emerges from eras and places where life is most unsettled. Twenty-first century Kyiv is such a city, as displayed at the famed New Orleans Jazz Fest on the afternoon of April 30, when the Ukrainian capital’s music ensemble DakhaBakha took the stage.

Writing in the prominent New Orleans cultural lookout Gambit, longtime local aficionado Will Coviello reported how DakhaBrakha took the overflowing Cultural Exchange Pavilion tent by storm. The quartet “describes itself as a world music quartet, and it draws on Ukrainian folk songs, classical training, vocal tricks, and more”, he wrote, and “the group often harmonizes on top of a good rhythm coming from just bass drum and cello. Sometimes they chant haunting vocals, and at times they divert into instrumental interludes”. In other words, the performance exudes just the sort of stunning intercultural mashup that so often emerges from the mixing bowls of cities—such as New Orleans—struggling for self-definition in the face of intense cultural fusion.

DakhaBrakha grew out of a chance encounter at Kyiv’s Dakh Center of Contemporary Art between avant-garde theater director Vladislav Troitskyi and Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts graduates Marko Halanevuch (vocals, percussion, harmonica, accordion, and other instruments), Olena Tsybulska (vocals and percussion), and Iryna Kovalenko (vocals, piano, ukulele, accordion, and other instruments). Cellist and vocalist Nina Garentska quickly joined the mix.

While Coviello was uncertain how to describe DakhaBrakha’s unique sound, Troitskyi, the group’s director and self-proclaimed 53

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“ideologist”, offers a more concise description of the group as the embodiment of Ukrainian “ethnic chaos”. Fittingly, the group’s name means “give/take” in an older Ukrainian language.

Categories aside, DakhaBrakha fits most comfortably into current notions of world music. Starting with Ukrainian folk music as its base, the group combines Indian, African, Russian, and Australian traditional and European classical instrumentation to produce a music that has never been heard before. Its power grows from the creative eruption unleashed by the contradictory cultural, social, and political forces that characterize post-independence Ukraine.

For all its paradoxes, this new culture rests—as does DakhaBrakha’s unique sound—on a profoundly Ukrainian sensibility.

The group garnered considerable international success and had long planned a post-COVID international tour in April. Agonizing over whether to embark on the trip after the war started, the group concluded that its performances in North America could help generate support for Ukraine. If the sea of blue-and-yellow flags on display at their New Orleans performance offers any indication, they made the right choice.

DakhaBrakha reveals a more profound truth about post-independence Ukraine. Precisely because so many issues around identity remained unresolved (at least until President Putin’s army provided cohesion), Ukrainian culture was energized by the mixing and matching of different heritages, histories, and identities. This “give/take” was not random; neither was it chaotic. The process was the result of Ukrainians determined to define Ukraine for themselves. Compared to neighboring Russia, where imposing a false sense of order and an illusory unanimity became the goal, Ukraine has emerged as the more creative fulcrum. Today’s Ukraine speaks powerfully to those coming of age in the twentyfirst century. DakhaBrakha’s pulsating success reveals that something powerful was taking shape beneath the seeming anarchy of Ukraine’s daily and political life.

Critics of the dissonance of urban life have complained for millennia that cities undermine human well-being through their tumultuous knocking together of seemingly irreconcilable cultures,

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lifestyles, belief systems, economic interests, social classes, and political factions. History is more complicated: some of humankind’s most exceptional accomplishments have been forged by such give and take. In the twenty-first century, Kyiv joins the long list of cities that demonstrate how this comes about.

13: Ukraine, Eurasian Theater’s New Leader May 16, 2022 “Why is Putin bombing us?” a frightened child asks a traumatized mother. How can anyone answer? Natasha Block’s new play, Our Children, brings the unanswerable, grotesque uncertainties of war directly into our souls.

The ghastly war in Ukraine is nurturing an exciting theater that holds promise for world theater. As reported here previously, some of the world’s leading theater artists rallied, as the first bombs were falling on Ukraine, to launch an international initiative to bear witness to Putin’s horrors. Starting with the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project, Maksym Kurochkin of Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights, Philip Arnoult of Baltimore’s Center for International Theater Development, Noah Birksted-Breen of London’s Sputnik Theatre, John Freedman, and others have commissioned Ukraine’s playwrights to create scripts in response to the war.

Kurochkin personifies the transfer of creative energy to Ukraine. A Russian-speaking native of Kyiv, he became one of the New Russian Drama movement’s brightest stars. Kurochkin worked in Moscow, in the post-Soviet theatrical hotbed of Yekaterinburg, and in the Russian film industry. More than six years ago, Kurochkin returned to his hometown, where he joined forces with two dozen playwrights to establish the Theater of Playwrights, with the goal of nurturing a rising generation of Ukrainian theater artists. Recently he has switched to writing his own plays in Ukrainian.

By the end of April, the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project had commissioned more than one hundred new scripts, many translated into English and other languages and all available online. Well over one hundred project-sponsored readings have taken place in some twenty countries. The proceeds are used to support Ukraine-based organizations.

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On May 5, I had the privilege of participating in one such reading in Washington, DC. Though Washington remains first and foremost a political city, the American capital has developed a vibrant theater community over the past three-quarters of a century. Boycotted in an earlier era by the nation’s leading theater artists in response to the city’s noxious Jim Crow segregation, by the midtwentieth century Washington was a city bereft of professional theater. A theater community befitting a national capital took root once Jim Crow customs became illegal.

Today the city is home to dozens of theater companies and the second-largest theater audience in the United States. Its theater world has become an incubator for all varieties of artists and productions that have found success in New York, Hollywood, and major dramatic centers around the world.

Washington’s Voices Festival Productions collaborated with the Washington Arts Club, long housed at the historic James Monroe House on Pennsylvania Avenue, diagonally across the street from the World Bank, to host a virtual reading for this expansive theater community. The evening featured three of the plays supported by the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project: Yelena Astasyeva’s A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, Natasha Blok’s Our Children, and Adriy Bondarenko’s Peace and Tranquility. A. Lorraine Robinson directed all three, which featured actors Hanna Bondarewska, Aakhu Freeman, and Lisa Hodsoll.

The plays captured the shock and horror of the war’s first days. Astasyeva used her experience to give new meaning to such emotions as panic, fear, hunger, betrayal, love, hatred, and guilt.

Blok tried to answer questions posed by children, such as “Why are they killing us?” Bondarenko pondered what happened to all those rights he thought he had while growing up. Interspersed community commentary set the plays off from each other. A panel discussion followed.

The shock of uncertainty unleashed by war binds together these works, which are rather different in style and temperament.

Far too much remains unknowable to answer the existential questions posed by the performances. Combined, they proclaim that

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which we already know, namely, that an energetic Ukraine and Ukrainian culture will continue well into the future.

Ukrainians have awed the world with their passion, resilience, creativity, and commitment to a better country. Their land and culture profoundly matter to them. Ukraine no longer stands in anyone’s shadow. As the arts reveal, Ukrainians themselves have built—and continue to build—a distinctive culture and society for themselves.

Endings in the arts often accompany beginnings. Early in April, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater presented Russian director Dmitry Krymov’s take on Anton Chekhov’s iconic The Cherry Orchard. The production was unlike any other among the thousands of productions of the play over the past century. Krymov had been one of the leading lights in Moscow theater during the remarkable era of the New Russian Drama movement, which took advantage of the new freedoms after the Soviet collapse to create one of the Russian theater’s most creative periods. Such inventiveness, unfortunately, wilted before the combined onslaught of Vladimir Putin’s brutish authoritarianism and the Russian Orthodox Church’s spiritcrushing campaign for “patriotic” moralism. Putin declared Krymov a traitor just days before the Philadelphia opening.

Fittingly, The Cherry Orchard is about curtains coming down on societies, and their cultures, overwhelmed by economic, social, and political change. An entrepreneurial peasant who has risen to wealth stealthily buys an estate out from under its aging aristocratic landlords and chops down their prized cherry orchard to build a compound of summer cottages for sale. Krymov, in one of several nods to the horror unfolding in contemporary Ukraine, uses a magical train departure board to announce that the Muscovite landowners have arrived in Kharkiv, thus setting the action in a region under attack. The play ends not to the sound of axes chopping down trees, as in Chekhov’s original, but to bombs falling on a nottoo-distant city. Once again, Chekhov’s last masterpiece prompts contemplation of finales.

In Krymov’s case, plans are afoot to establish a new studio in New York. Artists fleeing predatory authoritarians are enriching

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American performing arts yet again. America’s gain is Russia’s loss, even if few in the Kremlin seem to care.

For the past three decades, Ukrainian artists working in many genres—literature, theater, dance, music, the visual arts—have drawn energy from the freedom, chaos, and contradictions of their country’s independence. In the process they have created a mature artistic community that has overcome the Soviet Union’s deUkrainization cultural polices of the 1960s through the 1980s (and far worse before). They have done so largely out of the view of an international arts community mesmerized by the legendary glitter of European and Russian cultures.

The Ukrainian cultural moment arrived as Putin’s authoritarian regime lowered the curtain on Russia’s art scene and raised it on a culture that Ukrainians have been creating for themselves for the past several decades. In all the horror and terror of war, a previously undiscovered artistic domain full of innovation, energy, and beauty has come into view. The world should be thankful that Eurasia theater’s new leader will be ignored no longer.

14: Exchanging Camouflage for Tutus in Lviv May 24, 2022 Just over a month after the war brought down the house lights inside the Lviv National Opera House, performances—both virtual and in person—have begun once again. As director Vasyl Vovkun told reporters from CNN, “We understand that light must defeat darkness, that life must defeat death, and the mission of the theater is to assert this”. Vovkun’s spirit reached beyond the theater to dancers and musicians scattered by the war. So many have found their way back to the theater to perform that Vovkun has been able to mount a program of ballets, operas, and concerts.

Many of the Opera’s artists and their neighbors in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv have been unable to avoid the horrors of today’s war, even as the city has largely escaped Russian bombardment. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians displaced from the east have made their way to the city, seeking haven. Air raid sirens regularly sound. City residents have gone off to fight, while many have relatives in the east who have been under savage attack. A night at the ballet would seem an impossible pleasure under such conditions.

Vovkun and his company know better.

Lviv’s Opera House is a delightful marvel, a confection left over from the days when the city was ruled from Vienna. Hapsburg rulers may have been ghastly, but they had good taste. From Prague to Salzburg, Trento to Krakow, the Balkans nearly to the Black Sea, Hapsburgian provincial towns offered an abundance of cafés, coffee houses, pastries, picturesque town squares, tree-lined boulevards, and jewel-box opera houses, no matter the local language, ethnicity, or religion.

Ukraine's Lviv is imbued with such Hapsburgian charm, and no place more so than its captivating Opera House, which dominates the city's central square. As the twentieth century approached, the great and the good of Lviv (then known as Lemberg) came together to commission an opera house befitting the city’s role as the provincial capital of Galicia.

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Designed by Berlin-trained Zygmunt Gorgolewski, the theater combined modern construction methods—it rests on a reinforced concrete foundation—with the traditional opulence of the era’s Neo-Baroque style. Columns, statues, reliefs, and frescos representing a mishmash of allegorical figures and heroic personages decorate every surface, giving the impression that one of the city’s outlandish pastries has come to life.

Opening night on October 4, 1900, was an event for the ages, attracting painters, writers, and composers from across the AustroHungarian Empire, including the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and the painter Henryk Siemiradzki. Armenian Catholic archbishop Izaak Mikolaj Isakowicz, Rabbi Ezechiel Caro, and Protestant pastor Rev. Garfel blessed the theater on behalf of the city’s many cultural and religious communities.

Vovkun and his performers chose to relaunch the theater this month with a performance of Giselle, one of the oldest and most effervescent works in the ballet repertoire that is still performed today. The story of a beautiful peasant girl wronged by a deceitful nobleman, the ballet has been a mainstay of ballet stages since its June 1841 premiere in Paris. Tweaked and reworked, modernized, rehabilitated, and revised, Giselle has managed to survive as a relic of artistic eras long past. Its multitudinous white tutus, leaping princes, and faux-peasant stage sets provide a perfect haven from war, especially when the ballet is performed in as sumptuous a venue as the Lviv Opera House.

War nonetheless intrudes on every aspect of life, even in a city that has avoided the horrendous destruction further to the east.

Twenty-one-year-old Darnya Kirik, who danced the lead role, embraced the opportunity to perform as a release from the crushing emotions arising from the war. Her mother, grandmother, sister, and their pets only recently survived a horrific evacuation from once-occupied Bucha. Knowing that her mother was now in Poland helped bring some peace. But such welcome news could not erase the terrors of war through which her family had lived.

Audiences at the ballet, and at subsequent performances and concerts, are limited to 300, the number that can be accommodated

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safely in the Opera’s bomb shelter. Air raid sirens interrupt applause, and once the curtain comes down, the spectators return to families torn apart by war. Yet for two hours, a museum piece such as Giselle performed in the gilded hall of a long-past epoch is a glorious antidote to the grotesqueries of the Russian invasion.

15: Chernihiv Artist Reporting War Atrocities on TikTok June 3, 2022 Photography has borne powerful witness to the horrors of war since the first daguerreotypes of the Mexican–American War of 1847. Indeed, compelling photographs of the agonies and destruction of wars, joined in the twentieth century by moving images of various kinds, are how humans remember war. Images by some of the world’s leading photographers and ordinary Ukrainian citizens alike have transformed how the world might have seen the Russian invasion had content control rested with the Kremlin.

Among the thousands of photographers capturing the horrific destruction of Ukraine, twenty-year-old Valeria Shashenok stands out for her use of TikTok to turn tens of thousands of viewers worldwide into witnesses to the destruction of her country, her native city, Chernihiv, her home, and her family. Her work marks a turning point in how images bring war into our souls.

Chernihiv is one of Ukraine’s oldest cities. Already a substantial settlement when mentioned in the Rus-Byzantine Treaty of 907, the city grew into the second largest and wealthiest city in southern Rus’ lands, behind only Kyiv, some ninety miles to the southwest.

Today, the Russian border is just fifty-five miles to the north.

Local princes were major players in the intrigues among the Kyivan grand princes, the rulers of Kievan Rus’, throughout the twelfth century. Centuries of political turmoil followed, as Chernihiv fell under several of the region’s competing empires, including those of Kyiv, Lithuania, Poland, the Cossack Hetmanate, and finally, in the eighteenth century, Russia. The armies of Batu Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan), Hitler, and now Putin have passed through town.

Architectural marvels from these periods survived into the twenty-first century, including five churches from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Savior Transfiguration, Pyatnyska and

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Ilynska churches, Borisoglebsky cathedral, and the Eletsky monastery, which, though erected later, was established on the basis of the earlier churches. The eighteenth-century Collegium and Catherine’s Church are marvels of the Ukrainian Baroque style, which transformed Russian Orthodox architecture across the Russian Far North and Siberia.

Contemporary Chernihiv is a provincial center that was home to nearly 300,000 residents prior to this year’s Russian invasion, linked by major transportation routes north into Russia and Belarus and south across Ukraine. The city was an early target for invading Russian forces racing toward Kyiv. Russian forces surrounded the city almost immediately, establishing a blockade that lasted from March 10 until they were driven away on April 5, leaving behind a trail of destruction. Rocket and air attacks continue in the city and throughout the region.

Curiously, the Russians were not intent on using Chernihiv as a staging ground for an assault on Kyiv, or particularly concerned with the city’s logistical and economic resources. Once they had obliterated electrical, water, and transport facilities, schools, and hospitals, Russian missiles and artillery were aimed at the city’s residential neighborhoods and cultural heritage. The strikes shattered more than 3,500 buildings. Attacks damaged the Tarnovsky Museum of Antiquities, one of the oldest and most important regional museums in Ukraine, local theaters, and libraries (including the local children’s library). The goal of these attacks was to make life intolerable. The monstrous brutality of the Russian occupying forces and the resulting carnage were everywhere to be seen once Ukrainian liberating forces took the city back.

Shashenok is but one photographer and Chernihiv but one city in the middle of unbounded devastation. Her valiant effort to record everyday life during and after the Russian occupation carries extra force precisely because she is one person among the thousands who are trying to record events that have happened to them personally, and to their families, friends, and communities. The Russian army on the outskirts of Chernihiv set out to destroy the city and its people, its history and culture. They tried to annihilate

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1,000 years of independent urban culture that sprang up and continues to live there. Shashenok, and photographers and artists like her, ensure they can never do so.

16: Uzhhorod Songs June 10, 2022 Punk rock singer Yaryna Denysyuk has been editing the Ukrainian alternative music website Neformat for some time. The site showcases Ukrainian punk, metal, and experimental electronic music that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Her reviews of the latest news and recordings from the alternative music scene have become a bulletin board for musicians across Ukraine to share news, concert listings, and music.

Living in the far western city of Uzhhorod, Denysyuk felt both fortunate and unlucky to be far removed from the war that began when Russia invaded her country. Running through the gamut of emotions from hate and sorrow to hope and resolve, Denysyuk realized she had a special role to play in her country’s struggle. She began searching Facebook, Instagram, and the web more generally for new music about the war by Ukrainian performers.

Musicians—even those she did not know—began alerting her to their war experiences and their new songs. The result is a chronicle of how the underground music community has responded to the war at home and, when in exile, abroad. This work has been possible in part because Uzhhorod has remained thus far untouched by war.

The city’s history is unlike that of other Ukrainian towns. Located on Ukraine’s far western border, Uzhhorod fell under Hungarian rule for much of its thirteen century history, as the town of Ungvár. Located across the Carpathian Mountains from the rest of Ukraine, the city became part of newly independent Czechoslovakia in 1919 before the Germans folded the region back into Hungary in 1938. The Wehrmacht exterminated the city’s large Jewish community, with the Red Army expelling the Hungarian majority after the war.

Annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945, Uzhhorod became an important transit point to and from the USSR. Around 120,000 mostly Ukrainian residents lived in the city at the beginning of the 69

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twenty-first century, with significant Russian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Romani minorities.

Such marginality from the main body of Ukraine has become an asset during Russia’s invasion from the east. The city’s critical location on the country’s western border elevates its significance as a transfer point between Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Supplies flow in from the west, while refugees depart for Europe. Its local cultural scene has become integrated with more accessible European centers such as Budapest and Berlin, and a vibrant Roma cultural presence brings Uzhhorod into a wider international circuit.

These networks extend the city’s reach, connecting Ukrainian musical culture with Europe’s at a moment when it might have been cut off. Simultaneously, the city remains out of range of Russian bombardment.

Denysyuk is able to spend her days cataloging new developments in Ukraine’s alternative cultural scene without constant sirens and explosions. She has used this opportunity to create and manage a network that extends throughout the country, bringing new songs emerging from basements and bomb shelters to underground music fans across Ukraine and beyond.

Ukraine’s indie scene represents a vibrant response to the Russian invasion. Music inspired by the war—often angry, sometimes pensive—brings young Ukrainians together, despite the hardships of the conflict. This new wave of war music chronicles the ways in which Ukrainians are becoming ever more united in their resolve to defend their country and preserve their distinct culture. Events have made far-off Uzhhorod a critical hub for this struggle in part because a new generation of artists, such as Yaryna Denysyuk, feels compelled to guard against irreplaceable cultural loss, no matter the odds.

17: In Kyiv’s Podil, Tattoo Artists Work to Support the Troops June 16, 2022 For the past several weeks—ever since life began to return to a more normal pace following the Ukrainian victory in the battle for Kyiv—the capital’s tattoo artists have gathered in an abandoned factory in Kyiv’s Podil neighborhood to offer their talents in support of their country’s war effort. Scores of young Kyivans—students, soldiers, young professionals—line up for their “tattoos of courage”, a sign of patriotism and solidarity. Artists create mythical beasts inspired by the Ukrainian flag, images honoring national heroes, and anti-Russian tags, which they ink onto their customers.

Typically, fifteen artists will work on five to six dozen customers on any given Saturday, earning around $10,000 to support the war effort.

The factory stands near where some Russian rockets fell during the failed assault, bringing the terror of war to a neighborhood that had become a hipster haven in recent years. Located on the banks of the Dnipro River, Podil historically has been Kyiv’s roughand-tumble lower town, where goods unloaded onto the nearby docks were moved straight into markets, wholesale stores, and warehouses.

The neighborhood has served as the more respectable upper city’s entrepôt for 1,000 years. Podil even became the city center for a while, following the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion. Between 1797 and 1929, its Kontraktova Square (Contract Square) hosted Kyiv’s major annual trade fair. The area was rebuilt in stone and brick following a destructive 1811 fire. Surrounded by steep embankments separating the area from the main city above, Podil remained largely self-contained until the arrival of a funicular connecting the city’s upper and lower towns at the beginning of the beginning century, followed by a metro half a century later.

Historically home to merchants, traders, and small manufacturers of all types, the area developed a notable Jewish community 71

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that survived until the night of September 29–30, 1941, when German forces marched Jews to be slaughtered in the nearby Babyn Yar ravine as part of the extermination of 33,771 people. A small Jewish community returned after the war.

The area awakened after independence in 1991. A group of leading Ukrainian scholars led by Vyacheslav Brukhovetsky moved to reestablish the historic Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (founded in 1615, transformed into the Kyiv Theological Academy in 1819, and shut down by the Soviets). Securing several buildings near Kontraktova Square, their efforts made Podil one of post-independence Ukraine’s leading intellectual centers, attracting a steady flow of students, faculty, and visitors. The neighborhood’s vibrant food market grew in popularity, while its somewhat down-at-heels ambiance reminded expats and hipsters of New York’s SoHo, Paris’s Marais district (in the 4th arrondissement), and Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Podil became the sort of neighborhood where an American ambassador could keep bees in the back yard of his residence.

As in New York, Paris, and Berlin, gentrification began to push the hipsters out, though not as completely as in those wealthier Western cities. The hipster vibe lived on, with Podil serving as one of the city’s most important “zones of contact” for Kyiv’s various communities and classes. Such areas—and thousands of similar rough edges in cities around the world—are the necessary proving grounds where the diverse becomes transformed into an intercultural resource. They are where accomplished cities become successful.

Like wetlands in the natural environment, such mixing bowls of urban diversity often appear to outsiders to be little more than wastelands. They are the first places to be rebuilt, redesigned, reconceived, and reconstituted when reformers think about “improving” a city. Yet this is a terrible mistake. Like wetlands, zones of contact are among the most productive corners of the urban environment. Like wetlands, such communities must be revitalized from time to time for them to continue to enrich the city at large.

They are just the sort of place where tattoo artists would support soldiers fighting on their behalf.

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Putin and his cronies have made so many blunders in launching their invasion of Ukraine that it is difficult to elevate any one above the others. Among the many miscalculations, failure to recognize the generations of Ukrainians who grew up in an independent country must rank near the top.

Oriented to the West, these self-reliant children of freedom fought for their own vision of Ukraine during the Orange Revolution (2004–2005), the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity (2013– 2014), and now they are fighting again. They are Ukraine’s future, and their vision for their country is revealed through their own art forms: rock music, TikTok videos, and tattoos. Their Ukraine is— and will be—the antithesis of everything Putin’s authoritarian Russia represents. Their tattoos of courage are but one more indication of their country’s deep rejection of the society Russians want to impose on Ukraine. More than getting tattoos and making videos for the internet, young Ukrainians are demonstrating that they will resist Russian intrusions with passion, vigor, talent, and persistence well into the future.

18: Odesan Writers on War June 24, 2022 A month after Russia sent its troops into Ukraine, the prestigious literary quarterly The Paris Review published brief responses to the war by a dozen Odesan writers. Some authors wrote about the shock of war, others about the need to be in the city despite the dangers. Still others found solace in glimpsing seagulls flying over city streets as if there were no war. The impossibility of writing during war is a shared theme among many; the imperative to write united others.

Each writer responded in ways both universal and very specific to Odesa. Odesa has been a writer’s city since its founding in 1794 as a multicultural imperial outpost. The city’s Literature Museum identifies more than 300 writers with significant connections to the city. The corpus of Odesa literature is noteworthy for having been written in several languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Romanian, Greek, Italian, and even English.

Isaac Babel, Yevgeny Petrov, Ilya Ilf, Vera Inber, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Valentin Kataev are among the most noteworthy Odesa authors. Many more—including Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Bunin, and Anna Akhmatova—have significant Odesa connections, despite being better known for associations elsewhere. Odesan émigré writers—such as lyricist Lew Brown, poet Ilya Kaminsky, and sci-fi master Alex Shvartsman—carried the city’s culture with them in childhood relocation.

This tradition is not just historical. The bestselling contemporary satirist and novelist Andrey Kurkov began his writing career penning children’s literature while meeting his Soviet military obligation by serving as a prison guard in the city. As Ilya Kaminsky recounts for readers of The Paris Review, writing in Odesa begins early, with distinguished local writers and journalists visiting schools to encourage children—such as Kaminsky—to write.

The Odesa Literature Museum is part of the story. In 1898 the city council rented the centrally located Palace of Prince Gagarin, 75

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turning it over to the Odessa Literary and Artistic Society. The society survived the vicissitudes of two world wars, the arrival of the Soviets, Romanian occupation, and Stalinism, collecting invaluable manuscript collections along the way. In 1977, the writer and bibliographer Mikita Oleksiiovich Brigyn joined with others to convince the authorities in Kyiv to convert the club into a museum.

Open to the public and researchers, the museum nurtured a comprehensive vision of Odesan literature embracing multiple genres, languages, and cultures. Its public lecture series and literary events promote local authors and traditions. This role took on expanded importance following independence when literature became a vehicle for establishing a distinct Ukrainian cultural identity. That identity, when viewed through the prism of museum activities and exhibits, is confidently multicultural.

Post-independence Odesa is a city where literature matters.

The often-tragic stories of Odesa’s authors are commemorated in memorial plaques and statues. A monument to Ilf and Petrov’s famous novel The Twelfth Chair is to be found on central Derybasivska Street. Isaac Babel’s statue sits a few blocks away on Zhukovskoho Street. Ivan Bunin, who has a major street named in his honor, has a monument on Zhukovskoho Street.

The war has edged closer to Odesa since The Paris Review published its collection of literary conversations. Russian rockets have obliterated any sense of normality for those who remain. The Literature Museum is closed, yet its workers continue to celebrate International Museum Day; to post pieces about its collections on its website and Facebook page; and, as they do every spring, they sweep away the winter’s detritus from the graves of writers resting in cemeteries of multiple faiths.

Odesa remains a city where writing matters. The city’s literary heritage preserved the various versions of the city’s past, collected in vastly different historical eras by a great range and variety of Odessans. All remain “Odesan writers” and, as such, the city’s variety becomes its unity. Viewed within this larger storyline, today’s war is but another chapter in a vibrant literary culture certain to continue well into the future.

19: Renaissance at the Lesya Ukrainka Theater June 30, 2022 At six o’clock on the evening of June 7, 2022, Kyiv’s theater patrons gathered in the famous Lesya Ukrainka Theater for the one-hour premier of a new play, Renaissance, directed by Alex Borovensky.

Based on Ukrainian poems by Mykola Zerov, Mykhailo Semenko, Mykola Khvylovy, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Olena Teliga, and Pavlo Tychyna, the play explores history through the poetry of the moment.

The characters begin to create their own stories through poetry, and in the process, the poetry comes to life as the speakers fade into the background.

This work seeks to talk to Ukrainians of today about the Ukraine of today. It asks Ukrainians what they have experienced since the Russian invasion in February. Where were you? What did they do to you? What will you—and we—do moving forward? It declares there are no indifferent people, and by doing so, proclaims hope for the future.

Kyivans have slowly begun to repossess their city in the wake of Ukraine’s victory in the battle of Kyiv. Destruction has been considerable; displacement has been intense. The requisites of war remain ever present. Yet individual Kyivans demonstrate deep stores of resilience every day as they try to reclaim their city’s life. In addition to stores and restaurants reopening, the performing arts are coming back. Audiences—though limited by the exigencies of war—have returned to the Opera House to see ballet and opera.

Theaters are reopening as well. New performances at the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theater are especially significant indicators that the city’s culture can look forward to a vibrant future.

The Lesya Ukrainka Theater is among Kyiv’s oldest and most important performance groups. Tracing its roots back to the Solovtsov acting troupe, which began in 1891, the group evolved into the Russian Drama Theater. After World War II, the company was renamed in honor of the national poet Lesya Ukrainka (the pseudonym of Larysa Petrivna Kosach). It retained the name until this 77

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year’s Russian invasion, when the theater dropped “Russian Drama” from its name.

The theater company has performed in the historic Bourgogne Theater for nearly a century. Opened by French mogul Auguste Bergonier in 1875, the building hosted the city circus and then an early cinema before being given over to what became the Lesya Ukrainka company in 1929. Located in the very center of the city, this theater and company have long been honored and have hosted some of imperial Russia’s, the Soviet Union’s, and Ukraine’s most illustrious theater artists. Its reopening represents more than the reopening of a particular theater; it signals the revival of a cultural tradition, with the promise of more achievements to come.

For all its patina of majesty and tradition, the theater has been home to innovation. Under the direction of Mykhailo Yuriiovych Reznikovych since 1994, the company has worked to sustain its rich historical repertoire, rooted in Russian theater, in an independent Ukraine. Its “Under the Roof” series, performed in the theater’s attic, has focused on contemporary and avant-garde productions. The symbolic dropping of “Russian Drama” from its name recognizes the present moment while acknowledging the company’s longterm trajectory toward a more fulsome embrace of its Ukrainian roots.

The theater’s recent productions have purposefully provided a quiet—and much welcomed—oasis in the storm of war. Its initial offerings this spring included a joyous restaging of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Juliette and Romeo; Alexander Gelman’s miniature romantic tale Benches, whose action transpires as a couple settles on a wooden bench in a city park; and a youthful comedy, Hey You, Hi There! These shows offer the escape from dealing with wartime conditions that is necessary for community healing to take place. The theater has experienced no difficulty finding an audience, despite all that has happened in recent months.

The June 7 performance of Renaissance is equally of the moment, in a starkly distinct way. It elevates the audience’s experiences of living through the horrors of war to a more philosophical plane. In doing so, it initiates an important civic conversation about what Ukraine, its culture, and its people will mean going forward.

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The arts provide the foundation for such an essential discussion.

The rush to get back to culture—to the ballet, opera, and major theaters such as Lesya Ukrainka wherever and whenever possible—is one of the strongest signs yet that Ukraine has a vibrant future ahead.

20: Mozart in Wartime Lviv July 7, 2022 Austrian superstar organist Lukas Hasler’s June concerts at the Lviv Organ Hall marked one of the first appearances by an internationally acclaimed artist in Ukraine since the Russian invasion earlier this year. Hasler, a charismatic wunderkind sought after by organ performance venues around the world, honored a long-standing invitation to perform in Lviv. After delays due to the COVID epidemic and war, he decided that now was the time to show support for Ukraine by performing in the country, offering works by Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and, most significantly, Mozart.

The revival of live concerts in the relative safety of Lviv made his performances possible.

Hasler was drawn to Lviv by the opportunity to play the Organ Hall’s massive Rieger-Kloss organ. Located within the seventeenth-century former Church of St. Mary Magdalene, the hall opened its doors to concertgoers in 1988 after having served as a sports venue and dance hall during the Soviet period.

In his performances, Hasler also sought to honor the Mozart family’s connection with Lviv. Wolfgang Amadeus and Constanze’s youngest child, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, was born in Vienna less than half a year after his father’s death. Trained by such Viennese musical luminaries as Antonio Salieri, Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, and Sigismund von Neukomm, Franz Xaver grew up to become a professional musician. Lacking his father’s famous braggadocio, the younger Mozart excelled as a teacher and enjoyed success as a composer. Less popular as a performer, he was drawn to the country estates surrounding Lemberg (as Lviv was then named) to teach before moving into town in 1813.

Franz Xaver spent the next quarter century in Lemberg before returning to Vienna and, eventually, Salzburg, where he became the Kapellmeister of that city’s Mozarteum. He died in 1844, having spent most of his adult life in Lemberg.

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Franz Xaver’s tenure in the city was marked by considerable achievement. He conducted the amateur choir of Saint Cecilia, which grew into the city’s first music school. Long promoting his father’s legacy, he conducted the elder Mozart’s Requiem in a legendary 1826 concert at the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of St. George. His Lemberg interlude is well known and has been acknowledged by Mozart specialists and musicologists. The city commemorated his time in Lviv with a statue in Yevhena Malanyuka Square, unveiled in 2021.

Lviv’s tumultuous history is evident in how its name, Lion City, has appeared in the languages of multiple empires and communities that have claimed it as home, including Lemberg (German), Lwiwhorod (Ruthenian), Lwów (Polish), ‫( לעמבערג‬Lemberg, Yiddish), Львов (L'vov; Russian), and Leopolis (Latin). Throughout the twentieth century, the city experienced numerous revolts and revolutions, brutal wars, fierce street fighting, and the extinction and forced expulsion of once vibrant Jewish, Polish, and Armenian communities.

Lviv stands at the center of Europe’s twentieth-century heart of darkness. Before World War II, when the city was incorporated into Poland, Poles made up over half of the city’s population. The historic Jewish community, dating from the tenth century, comprised some 140,000 members, which grew by another 100,000 Jews during the brief Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941. By the end of the war, only a few thousand had survived the Holocaust.

The story of Franz Xaver Mozart represents a tiny tile in this broad—and troubling—intercultural mosaic. His time in the city constitutes part of a rich cultural subsoil that powerfully contradicts the single homogeneous storylines imposed by empires and imperial wannabes onto Lviv’s—and Ukraine’s—history. The lands that constitute today’s Ukraine have always been a heady mix of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. They have always been more than the extension of any single neighboring power.

By performing in Lviv during the war, and by honoring the city’s musical heritage, which includes the Mozart family, Lukas Hasler has pointed toward a vibrant cultural future for the city, one

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that draws sustenance from multiple strains. Known for his dazzling finger work that effortlessly negotiates the most complex scores and thickly textured compositions, Hasler, in his June concerts, has brought lessons beyond music to a city that is redefining itself in a time of war.

21: Kharkiv Sketches July 15, 2022 Thirty-year-old Kharkiv graphic designer Sasha Anisimova did not believe there would be a war. Focused on her daily life and artistic projects, she ignored her boyfriend’s entreaties to prepare for a quick getaway until there was no time left. Hearing Russian bombs strike her city on the morning of February 24, Anisimova beat a hasty retreat to find refuge in western Ukraine. Once safe, she could think of nothing else than returning to her beloved hometown.

Kharkiv, like many “second cities” around the world, is more dynamic than beautiful. Such cities can generate intense attachment among those attracted to urban life with an edge. Second city residents often nurture a distinct chip on their shoulders as they realize their achievements don’t receive the recognition accorded their contemporaries in capitals and other “first cities”. The more Russian bombs and rockets rained down on Kharkiv, the more residents realized how much they loved their city, and none more than the 600,000 residents who, like Anisimova, were forced to flee west.

Anisimova couldn’t wait to return home and did so as soon as Ukrainian fighters had pushed back the Russian line. She returned to a city devastated by relentless shelling and littered with land mines. Much of the city lay in ruins, despite the heroic efforts of local firefighters to save as many buildings as possible; of municipal workers who rushed to repair water mains even as bombs were falling; and of city authorities relentlessly focused on urban sanitation.

Once back home, Anisimova took a photo of her room and posted it on Instagram, together with dozens of other photos of destroyed buildings and broken souls. Always curious about the lives lived behind the city’s façade, she began to sketch cartoon figures of ordinary people going about everyday pursuits against the backdrop of the ruins. She drew herself sitting at a desk working, neighbors taking showers and preparing dinner, customers enjoying a coffee outside a destroyed café.

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One drawing showed the interior of a subway car temporarily housing those who had escaped the bombing aboveground, with her delightful cartoon characters superimposed, as if they were merely riding to the next stop. Anisimova’s sketches reveal unremarkable lives shattered by war, ghosts of an unexceptional existence no longer possible. The humanity embedded in her visions offers hope that such ordinary existence may yet return.

Anisimova immediately attracted a following on Instagram, one that has grown into the tens of thousands and has drawn the attention of European newsrooms and the editors at Vogue magazine. She began selling online T-shirts and other merchandise depicting her art to raise money for charities operating in Ukraine. A European publisher has approached her about compiling her images for a book.

The internationally acclaimed street artist Hamlet Zinkovsky is, at 35, another young Kharkiv artist who, like Anisimova, could not stay away from his hometown. Abroad when the fighting broke out, Zinkovsky made his way back to Kharkiv and reported to a local military battalion defending the city. When he asked what he could do to help, the Hartiya battalion commander gave him a bulletproof vest and sent him out into the streets to paint. His orders were to enliven the streets with his work, and he has done so, spending his days creating his signature black-and-white street murals on boarded-up buildings and half-destroyed walls and in bombed-out lobbies. The city has become his canvas, on which he is rebuilding his hometown, image by image.

Artists such as Anisimova and Zinkovsky are joined by writers, including local poet Ivan Senin and renowned novelist Serhiy Zhadan, in turning their talents to redeeming their hometown. Despite being a predominantly Russian-speaking city, Kharkiv long nurtured visions of Ukrainian cultural autonomy and political independence. The effort dates back to the early nineteenth-century university professors and intellectuals who helped create a literary Ukrainian language.

The more Kharkiv artists and writers practiced artistic sovereignty, the more the Russian state, in its various incarnations,

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fought back, often brutally. Anisimova and Zinkovsky, two children of post-independence Ukraine, grew up in a world in which political sovereignty had been achieved. For them, the cultural autonomy to pursue their creative instincts is a given, and they will not forfeit it willingly.

Second cities such as Kharkiv often are known for a feral toughness that comes from a boldly utilitarian economic purpose outside the national superiority of political capitals. Yet a vibrant artistic and cultural life always exists alongside commerce and industry. It is the art that endures.

Creators such as Anisimova and Zinkovsky may reveal more about Kharkiv’s ultimate fate than the strategic illusions of national politicians far away.

22: Finding a “European Way” Kharkiv’s East Opera Heads West July 22, 2022 The European Parliament granted Ukraine candidate status on June 23, 2022. Two days later, a large Russian rocket struck Kharkiv’s Freedom Square, damaging both the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre and the neighboring Kharkiv Philharmonic.

These two events capture Ukraine’s—and Kharkiv’s—current moment. The local population has been turning to the West, following the lifting of Soviet-era restrictions on expressions of Ukrainian identity more than three decades ago. Those who view the predominantly Russophonic city as part of the so-called Russian World seek to turn back the clock through violence. The futility of such an effort might have been better understood had those in charge in Russia viewed the Kharkiv Opera as something more than a rocket target.

Ukraine’s second-largest city’s opera company, the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, founded in 1925, has been a center of artistic innovation throughout the period of Ukrainian independence. Beginning in 2018, the theater formed the East Opera (Skhid Opera) ensemble to serve as a European center of Ukrainian musical and theater development. The goal was to reestablish the artistic dialogue with Europe interrupted during the twentieth century, rather than replace one dominant outside culture with another.

East Opera’s initiatives supported the work of young artists in theatrical arts ranging from design, lighting, and sound technologies to performance, with an eye toward integrating Ukrainian performing arts into a broader European cultural endeavor. The establishment of a “sacred music bridge” electronically connecting Kharkiv with the Vatican was symbolic of the company’s European orientation.

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In late April, as the Russian attack on Kharkiv intensified, East Opera leaders Igor Tuluzov and Armen Kaloyan accepted an invitation for their opera, choral, and ballet companies to tour Lithuania as a sign of solidarity. This “European Way” expedition solidified the long-standing connection between Kharkiv and Western artists and helped raise significant funds for the Ukrainian war effort.

Touring Lithuania by bus, the musicians and dancers spent a month performing in historic churches, universities, and concert halls in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda, and smaller towns. The artists met with their Lithuanian counterparts and taught master classes to rising musicians and dancers. Toward the end of their Lithuanian ramble, a quintet of musicians performed the Ukrainian national anthem in a peaceful field overlooking a calm lake surrounded by birch trees. East Opera director Kaloyan used the setting to thank the Lithuanian hosts for their humanity, empathy, and concern. He noted that the hearts of the company members beat in unison with those of the ordinary Europeans for whom they had performed. A similar outpouring of solidarity with European culture was evident at every stop.

The tour continued to Austria, where, on May 31, the Lyatoshynsky Trio (Mykhailo Zakharov on violin, Roman Lopatynsky on piano, Oleksiy Shadrin on cello) performed in Vienna’s historic Ehrbar Saal. The trio, formed in 2019, is named after composer Borys Mykolayovych Lyatoshynsky, who brought together Ukrainian and European classical musical strains.

Lyatoshynsky’s legacy symbolizes the potential for Ukrainian musicians to engage creatively with their European counterparts rather than just earning performance fees. Lyatoshynsky is widely honored as the father of contemporary Ukrainian music. A native of Zhytomyr, he simultaneously earned a law degree from Kyiv University and graduated from the Kyiv Conservatory at the end of World War I. Steeped in the artistic ferment of the first Ukrainian republic, Lyatoshynsky explored atonality, then emerging as a new musical language in Western Europe. His works drew on both Russian and European contemporaries and predecessors, including Robert

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Schumann, Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. He was particularly influenced by the music of Alexander Scriabin and the era’s French impressionism, at a time when Russian and European composers were jointly exploring the boundaries of the nineteenth-century musical canon.

Lyatoshynsky’s experimentation put him at odds with the principles of socialist realism imposed under Stalin. As criticism of the “decadence, formalism, and cacophony” of his music grew he turned to conducting and teaching at the Kyiv Conservatory (and, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, at the Moscow Conservatory).

His later cantatas, choral works, symphonic poems, symphonies, and film scores quarried the harmonies of Ukrainian folk music for inspiration. These works are only now being published, enhancing his growing reputation.

By June, the East Opera tour had reached Slovakia, where concerts continued to amplify the cultural connections between Kharkiv and Europe. The company triumphed at an evening of organ and choral music at Bratislava’s St. Martin’s Cathedral, once again combining European and Ukrainian classical repertory. As in Lithuania, the visitors conducted master classes and concerts in schools, community centers, and concert halls, large and small, throughout the country.

On June 25, the same day a rocket fell on their home theater in Kharkiv, East Opera was celebrating another successful concert, this time in Central Slovakia’s Banská Bystrica. In the thirteenthcentury Romanesque Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the soloists and choir from Kharkiv performed, among other works, Mozart’s Requiem.

The coincidental juxtaposition of Kharkiv musicians singing European music in a European setting and the damage inflicted by the Russians on their theater at home exemplifies a cultural transition that has been taking place over several decades. Seeing the opportunity provided by the end of the Soviet Union, the residents of predominantly Russian-speaking Kharkiv have increasingly looked west for inspiration and identity. The current war embeds this change in the deepest and most personal feelings of tens of thousands of Kharkiv citizens. An incalculable amount of time will

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pass before Ukrainian residents find it possible to acknowledge the humanity, empathy, and concern of their neighbors in the Russian Federation in the way that the members of East Opera just thanked their Lithuanian hosts.

23: The Healing Potential of Community Theater as Seen in Ukraine’s Lutsk July 28, 2022 An unremarkable, long, cylindrical metal hangar—what Americans call a “Quonset hut”—stands in a tattered industrial yard near rail lines in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk. The forlorn temporary building has become the site of much coming and going since the Russians invaded Ukraine on February 24.

About sixty miles (one hundred km) from the Polish border and twice that distance from the Belarusian one, the hangar is well positioned to support recruits and store supplies gathered to be shipped off. The hangar stands on hallowed ground, in a rail yard once used by both the Nazis and the Soviets to house those dispatched to death camps in the west and the Gulag to the east. Today, the building rectifies this dark past by serving as a hub for Ukrainians volunteering to defend their country.

These logistical advantages are also why its proprietor—the experimental GaRmYdEr (Garmyder) theater—found the hangar so suitable. Ruslana and Pavlo Porytski established their company two decades ago to create a theater which embraces a little of this and a little of that to speak to the surrounding community. The name “Garmyder” tells the story, meaning “mess, clutter, lots of different things, space without order”. Several years ago, the hangar became the home base for their artistry.

Before February 2022, surrounded by textile and candy factories, the building seemed a sweetly benign gathering spot for theatergoers, children attending their first performances, rock bands, and international touring groups. Such peacetime activities exemplify the reasons why so many Ukrainians believe that this war is worth fighting.

The Porytskis created the Garmyder Theater in 2003, while at Lutsk’s Volyn State University. A student of cultural studies, Ruslana researched the role of theater in education and community building. Pavlo, an art student and aspiring actor, approached the 93

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power of theater from the stage. They found common ground studying Lesya Ukrainka’s poetic play Forest Song and joined forces to establish an experimental company that would meld classical performance with contemporary multimedia tools such as 3D visualizations.

The Garmyder promoted physicality in theater, an approach that remains uncommon in Ukraine. The company’s explorations did not end there. The Porytskis wanted to blow apart traditional theatrical forms and spaces. In 2017, their Princely Banquet brought together visiting choruses from Lviv and an equestrian theater troupe to celebrate Prince Vytautas, his retinue, knights, traditional dance, and songs. Later, they honored the poet Kost Shyshko, who was executed by the Soviet regime, by staging readings of his works at an unfinished high-rise building. On every floor, including the roof, there were immersive events based on his poems and his life.

Starting out on small chamber stages at the university, and moving to a local House of Culture, the Porytskis attracted enthusiastic collaborators. By 2022, the troupe had grown into a self-managing company of some fifty actors, directors, editors, camera operators, administrators, and writers. The group became a cherished community resource, expanding its activities to include a vibrant children’s training program at the theater studio-workshop, the Dogory Drygom. The humble hangar, which can seat 120 people for theater performances, and up to 230 for concerts, is a flexible and open space that can be reconfigured easily to serve the company’s multiple purposes. The hangar, in effect, has become a partner in these various ventures.

Garmyder artists also take their performances into the community and travel to festivals abroad. Performing on streets, in unfinished buildings, and at historic sites, they have promoted theater to revitalize Lutsk as an open and tolerant community. At times, they have joined forces with progressive theaters from Kharkiv, thus bringing east and west Ukraine together through artistic expression. Group discussions often follow Garmyder shows. The theater’s active community outreach has helped nurture a shared sense of belonging in a city that has suffered from a long history of exclusion and conflict.

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Contemporary Lutsk is home to nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants. The city has existed since at least the eleventh century on the volatile borderlands fought over by Rusians (rusychi), Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars, Russians, Austrians, Germans, and Soviets. By the mid-1930s, nearly half of its 39,000 inhabitants were Jews, with a sizable Polish population. Virtually none of these pre-war residents survived, with as many as 25,000 Jews being shot at close range on nearby Górka Polonka hill.

The city’s troubled history and modest size encouraged the Porytskis and their colleagues to mobilize the arts to support community-building. Volyn State University was founded as a teachers’ college in 1940. The school attained university status following Ukrainian independence and has been elevated to the rank of a national university. Its growing presence in the city—as exemplified by the Portytskis—cultivates a broader arts community.

In 2014, at the outset of the war in Ukraine’s east, the Porytskis responded by using their organization to investigate the role of theater in times of war. They have continued doing so all this year, even as war flared on a new scale. Ruslana says, when the full-scale war began, I asked myself: “Has our theater done enough to understand social processes, talk about the threat...?” We often talked about these topics from the stage, but when this collapse happened on February 24, it seemed to me that we did not do enough, that we were not decisive and categorical enough in our statements. How should the theater change now?

How should it talk about the war so as not to injure? What else [is there] to talk about with the viewer? We are exploring a new way of interacting with the public. Anyhow, one thing is obvious. We cannot simply resume the repertoire after a break and pretend that nothing happened.

The Russian invasion accelerated Garmyder’s plans for further community engagement. In addition to supporting the current war effort, the Porytskis and their colleagues have already started planning for a postwar Ukraine. Their company is contemplating the ways in which the various lessons learned from community building can provide art therapy for those returning from combat. However this future unfolds, the activist community theater developed by the Garmyder company will be fundamental to Lutsk’s success moving forward.

24: Taking Out the Trash in a Time of War August 5, 2022 Several of Ukraine’s leading theater artists joined together in late July to stage Natalka Vorozhbyt’s play about wartime, Sasha, Take Out the Trash. The production took place in Odesa, a city increasingly on the front line of Ukraine’s war with Russia, giving new meaning to a work that dates from 2015.

Sasha is a one-act, domestic, mystical play about the victory of life over death in a time of war. Sasha is an officer who died of heart failure before the war in Ukraine began in 2014. He is convinced that death is no excuse for failing to keep his oath to protect the motherland. He wants to return to fight, but his wife and pregnant stepdaughter will only take him back in renewed life if he returns to his family rather than the front. They want him to take out the trash.

The play has been performed in Ukraine, Belarus, Scotland, and elsewhere. In response to the wartime conditions in Odesa, the participating artists—including director Maksym Golenko, set designers Pavlo Lvlyushkin and Denys Hryhoruk, and actors Oleksandr Samusenko, Ihor Herashchenko, Ninel Natocha, and Iryna Okhotnichenko—launched the play in a new “theater as shelter” format. The scenery and costumes are designed to be easily transported and the cast has been kept small so that the play can be produced anywhere that is safe.

Vorozhbyt ranks among Ukraine’s most compelling contemporary playwrights. Now in her forties, she emerged together with her country’s post-independence theater scene after graduating from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. Writing in Russian and Ukrainian, her 2020 movie Bad Roads, about the conflict in Donbas, received international acclaim and has become available on HBO. The Royal Shakespeare Company performed The Grain Store, her 2009 play about the Holodomor (the 1930s famine), at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

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Vorozhbyt’s biography reflects the consolidation of a Ukrainian identity over the past several decades. In addition to her studies in Moscow, she worked on the Russian television series School, a portrayal of Moscow high school students created by some of the most significant writers of her generation. The show proved too realistic for Russian television executives and their political overseers, who closed it down after just four months on the air. Meanwhile, Ukraine beckoned.

Living in her native Kyiv when the 2014 Euromaidan revolt broke out, Vorozhbyt joined those on the barricades. That experience, combined with the war touched off by Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas, deepened her commitment to helping Ukraine choose its own future. She turned to play- and scriptwriting to express her deep concern over the tragedy that was about to happen in Ukraine. As she later told the Financial Times, her plays were—and are—an attempt to warn people in the West that Putin’s Russia is a threat to everyone. Over time, she switched from writing in Russian and began using Ukrainian in her professional life.

Living in Kyiv when Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, she made her way first to Lviv, and later, Krakow and Vienna. Subsequently, she joined with Maksim Kurochkin and others in Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights to promote new Ukrainian theater. The Theater of Playwrights has joined the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project headed by John Freedman to stage nearly 200 readings of nearly one hundred plays written since February in more than twenty countries.

The idea of theater in a city under attack is challenging. So many other concerns seem to be more pressing. Nonetheless, theater is coming to play an essential role in the current conflict in Ukraine. It has become an important vehicle for Ukrainians struggling to comprehend what has happened. It establishes a dialogue between actors and audience, between Ukrainians, and between those in Ukraine and those abroad, which has molded how they— and we—understand what has gone on, individually and collectively. Sometimes, Vorozhbyt tells us, simple tasks such as taking out the trash reveal profound insights into the human condition.

25: The Artists of Kyiv August 12, 2022 Late in June, as Kyivians struggled to recreate an approximation of prewar life, the youthful promoters of the On Time music and arts festival converged on several former factories in the capital’s Podil district that have been the go-to place for all-weekend raves and cutting-edge art exhibits. Billed as the first large-scale alternative music and arts event since the invasion, hundreds of young Kyivian hipsters poured into nightclubs and art galleries centered on a nineteenth-century ribbon factory to wash the traumas of war at least briefly from mind.

Grunge bands, techno music, and metalcore groups drowned out the previous weeks of war, even as that conflict continued (and Kyiv would again be hit by missile attacks in the weeks ahead). And while the music would eventually stop as revelers succumbed to exhaustion, the work of painters, sculptors, photographers, textile artists, and illustrators remained. This work, on display at On Time’s art galleries, tries to capture the havoc of war and resist Russian efforts to obliterate an autonomous Ukrainian culture. It acts as therapy for creator and viewer alike.

The spontaneity of the artists bringing their works to the On Time festival does not obscure the rich and varied local art scene that nurtured the art. In late 2021—before the war—Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum mounted an important six-month exhibit tracing the transformation of Kyiv’s undistinguished late Soviet art scene of the 1970s and early 1980s into the global phenomenon it had become by the mid-1990s. Guest research curator Olena Martynyuk and curator Julia Tulovsky argued that, between 1985 and 1993, “the calm waters of the culturally provincial capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic became radically stirred with new and daring art made publicly visible for the first time since the avant-garde period”. This explosion of styles, rediscovered histories, and newly found freedoms blossoming against the backdrop of the collapsing Soviet empire, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 99

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These developments garnered new energy following Ukrainian independence. Kyiv’s art scene, bristling with work by committed amateurs selling their works on the street, boasted an acclaimed street mural movement, and the art of international artists such as self-described neo-avant-gardist Viktor Sydorenko. A robust, vibrant, and varied art scene solidified prior to the Russian invasion.

Kyiv’s artists have responded to the war with determination.

Since the Ukrainian victory in the Battle of Kyiv in the spring, the art community has opened exhibitions, raised funds for the war effort, and presented new works at the numerous galleries that are keeping their doors open. A month ago, Kyiv Post correspondent Aleksandra Klitina visited several small galleries tucked away in small streets around the city’s cultural hub surrounding St. Sophia’s Cathedral. She quoted textile artist Zinaida Kubar about “uniting the present with the cultural code and the energy of my land” with her painted and woven works; remarked “a message of optimism for the future” in Anton Lohov’s “The Sun Will Rise in Crimea”; and took in Matvei Vaisberg’s “Road Diary”, work the well-known painter created while a refugee in Germany.

Visual artists throughout history have responded to war, using their non-verbal language to delve into the deep emotions unleashed by conflict. Works exploring horror, grief, fear, anger, and hope, revealing humankind’s creativity at its best, repeatedly go along with the actions of humans at their worst. Perhaps Kyiv’s resurgent art scene is nothing more than another such instance among thousands.

Time must pass before anyone will understand whether works of lasting primal power—such as Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica—will emerge from the current conflict. We already know that the artists of Kyiv are neither surrendering nor fleeing. They are using their talents to engage the moment and their fellow Ukrainians, displaying and encouraging a spirit of resistance and composure.

26: Jazzy Nights in Kyiv August 19, 2022 Jazz is back in Kyiv. Its return at several venues around town—like the reopening of art galleries—offers evidence that the city is trying to reclaim its vibrant, urban culture. Jazz, since its invention on the streets of New Orleans at the turn of the last century, has always been an improvisational art, drawing on a myriad of urban musical influences. Once asked where his music came from, Thelonious Monk reputedly quipped that he simply wrote down the sounds of Manhattan.

Musicians are now back improvising with the sounds of Kyiv, a city with a notable jazz history. In Ukraine, as throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, aficionados devotedly tuned into Willis Conover’s fabled Voice of America Jazz Hour throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Before the arrival of cassette tape recordings, fanatics copied bootlegged vinyl records from the West pressed onto X-ray pictures to pass around in back rooms (this technique led to jazz being known as “bone music”). Musicians looking to swing tracked down gigs in circus bands and music hall shows (known as estrada), cherishing the moments when they could cut loose.

Following glasnost’ and independence, Kyiv’s jazz heads cultivated their own radio shows and circuits of neighborhood community stages. Gatherings of enthusiasts popped up. Increasingly, musicians at the conservatory and other musical institutions mixed various genres, providing a rich tapestry for improvisation. The international jazz circuit quickly spread to the former Soviet Union after 1991, with Kyiv becoming a stop for many notable players.

As elsewhere, jazz musicians struggled for their paychecks.

Players, universally, need to supplement their meager earnings from gigs and recordings by teaching and finding flexible day jobs.

In this regard, the local scene was no different from any other jazz center. Jazz survives everywhere on the passion of its musicians and fans.

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102 THE ARTS OF WAR Touring musicians and community halls remain important for sustaining a jazz scene. The music’s viability always rests on the availability of venues intimate enough to allow musicians and their fans to connect with one another under an improvisational aural cloud.

In 2015, Ukrainian businessman Viktor Savkiv supported the opening of the Vozdyzhenska Arts House Gallery of Contemporary Art. In addition to the gallery, Savkiv longed for the sort of intimate jazz club he had visited in New York. By 2017, he had joined with Lviv’s Markiyan Ivashchyshyn to carve out such a club within the gallery. Savkiv reportedly sold his yacht to pay for his club’s grand piano.

He named his venue, perfectly suited for the small trios, quartets, and quintets playing modern jazz, after the sign designating the gallery’s location, at 32 Vozdvyzhenska Street. Within a year, 32 Jazz Club was sending out its performances via its online broadcast service, Old Fashioned Radio.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic and the war threatened the future of the club, its owners, managers, and musicians longed for its return. Over the past several weeks, the club has presented shows on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, offering musicians a valued place to perform and jazz fans an important musical home.

The small, yet vibrant, club scene in Kyiv—which includes Jazz Vibes, In Jazz, and Jazz on the Terrace—offers a glimpse of some of the lively culture that will enrich a postwar city.

27: Providing Humanitarian and Creative Sanctuary for Artists in Ivano-Frankivsk September 9, 2022 In 2014, arts administrator Alona Karavai fled west as Russian-supported separatists overran her hometown of Donetsk. Karavai ended up in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city nestled in the Carpathian foothills, where she opened the gallery Assortymetna Kimnata (Assortment Room). She joined with local artists to form a collective community which shares living and working space. A network of modernized traditional mountain cabins eventually spread throughout the region. Modeled on German “artist houses”, the collective supports artistic work and links its members together.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced the community members to expand their reach. Lesa Khomenko, who facilitated support for young artists in Kyiv and linked Karavai and her colleagues to important partners in the capital at the Center for Contemporary Art at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, fled Kyiv and joined the Assortymetna Kimnata group.

Facing the uncertainties of war, the group expanded its activities, providing sanctuary for artists fleeing their homes in the east, offering a safe haven for evacuated work, raising funds to help support fleeing artists and their work, and creating an internet presence for artists that reached beyond Ukraine’s borders.

The community works with around thirty artists in the region and, to date, has provided homes for eighteen artists. It organizes virtual and physical shows. It has archived some 600 works brought from endangered cities, like the 200 items, for example, returned as the Ukrainian army drove out the Russian occupiers in Kyiv and Kharkiv. The gallery has deepened relations with international partners, such as the Network of Northern German Art Houses (Netzwerk der Künstlerhäuser Norddeutschland, or NKN).

Ivano-Frankivsk, like the Transcarpathian city of Uzhhorod, has a long and complex history. Several international boundaries

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104 THE ARTS OF WAR have successively crossed the town since its founding as the seventeenth-century fortress of the Polish Potocki family. Known by various linguistic variants of Stanisławów over the years the town became part of a newly independent Poland in 1921. The town’s architecture remains a delightful blend of these various incarnations.

The town served as a regional center of around 50,000 during the interwar era, with some 40 percent of its residents being Polish; another 40 percent Jewish; and the remainder predominately Ukrainian. The Jewish population was largely exterminated during the war and the Poles were forced to migrate to Poland after the war. Soviet authorities marked the town’s tricentennial by renaming it in honor of Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko. The city’s 240,000 twenty-first century residents have adopted the short form of the name, “Franyk”.

Since Ukrainian independence, the city has become a hub for rustic tourism celebrating traditional crafts and culture. Local entrepreneurs developed hiking trails and services, including picturesque log cabins, to host visitors from the country’s metropolitan centers. Karavai and her partners have paid local households, from Assortymetna Kimnata’s inception, to provide room and board for visiting artists. Initially, both rural host and big-city guest struck each other as exotic. Over time, relationships formed between these groups. These ties have added to the artists’ appreciation of rural customs and culture, enriching their creations.

At present, the collective has a large apartment in town with a cellar and storage rooms, and additional studio space in a nearby private art school that closed when the war began. It also offers links to rustic sanctuaries in the surrounding countryside. Providing living and working space in a region of Ukraine that remains relatively untouched by war, this initiative provides an important retreat for artists, whose imaginations offer a vibrant response to the physical destruction elsewhere in Ukraine.

28: Ukrainian and Polish Dancers Respond to the Pain of War September 16, 2022 Anna Myloslavska and Vitalia Vaskiv are dancers from Lviv; Darya Koval and Anastasia Ivanova are dancers from Dnipro. All four are now refugees in Poland, after having been forced to leave their homes by the war in Ukraine. At some point in the not-too-distant past they probably thought they would spend this summer trying to advance dance careers derailed by COVID-19. Instead, they find themselves trying to put their lives back together in Poland.

Maciej Kuźmińki is a rising star in the world of Polish dance.

Now in his late thirties, he launched his career in 2007 as Romeo in Austrian choreographer Liz King’s production of Shakespeare’s love story. He performed internationally for several years as a freelance dancer and as a soloist at the Polish Dance Theater. In 2017, he created the Polish Dance Network to produce works by independent artists and institutional dance groups. By 2020, the Network included fifteen partners, which presented thirteen dance works in seventy shows around Poland, featuring nearly one hundred artists.

When Kuźmińki thought about this summer, he probably was thinking about how to use dance to confront complacency. To date, his works have used the language of physical theater and dance theater to engage politically sensitive topics, to explore feminism, and to present his interest in metaphysics. These efforts have garnered international prizes; productions in the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, and Lithuania; and a courtroom appearance in Bytom, Poland, where he fought against the city council’s attempt at censorship.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees shook Kuźmińki to his core. For him, the war called into question all of his—and Poland’s—assumptions about safety, home, and identity. Though he is not displaced,

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106 THE ARTS OF WAR Kuźmińki—like Myloslavska, Vaskiv, Koval, and Ivanova—now found himself trying to refresh the meaning of his life in art.

Kuźmińki turned to dance to help him sort out what an entire world set in motion by brute force might reveal about transformation within individuals. His questions combined the focus of his previous work, exploring the political and metaphysical, with the tumult unleashed in Poland by the arrival of so many Ukrainian refugees.

He understood that any work must draw on a partnership with Ukrainian refugees, as their experiences exceed whatever he and his Polish colleagues might feel. Moreover, he became aware of how different the same events appear from the vantage point of different European countries.

For Kuźmińki, performance dance provided an eloquent language for exploring such grand themes across linguistic, cultural, and political borders. Once they discovered one another, Kuźmińki, Myloslavska, Vaskiv, Koval, and Ivanova entered into a creative partnership to document the experience of forced migration. The resulting piece, Every Minute Motherland, was created by seven Polish and Ukrainian dancers working together. Individually and collectively, they use the language of movement to express the experience of having been torn from stability and suspended between the memory of the past and an incredible present. Their goal is to use creativity to find a path to mutual understanding, with one another and with the world at large.

Every Minute Motherland was performed in late August at two of Poland’s most celebrated contemporary arts centers: Klub Żak in Gdansk and Materia in Łódź. Klub Żak opened in 1957 as a student club and is now one of the oldest cultural centers in Poland, bringing together music, theater, film, and dance under one roof. Materia is one of Poland’s leading residential centers for innovative creative artists. Their joint sponsorship enables the creators of the performance to speak with authority to Polish and Ukrainian audiences.

The dance partnership formed by Kuźmińki, Myloslavska, Vaskiv, Koval, and Ivanova signifies a fulcrum in the artistic journey prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In seeking meaning

DANCERS RESPOND TO THE PAIN OF WAR 107 in their own agony, Ukrainians are now helping European and international artistic communities to reassess their values and artistic principles. The search for a Ukrainian creative voice is no longer just about Ukraine. As Kuźmińki observes, “the war set the whole world in motion. . . . Everything that we used to take for granted has taken on completely different meanings”.

29: Maestro Earle and Ukrainian Music at the Berliner Musikfest September 23, 2022 On September 6, the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra performed under the direction of Principal Conductor Hobart Earle at the prestigious Berliner Musikfest. The Orchestra’s program featured several works by Ukrainian composers before ending with Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2.

The concert began with the Ukrainian national anthem, followed by a performance of Myroslav Skoryk’s evocative short piece “Dytyntsvo” (“Childhood”) from Sergei Parajanov’s masterful 1965 magical realist film, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Mykola Lysenko’s elegant Elegy followed, offering a touching remembrance to those lost in war. Pianist Tamara Stefanovich performed Alemdar Karamanov’s haunting “Ave Maria” from Piano Concerto No. 3. Karamanov’s insistence on composing music based on religious texts undermined his renown in the Soviet Union. In this instance, he turned to themes from Egyptian ritual to connect with the biblical story of the flight from Egypt.

Sibelius’s magnificent Second Symphony provided the evening with a grandiose finale. At the time of its premiere in 1902, Sibelius’s work was taken as a call for Finnish independence from Tsarist Russia. Fittingly for its time and our own, it quickly became known as the “Symphony of Independence”. Two encores followed, Skoryk’s Melodiya and the overture to Lysenko’s opera Taras Bulba.

The concert had political overtones, with Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andrej Melnyk and German Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth in attendance. The hall for 2,300 listeners was packed with a large number of at-times flag-waving Ukrainian audience members as well as many Berlin music buffs. Standing ovations, cheers, and overflowing emotions marked the evening.

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110 THE ARTS OF WAR The concert proved to be an artistic achievement. Reviewers commented on the orchestra’s high-quality execution of the Sibelius symphony as well as on Stefanovich’s performance of Karamanov. As Hans Ackermann observed on the Rundfunk BerlinBrandenburg (Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting) evening show, “a dark warm sound builds up more than once. Starting with the double basses, which the conductor has placed in a row at the very back, the music then spreads with all of its might through the excellent winds and strings in the hall. Here is a body of sound at work whose power probably comes from great inner unity”.

The renowned music critic Wolfgang Schreiber, writing on September 7 in Süddeutsche Zeitung, asked, “can the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1937, score artistically on the international music scene? Yes, clearly, and for two reasons. On the one hand, the ensemble from the cultural city of Odesa is musically capable of an all-round convincing, even brilliant performance. On the other hand, because of its engaging and gifted chief conductor Hobart Earle”.

The Odesa Philharmonic was one of only a handful of the world’s best orchestras to be invited to perform as part of this famous festival (the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras from the US were among the others). The evening was one of the first concerts presented by the Odesa Philharmonic since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Its last concert in Odesa had taken place the Saturday evening before the invasion, ending with a stirring encore featuring the overture to Taras Bulba.

Orchestra members scattered after their final prewar concert.

Some joined the Ukrainian armed forces at the front; others sought refuge in western Ukraine, Europe, Israel, and North America.

Maestro Earle honored conducting commitments in Europe and the United States. In late spring, at the invitation of Daniel Barenboim, Earle lectured, accompanied by videos about Ukrainian music in wartime, at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal. He later repeated the same lecture in Miami.

The invitation to perform in the Berliner Musikfest drew ninety orchestra members back to Odesa to rehearse, before they

MUSIC AT THE BERLINER MUSIKFEST 111 gave a trial concert in Chisinau, Moldova, four days before the Berlin performance. Moldovan Prime Minister Gavrilița, President of the Moldovan Parliament Igor Grosu, and US Ambassador Kent Logsdon attended the Chisinau concert. This performance marked Odesa’s “City Day” and featured much the same program as in Berlin, with pianist Oleksandr Perepelytsia playing the Karamanov concerto.

The orchestra’s current success did not come easily. The December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union destroyed more than a superpower-driven empire. Everything from supply chains and transport links to education and health care imploded with it. All aspects of life fell apart, including the once proud Soviet Big Red Machines of classical music, ballet, gymnastics, and hockey. Hundreds of world-class musicians, dancers, and athletes scurried to safety wherever they could find it. Orchestras and dance companies, hockey team rosters, and gymnasiums filled with former Soviet talent, from Argentina and Canada to Japan and South Asia.

A few intrepid pioneers set out in the opposite direction, Venezuelan American conductor Earle among them. Earle joined those swimming against the tide by heading to the Odesa of a newly independent Ukraine, where he transformed the struggling Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra into an ensemble worthy of international recognition.

Earle was born in Caracas in 1960 to a family of expat Americans. He attended the Gordonstoun School in Scotland before heading off to Princeton University. His musical studies took him to Vienna’s prestigious University of Music and Performing Arts, which opened the door to the “Wild East” of Ukraine. Along the way, he studied composition and music theory with Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone, Claudio Spies, and Paul Lansky. As a member of the Vienna Singverein, he performed and recorded under Herbert von Karajan and Lorin Maazel. His career easily could have remained focused on Europe or the US. Instead, he took an extreme chance and bet on Odesa.

For all their fame, Odesa’s major musical institutions—its orchestra, conservatory, and opera—had fallen increasingly on hard times by the twentieth century’s last decades. The collapse of the

112 THE ARTS OF WAR Soviet Union accelerated a long decline into penury. This was the condition of the once famous Odesa music scene when young Earle arrived to assume artistic leadership of the local philharmonic orchestra.

He set out to consolidate existing resources to retain musicians at a living wage, to attract new musicians, to expand their repertoire, and to protect the orchestra’s famed concert hall, under constant assault from rapacious real estate interests. All the while, he fought to sustain and expand the orchestra’s audience base, no small task in a community in which the Soviet-era middle class was rapidly sliding into poverty. He succeeded in large measure because he made the orchestra’s revival part of the larger civic renewal for the city. He positioned the philharmonic as a potent symbol of post-Soviet Odesa. The orchestra’s rebirth thus became part of the city’s resurgence.

The city and the orchestra became ever more formidable as Ukrainian independence took hold. Earle’s own reputation grew as well, as recognized by the Ukrainian government in 2013 when he was granted the title of People’s Artist of Ukraine.

For all these accomplishments, much of the classical music mainstream remained centered on Russian composers and musicians. Ironically, Putin’s invasion has cast a spotlight on a reality that Putin has sought to deny. As Berlin audiences recently witnessed, Ukraine has its own cultural traditions worthy of world attention.

30: What’s Up with Ukrainian Rap? September 30, 2022 Ukrainian rapper Jockii Druce is a person of this century. Now twenty-two, like the century itself, his entire life has been lived with no memory of the Soviet Union or the first tumultuous decade of Ukrainian independence. As for many other young Ukrainians, for him Ukraine has always just been.

Druce grew up in a Russian-speaking family and community in Dnipro, learning Ukrainian in school. As he approached his teen years, he began rapping with friends after school and on weekends.

Discovering an aptitude for the music, he became increasingly serious about rap as a means of expressing his feelings and identity.

The more he turned to the music for self-expression, the more he found rapping in Russian unsatisfying. He shifted organically to creating his music in Ukrainian because it empowered him to explore uncharted territories.

Druce already had a following before the Russian invasion this year. Because he is from an eastern Ukrainian city close to the fighting that began in 2014, Druce could not ignore the growing division between his Ukrainian friends and fans and the Russian-language culture dominating the airwaves. But Russian culture and language increasingly felt impervious and unchanging while Ukrainian culture and language felt fluid and experimental.

When the Russians invaded in February, he released a new video on TikTok, “So What’s Up Brothers?”, ironically referring to Russian propaganda about Russians and Ukrainians being brethren. Full of biting humor and sharp satire, the song racked up millions of plays and has become a favorite soundtrack for videos about the war posted on social media. Its closing line repeating the popular slogan, “Russian warship, go #%&@ yourself”, speaks to thousands of Ukrainians of his generation.

Ukrainian hip-hop naturally provided the soundtrack to the 2004–2005 Orange Revolution, and it scores the lives of twenty-first century Ukrainian youth like Druce. Rap and hip-hop emerged 113

114 THE ARTS OF WAR from the 1960s and 1970s interaction of Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino street cultures in New York City’s poorest borough, the Bronx. Its path to global dominance—by all accounts, rap is the biggest-selling musical category in the world—revealed a capacity to give voice to the most local discontent, from the slums of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg, in a form that was universal. Hip-hop’s power comes in part from a total cultural expression, embracing music, graffiti art, fashion, poetry, and dance.

Druce is hardly alone in turning to music to express the emotions prompted by the war and its brutality. Countless musicians have done so. Ukraine’s young people are sharing and singing dozens of songs about the war and its perpetrators, such as Sasha Chemerov’s “Wake Up!” Khristina Soloviy’s “I Am Your Weapon”, Zhadan and Dogs’ “Children”, and Karta Svitu’s “Wings”.

The Ukrainian rap scene, like so much cultural expression, was once heavily influenced by Russian musicians. Over time, Ukrainian rappers such as Druce turned away as they realized it was a music that did not speak to who they are. Their music allowed young Ukrainians to define themselves for themselves. This evolution began well before the current war, as evident in Druce’s own musical development.

The Russian invasion accelerated this breach. Horrified by Russian cruelty, Ukrainians are turning to their own language and music to express their anger. Russian culture has little to say to young Ukrainians whose lives have been upended by Russian troops. Ukrainians such as Druce think it pointless to try to change minds molded by Russian war propaganda.

Russian politicians, cultural figures, and media personalities have begun to complain that their glories of their culture are being “cancelled”. . Druce and tens of thousands of Ukrainians of his generation, have neither cancelled Russian culture nor left it behind.

Rather, in their arrogant obtuseness, these Russians have turned their backs on a vibrant Ukrainian culture being built by artists and their fans who have no memory of ever having been part of a “Russian World”. So, what’s up, brothers, indeed?

31: Folk Art October 7, 2022 The Russian invasion has challenged Ukrainians of all ages to proclaim their cultural distinctiveness in the face of the Russian denial of Ukraine as anything other than part of a fictional “Russian World”. This attack on national identity is undeniable in Russia’s wanton destruction of Ukrainian cultural symbols that otherwise have no military value. The destruction of the Prymachenko Museum in Ivankiv offers a particularly poignant example of this policy.

The Russian army quickly captured the village when it invaded Ukraine earlier this year. The occupying forces purposefully burned the museum to the ground as part of a campaign to destroy symbols of distinctive Ukrainian culture. Local residents somehow saved much of the work from the conflagration.

Beloved folk artist Maria Prymachenko’s vibrant, joyous, magical paintings, drawings, and embroideries have been celebrated for decades for her very personal vision rooted in Ukrainian folk motifs. Prymachenko’s superficially naïve, self-taught style made deceptively simple use of complex color palettes, forms, and materials. According to some accounts, Pablo Picasso declared, following a visit to an exhibition of her work in Paris, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian”.

The delight that is so visible in her art belies a life of loss. Born in 1908 to a peasant family in the village of Bolotnia, twenty miles from Chernobyl, Prymachenko contracted polio as a child, an illness which forced her to drop out of school after only four years.

She was fascinated by the natural world around her and began to draw and paint on the walls of her house. Her mother taught her embroidery, which eventually brought her to the attention of artists in the folk-art center of Ivankiv. She was soon showing her work in major Soviet cities and abroad.

Able to stand unaided following two operations, she met her fiancé Vasyl Marynchuk in Kyiv and, in March 1941, gave birth to 115

116 THE ARTS OF WAR their son Fedir (who would become a noted folk artist himself).

Marynchuk died fighting in Finland in World War II and the Nazis killed her brother. Left with no other option in a country devastated by war, Maria and Fedir returned to Ivankiv to work on a collective farm.

Prymachenko, by this time, had moved beyond embroidery to drawing and painting, using an increasingly colorful palette. Her works appeared in major exhibitions, and she won the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in 1966. She lived in the village until her death at age 88 in 1997. Her reputation continued to grow, with UNESCO declaring 2009 the year of Prymachenko. A museum dedicated to her art in Ivankiv attracted a steady stream of visitors, despite its somewhat remote location.

While Prymachenko’s works have never fallen completely from view, her art nonetheless failed to speak to a rising generation of Ukrainians raised in large cities. But news of the Russian devastation changed the meaning of Prymachenko’s art for thousands of Ukrainians overnight. Her art represented an expression of a particularly Ukrainian imagination. Destruction of her art represented an assault on Ukrainian identity and culture more broadly. Her ability to communicate joy and magic through dark times, her talent at combining Ukrainian folk motifs with a highly personal style, and her astounding use of colors spoke anew to Ukrainians trying to make sense of the loss of their own hopes and dreams in this devastating war.

The countryside never seems distant in Ukrainian cities. A majority of Ukrainian urban residents descend from people who moved from the village only one or two generations ago. Folk kitsch adorns numerous restaurants and bars, creating imaginary villages with fake cottages, fake haystacks, and mostly fake (although sometimes real) farm animals attracting tourists and nostalgic city dwellers to their tables. Prymachenko’s art operates at a different level, demonstrating how an imaginary past animates a contemporary Ukraine confronting an existential challenge. Fittingly, two of her works were shown at the Venice Biennale this year.

In July, Lviv’s Sheptytsky National Museum opened a major exhibition of Prymachenko’s later work. The exhibit’s five rooms

FOLK ART 117 present the museum’s own collection, together with more than eighty works held in the private collection of Kyiv art critic Eduard Dymshits. Many of the works on display address the horrors of war as personal loss rather than abstraction. They speak directly to viewers finding sanctuary in a museum that is surrounded by war.

The curators at the Sheptytsky Museum have chosen well in their selection of an exhibit at this moment in history, since Prymachenko’s art speaks to Ukrainians anew as they try to affirm their lives in the face of murder.

32: Ukrainian Odyssey October 14, 2022 Much to their dismay, director Dmytro Kostiumynskyi and his team with the DollMen Theater Company could not have been more prescient when they formulated their Ukrainian Odyssey. The project takes their creative team on a five-city tour (Kyiv-LvivKharkiv-Odesa-Kyiv) offering a contemporary take on Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses. They hoped to encourage audiences to travel and to see segments performed by different artists in other cities. But their parade of performances across Ukraine’s major cities made only three stops before the destruction of a real war brought the tour to a precipitous stop.

Despite COVID restrictions, the DollMen theater group managed to bring its Ukrainian Odyssey project to its third stop at Kharkiv’s NEFT puppet theater prior to the Russian invasion. The immersive performance showed contemporary Ulysseses and Penelopes seeking their own paths though the chaos of a postapocalyptic, virtual city.

Just weeks later, the virtual and theoretical became immediate and tangible. Kharkiv was at the center of a major battle which eventually turned back the Russian invaders, leaving destruction and apocalyptic obstacles behind. By posing the imagined travails of life in a virtual city following urban collapse, DollMen’s theatrical performance helped prepare its audiences for the actual horrors of urban warfare that were to follow.

The project started in 2020, inspired by the ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. When Russian troops invaded the remainder of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it took on new meaning. This work–– created by several artistic teams performing dramatic and physical theater, virtual reality, and puppetry–considers war, evolution, and heroism through five episodes in postapocalyptic cities. It poses questions like: what does it mean to be a hero, an immigrant, a resident, a feminist, a nationalist, a patriot, a

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120 THE ARTS OF WAR civilian, or a soldier, in a country that has survived horrific violence? What does the right to a city mean in such conditions?

Kostiumynskyi created one of Ukraine’s most experimental theater groups, embracing different formats, new media, and crossgenre collaboration. After meeting Viktor Ruban, the Ukrainian choreographer and founder of Ruban Production ITP, Kostiumynsky initiated an exchange of artistic approaches. Ruban joined in to advocate for physical theater, storytelling in a space between mime and dance.

Kostiumynskyi formed DollMen in 2014 and immediately established connections with like-minded European theater directors.

His production that year, Hamlet. Babylon, combined contemporary music, video scenography, and interactive modern media to show Shakespeare’s Danish prince constructing and destroying a personal world in an unstable virtual environment. The work played in Geneva, where it received encouraging reviews.

Kostiumynskyi and the company turned to Ukrainian matters with the stunning 2021 production Crimea, 5 am, dedicated to political prisoners, telling the story of human rights violations in Russian-occupied Crimea. Kostyiumynskyi feared that the human tragedy of the prisoners—who are often are taken from their homes at 5 a.m.—and their families were becoming abstractions. He asked playwrights Natalka Vorozhbyt and Anastasia Kosodiy to write scripts based on interviews with real activists to create a documentary text. The production and accompanying videos and books brought the human dimension of incarceration back to the center of Ukrainian attention.

Ruban is a performing artist, choreographer-researcher, dancer, producer, curator, and educator who, among numerous other projects, has served as artistic director of the #KyivDanceResidency. Ruban has worked with dance and performance centers across Europe and North America to use dance to expand the integration of the arts through community engagement as well as to promote understanding of how choreography can be used. For Ukrainian Odyssey, Ruban and Kostiuminskyi worked with the Lviv Academic Dramatic Lesia Theater. This collaboration brings physical theater into the project.

UKRAINIAN ODYSSEY 121 Ukrainian Odyssey has hit the pause button, as most of the company members have headed off to war. Recreational travel around Ukraine has come to a halt. But the project’s creators continue to redefine the project in light of all that is happening. Despite the war, Lesia Theater re-premiered the piece in June, adding accents prompted by events since February 24. With Kostiumynskyi on the front lines, the theater team, together with Ruban, connected with him online to create the new premiere, which demonstrated how art can sometimes foretell events and sometimes help us prepare for them.

Bringing Homer's Odyssey to the stage in contemporary Ukraine proved to be an odyssey in itself. As choreographer Ruban notes: Theatre actors noted that this piece helped them get back to work. . . . Actors in Ukraine are going through very hard times because it’s psychologically challenging to perform something light and inspiring as a war is being fought. And it is even more emotionally challenging to perform something on the subject of war. The physical theatre aspect that infuses this piece was a great help to the actors. It allowed them to address the emotions that emerged from the action in the physical tasks of the scene, and, in this way, made it possible for them to cope even as they became aware. This consciousness empowers them more effectively to address the text in spoken performance.

I had the chance to speak with audience members following the June 2022 performance and they couldn’t believe that we premiered this piece in 2020. It contains several parts that form something of [a] “tableau vivant” in which we can now recognize images of Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and other places. In this instance, the artistic imagination explored a future once thought unimaginable.

33: Turning to (Street) Art for Meaning October 21, 2022 The importance of street art emerged as a major theme in the opening months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over and over, artists throughout Ukraine have turned their country’s streets into a canvas expressing resistance, resilience, and rebirth. Haunted by what is happening around them, professional and amateur artists have lifted paintbrushes and spray cans to proclaim that they, their communities, and their country have a future.

The stories about this art are too numerous to catalogue with any comprehensiveness. They appear in Ukrainian and international media almost daily. On the eve of Ukrainian Independence Day in August, for example, Varvara Logvyn went out to Independence Square and started to paint the red berries featured in the Ukrainian war song “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow” on some of the hedgehog tank traps that are scattered across Kyiv. After Russian forces were driven out of Irpin and other cities, groups of artists began painting sunflowers on the wreckage of burned-out cars, quietly proclaiming the return of the territory to Ukrainian control. Artists like Yulia Abramova have painted large murals depicting life-affirming symbols—trees of life and white storks—in the capital’s residential neighborhoods.

Numerous unknown artists have painted humorous scenes of Ukrainian tractors pulling Russian tanks against the backdrop of wheat fields, Ukrainian flags, and country scenes. Like the Ukrainian sailors’ retort “Russian warship, go #%&@ yourself” to a Russian ship asking them to abandon Snake Island early in the war, images of spunky Ukrainian farmers on their well-worn tractors removing Russian tanks have become something of a folk legend, recounted endless times in paintings, photographs, reenactments, social media posts, and song.

Most of these initiatives arise spontaneously among artists and communities. In some instances, though, artists have taken up

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124 THE ARTS OF WAR brushes at the behest of commanders. Street artist Hamlet Zinkovsky’s commanding officer sent him into the damaged streets of Kharkiv to paint when he reported for duty to a military unit defending the city. His commander understood that public art can give meaning, lift spirits, and nurture a shared sense of the future.

The role of public art on the Ukrainian home front stands in contrast to the general tenor of conversation about the arts elsewhere. A recent spate of articles in major American media outlets have lamented the decline of this or that art form, of this or that artistic center, of this or that notion of urban community in the face of social media and declining economic fortunes. To cite just one example, The New York Times lamented the decline of San Francisco as an art center in August. A quick survey of American media reveals proclamations on the demise of genres—jazz, opera, European classical music—and of neighborhoods once thought to be artistic incubators, such as Washington’s U Street and New York’s SoHo. The arts’ ability to sustain a robust commercial value has become the single measure of artistic health.

Commodification in the arts has inflicted damage to the creative enterprise, while the rise of social media and a restructuring of economic incentives combine to undermine once valued forms of artistic endeavor. These danger signals appear everywhere that artistic quality is evaluated in monetary terms rather than in imaginative ones.

Artists throughout Ukraine have turned to their own creativity to help themselves and their compatriots understand what has happened to their neighborhoods, cities, and country since the Russian invasion. They have drawn on their own artistic skills to make powerful public statements of resistance, survival, resilience, and communal meaning. They have responded to the war with passion, inspiration, energy, and strength. They offer a reminder to themselves, their neighbors, and to us that artistic creation is about more than the price of a canvas, a device, a ticket, or a studio.

34: Battle-Worn Ballerina October 28, 2022 In early 2022, 30-year-old ballet dancer Olesya Vorontniuk was approaching the peak of her career, having performed with the National Ballet of Ukraine for several years. She had danced in Japan and elsewhere, becoming particularly known for her performances in productions of Bolero. Despite her artistic success, however, Vorontniuk’s personal life had been difficult. A native of eastern Ukraine, she witnessed war break out over Donetsk in 2014. Five years later, her husband was killed as his unit sought to push back occupation forces. Vorontniuk knew then that, were the Russians to launch a full-fledged invasion, she would take up arms.

After February 24, she did indeed take off her pointe shoes and pick up a machine gun. As she told The Economist, “I could shoot. This is my hobby”. Vorontniuk joined the military reserve and took up duty at roadblocks. She evacuated civilians, eventually joining in the successful defense of Kyiv during the war’s opening months. Her experiences at the front convinced Vorontniuk that ballet and military service had some similarities. “Ballet teaches discipline. It hardens the spirit and develops tolerance for pain.

Pointe shoes are tight; it hurts to stand on tiptoe,” says the ballerina.

“Your feet are covered in blood. But despite this, you learn to dance”.

Vorontniuk returned to dancing when active hostilities stopped around the capital, though she remained on call and volunteered to help those in need. Wanting to bring her ballet life and military experiences together in defending Ukraine, she and a handful of other dancers from the National Ballet turned to media to make a statement about the power of dance. In late June, as Ukraine’s Constitution Day approached, Vorontniuk organized a brief performance titled “Ukrainian Ballet Says Stop to Russian Bullets”. Choreographed by Valery Kovtun and set to the music of Kostiantyn Dankevych’s ballet Lileya (Lily), the piece was filmed for YouTube.

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126 THE ARTS OF WAR The music carries special meaning for the Ukrainian ballet community. Dankevych graduated from the Odesa Conservatory in 1929 and held several positions prior to World War II, including as the director of Songs and Dance for the Red Army Choir in Tbilisi. He wrote his first symphony in 1937 and, two years later, composed the score for Lileya. He moved to the Kyiv Conservatory at the end of World War II where he wrote several historical operas, including Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1951) and Nazar Stodolya (1960). He died in 1984.

Kovtun is well known in Ukrainian dance circles. He has danced with the National Ballet of Ukraine over the past several years. He is perhaps best known for his well-received new choreography of Swan Lake, which is now used by the Ukrainian National Ballet. The music and choreography in Vorontniuk’s piece thus represent distinctly Ukrainian contributions to dance.

“Ukrainian Ballet Says Stop to Russian Bullets” lasts only two minutes on YouTube. For the first minute, four ballerinas dance a scene from Lileya in a field of flowers overlooking a broad river, under a blue sky with the superimposed words, “Ukrainian culture has a very long history”. Then, jarringly, the dancers continue the number for the second minute in the charred ruins of the Irpin House of Culture.

The Kyiv satellite of Irpin—just a half-hour drive from downtown—was occupied by Russian troops. The city was in ruins by the time Ukrainian forces returned to the city, and its destroyed House of Culture has become a symbol of Russian viciousness. In posting the video on Facebook, Vorontniuk wrote: I want to draw people's attention to ballet and show that although ballet is a silent art, we are also citizens of Ukraine. The title “Ukrainian Ballet Says Stop to Russian Bullets” came to my mind. I am very grateful to the women from my life, who have shared dressing rooms, for taking such a patriotic position . . . The cultural front is also very important because Russia is waging a cultural war against us; Russia is also at war with us through ballet.

We are all heroes, we are all united for victory, and everyone does whatever they can and knows how to do.

Ukrainian performing artists, from painters to symphony musicians, from ballerinas to playwrights, have taken up arms to defend

BATTLE-WORN BALLERINA 127 their country. Simultaneously, they have turned to their creative skills and imagination to make powerful statements about Ukraine’s culture, a culture that has survived—and will continue to do so. Like Vorontniuk, they never expected to be called upon to fight in a war. Having been asked to do so, they have responded with arms and art.

35: The 100th Heroic Season of the Mykolaiv Theater November 4, 2022 The arts have stood at the center of the current war in Ukraine from the beginning. Driven by megalomanic conceptions of their own culture, Russian forces have targeted cultural sites in their effort to deny the existence of an independent Ukrainian culture. Russian rockets and bombs dropped by kamikaze drones have rained down on schools, libraries, museums, and theaters across Ukraine.

Ukrainians, in response, have turned to their own cultural heritage to support their troops and to proclaim their own distinct identity in the face of the brutal Russian onslaught.

Mykolaiv has been in the Russian crosshairs from the very beginning of the war. Just eighty miles from Ukraine’s largest port of Odesa, the city, founded as Nikolaev in 1789 by Prince Potemkin, has been a major Black Sea shipbuilding center since its beginnings.

By 2020, it housed three major shipyards. Mykolaiv stands in the middle of Russia’s southern invasion strategy to seize a belt of territory extending from Odesa to Moldova. Just a couple of dozen miles from the front for much of the past year, those who have remained in the city have endured nightly shelling, which has obliterated much of the city’s residential, industrial, and cultural infrastructure.

Prior to the Russian invasion, the city was home to nearly half a million residents and several museums, a philharmonic orchestra, a puppet theater, and important Ukrainian and Russian drama theaters. The Russian drama theater, now renamed the Mykolaiv Academic Art Drama Theater, has a distinguished artistic history enhanced by its location in a lovely neo-classical building dating from the 1880s. In September, Russian rockets destroyed it, as they have more than 500 Ukrainian other cultural institutions.

Mykolaiv’s remaining residents would be forgiven if, under such circumstances, they cast the arts aside. But, as Ukrainians have

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130 THE ARTS OF WAR appreciated from the beginning, sustaining the arts and a distinctive Ukrainian culture is at the center of their battle for survival. A “theater of war” has emerged across Ukraine, with producers, directors, and actors mounting new works about the invasion in basements, metro stations, and bomb shelters. The launching of the Mykolaiv Drama Theater’s hundredth season this fall represents a remarkable example of Ukrainian theater’s endurance and artists’ heroism.

In August, in the face of constant bombardment, the theater organized its first film festival since the war began. As artistic director Artem Svistun explained, it is critical to keep culture alive.

An audience of thirty-five gathered in the theater’s bomb shelter for the film screenings. In September, after the bombing, the theater began to present small theatrical productions with help from Georgian, Bulgarian, and Lithuanian theater partners and local authorities. Any profits go to support Ukraine’s military.

For the season’s opening productions, theater director Artem Svistun chose a concert program, “Ukraine will win!”, as well as previously mounted productions and an exploration of the themes in Johan Huizinga’s study of play in culture, Homo Ludens, presented by a Belarusian dissident playwright. Beleaguered residents and soldiers taking a break from the front have eagerly sought out the limited seats.

As Ukrainians have understood, the Russian attack has been about culture and identity as well as land and resources. They are looking to a future that will engage both Ukraine and the world at large, and they persist in the present in remarkable ways.

36: Pulling Strings to Life Spirits November 18, 2022 The legendary marionettes of the Odesa Regional Puppet Theater have returned to the stage so that string-operated wolves, Little Red Riding Hoods, and Thumbelinas can provide war-weary Odesans with a moment or two of delight. Over the past several weeks, the company has produced plays at Odesa’s Museum of Western and Eastern Art for audiences limited to the forty-five patrons who can be accommodated in the building’s bomb shelter, in case of an air raid. The late morning shows are free to handicapped children as well as members of military families and those displaced by the war.

Theater founder Jozef Gimmelfarb established the company nine decades ago as a house of fairy tales that come to life. Like his mentor, the legendary Russian puppeteer Sergey Obraztsov, he understood that puppetry offered a surprising insight into the human condition. For both Gimmelfarb and Obraztsov, puppet theater spoke to human foibles and imperfections, making exotic tales for youngsters a mirror of the world of adults.

Obraztsov studied with the legends of the Moscow Art Theater before opening the State Central Puppet Theater in 1931. The company’s vaudeville-style shows and short films popularized the art. As in many closed societies, puppets got away, from time to time, with performances that would have resulted in adult actors being carted off to prison.

The young Gimmelfarb was just embarking on an acting career in Odesa when Obraztsov was launching his theater in Moscow. The young Odesan headed off to Moscow to learn his craft and then returned home to open the Odesa Puppet Theater in 1934.

Gimmelfarb served as its artistic director for the next four decades, with his son Evgeniy continuing his father’s mission for several years thereafter.

The puppet theater has been no stranger to war. Evacuated to Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) in 1941, Gimmelfarb returned to Odesa 131

132 THE ARTS OF WAR immediately following the city’s liberation. He reestablished the company, bringing humor and joy to a city devastated by war. Gimmelfarb became a local legend, building the company into a permanent presence on the Odesa cultural scene. By the 1970s, his troupe was winning praise from the international puppetry community.

More important, he made going to a puppet show a treasured aspect of growing up in Odesa for thousands of children.

The company celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2012, with the opening of a renovated, state-of-the-art theater. The new theater, with more stages, enabled the company to expand its repertoire to include both children’s classics such as The Little Mermaid, Gulliver in the Land of the Lilliputs, and Aladdin, and adult works such as Dead Souls and Babel’s Grandmothers.

Gimmelfarb and his mentor believed that the suspension of reality demanded by storytelling through dolls empowered their audiences to reconsider the world around them. He envisioned his company’s performances as preparing children for the challenges of adulthood later in life. He also hoped this early experience would encourage young audience members to embrace theater and the arts throughout their lives. He saw his productions as an opportunity to teach lessons about goodness, honesty, love, friendship, nobility, justice, and getting to know the world. His puppets were similar to people in that they rejoice, grieve, quarrel, and make up.

Gimmelfarb believed that such values and emotional demonstrations enabled Odesa to sustain hope even during the harshest times of Stalinist repression and rebuilding following World War II. A Scientific Tale with Professor Kolobochkin, a recent production, shows a cheerful and witty instructor who uses amazing experiments to make objects fly, to cause colorful liquids to boil over in their test tubes, and to demonstrate how volcanos work. His goal is to teach people how to create real miracles from improvised materials, lessons that might serve young audiences well as they return to the streets of their besieged city.

37: The Sound of Resilience November 23, 2022 Russian attacks on Ukraine have become more brutal in recent weeks. Incapable of victory at the front, the Russians have turned, as they have in numerous wars in the past, to a strategy of punish and destroy. The Russians have increased their bombardment of civilian targets, thinking they can pound Ukrainians into submission.

Instead, Russian inhumanity has only increased Ukrainian humanity.

Ukrainians across the country have fallen back on one of humankind’s most elemental forms of expressing community and solidarity: they have begun singing. Perhaps the performances are not polished, perhaps they do not merit the attention of music critics.

They are simple expressions of humanity, resistance, and resilience.

They offer a powerful sign that Russia cannot win this war with bombs and drones.

Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, has suffered rocket attacks aimed at civilians throughout the war. Somehow, despite the intense shelling, the city continues to function. Those passing through a major intersection downtown as they gather the necessities of life might encounter Viktor. A gently eccentric, bearded pensioner, he perches on a building ledge surrounded by pigeons, wearing a jaunty white cap, puffing on his pipe, and looking a bit like Santa Claus. He holds a hand-operated music box on his lap, turning the crank round and round as he greets passersby.

In hard-hit Mykolaiv, where the bombs fall at least nightly, an engineer named Pavel and his mates continued to gather at Rock Hata, a basement bar. The club has continued despite air raids, blackouts, and a 9 p.m. citywide curfew. The hard-edged sound of rock provides a moment of shared solace every night. As they gather, Pavel and the others proclaim, through action and song, that Russia can never win.

Ukraine’s capital Kyiv has been hit harder and harder by drone and missile attacks, which have obliterated important water 133

134 THE ARTS OF WAR and electricity facilities. As the lights go out, musicians set up in the streets, offering a wide range of musical genres. Perhaps they only play for themselves; perhaps a small audience forms in the dark around them. Such proclamations of humanity through song demonstrate a resilience undiminished by Russian bombs.

Ukrainian musicians have even taken to playing at the front.

Street musician Moisey Bondarenko took his violin with him after signing up to fight. He began playing for himself during breaks in the fighting. A comrade in arms filmed him performing in a vacant field during one of these breaks and posted a video of his performance online, where it collected thousands of views and shares.

Spontaneous musical performances arise across Ukraine no matter how brutal the Russian onslaught has become. Music in a myriad of forms—folk, classical, rock; professional, amateur, and novice—continues to fill the Ukrainian air. Ukrainians, through their music, are proclaiming their steadfastness, their resistance, and their resilience.

38: Artist Soldiers December 2, 2022 Petro Buiak is an artist, musician, and photographer—all roles which share the aim of creating images. Just ten years old when Ukraine gained independence, he grew up defying categorization in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk. He added soldier to his list of vocations when the Russians invaded his country on February 24.

Feeling not quite comfortable appearing before live audiences, he turned to printed and painted images to express the stories swirling about inside his head. Much of his earlier work drew on Hutsul folklore. The Hutsuls are an ethnic group living along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. Buiak also claims a “Judeo-Masonic” lineage which, he claims, taught him “how to successfully promote any kind of b*** s***”. This ironic reference mocks longtime Soviet and other conspiracy theories about an evil “Judeo-Masonic” collusion.

Buiak was drawn to Ivano-Frankivsk’s lively, even seedy artistic scene. He became the lead singer in a band, playing two notes on a broken accordion. He participated in the self-proclaimed “schizophrenic performances” of the local Franshyza group. He embraced motorcycle culture. He began months-long expeditions around the former Soviet Union, often hitchhiking along the way.

“I never travel to see architecture or visit museums”, he said. “I’m interested in going to a bar, drinking with local people, eating their local food, and talking”. By 2015, these contrasting ventures came together in an exhibition at the Ukrainian “Gallery of Awesome Pictures”.

Promoting his “bad-boy” persona, Buiak presents himself as having tricked the art community into thinking he is an artist. “I’m an imposter”, he has said, “and drunkard, an image creator who usually comes to [an] exhibition and immediately looks at the buffet table, whatever is hanging on the walls”.

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136 THE ARTS OF WAR Underneath this combination of bravado and self-deprecation is a creative, contemporary artist who has spent his life thinking about the difficulty of being a Ukrainian at this moment in history.

His frenetic storytelling merges elements of what it means to be an artist, what it means to be from Ukraine, and what it means to be not from all of those other corners of the former Soviet Union he has visited on the seat of a motorcycle or hitching in a truck.

Perhaps none of it seemed to serve a serious purpose. Until, that is, the Russians invaded his country. Buiak enlisted to fight and was wounded by artillery fire at the front lines. The arts community heard of his injuries and immediately organized to fund treatment and help his recovery. They raised so much money, in fact, that he told his friends “to stop throwing money at me; I am okay”. Fortunately, his injuries, while severe, affected his left arm, so he can still paint. Presently, he is home for rehabilitation and is creating art once more.

Buiak’s is but one of thousands of stories about Ukrainian artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and performers who have joined the Ukrainian army to defend their country. Far too many have died, some have been seriously wounded, and many continue to fight. Their front-line service is an extension of the search for personal and shared Ukrainian identity which drove their creativity before the war.

Creative artists of all genres have played a significant role in the fighting, from the war’s first days. They have done so as soldiers, as promoters of Ukrainian culture, and as creatives turning their talents to promoting resilience. Field commanders have released painters, actors, dancers, and singers to head out into the community to paint, sing, and dance in an effort to lift morale. National leaders have encouraged others to head abroad to promote Ukrainian culture, often providing funds and visas to make such travel possible. These efforts are not supplementary to the task of winning the war; they are core elements of establishing a distinctive Ukrainian identity that will foster resilience in the future.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has placed such cultural activism and achievement at the center of the war by declaring that there is no such thing as a distinct Ukrainian culture, a separate Ukrainian

ARTIST SOLDIERS 137 identity and history. Putin’s war has been driven by a desire to obliterate all manifestations of Ukraine. Artists, be they fighting on the front or not, have become soldiers pursuing Ukrainian victory.

Dismissing the “bad boy” and ‘bad girl” artists of Buiak’s generation prior to the war would have been a mistake. Hidden behind all the posturing lurked the serious enterprise of defining what it meant to be Ukrainian. Such efforts became deadly serious when Russia began to deny such an enterprise, eventually with guns, tanks, bombs, and rockets. Thousands of “creatives” have taken up the challenge and are helping their country defend itself from physical and cultural annihilation.

39: Hong Kong Celebrates Wartime Ukrainian Theater December 9, 2022 In late October, Blank Space Studio HK joined with the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings campaign to bring twelve new stories about the scourge of war to Hong Kong stages. Produced and directed by Donald Chung, Amy Sze, and William Wong, the festival presented six productions from seven directors with twenty-eight actors on two consecutive weekends. It was the largest fundraising event for Ukrainian theater in Asia.

Chung, Sze, and Wong were unfamiliar with Ukrainian theater prior to the Russian invasion in February 2022. Sze was studying for a master’s degree in London. She met a classmate from Moscow with a Ukrainian cultural background and was drawn to the play readings organized by the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project.

Chung was also in London. As a theater maker, he set out to find Ukrainian plays in bookstores, only to be disappointed by how little Londoners and other Europeans knew about their neighbors.

Recalling similar disinterest in Hong Kong about events in Thailand, Myanmar, and elsewhere in Asia, Chung began to think about how to use theater to break down walls of unfamiliarity. He too sought out the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Reading project’s London readings.

Sze and Chung found the Ukrainian plays speaking to themes of resistance and resilience that resonated with their own experience as theater makers in Hong Kong. As Chung says, “deep down, I am searching for a purpose to continue to tell stories during my city’s difficult times. These Ukrainian works have ignited my hope and faith in humanity, which was also what I wanted to share with other Hong Kongers”.

Hong Kong theater leading light William Wong made his own discovery of Ukrainian plays during the weeks following the Rus-

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140 THE ARTS OF WAR sian invasion. While he had never thought of Ukrainian plays before, the opportunity to read Natalya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads got him thinking about what was happening. His Blank Space Studio brought a reading of Bad Roads to the local stage shortly after the outbreak of the war.

A center for alternative art, the Blank Space company brings practitioners from different performing arts together to curate cultural activities to promote exploration of Hong Kong’s art scene.

The new Ukrainian plays embody the group’s goals of empowering artists to respond quickly to socio-cultural issues. Wong and Chung enthusiastically responded to Sze’s proposal for a festival of play readings.

Sze and Chung presented excerpts from new Ukrainian works: Elena Astaseva’s Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, Neda Nezhdana’s Condensation, Andrii Bondarenko’s Survivor Syndrome, Natalia Blok’s Fur, Maksym Kurochkin’s Red Swallow, Olga Matsiupa’s Flowering, and Polina Pologenceva’s Save the Light. All were translated by the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project, which has commissioned more than one hundred plays by Ukrainian writers. This work has generated 191 texts in several languages that have been heard at more than 250 readings in more than two dozen countries since the beginning of the war.

Each of the plays in October’s festival was translated into Cantonese and performed with English subtitles. They reflect the impact of the war on Ukrainian life and speak to human emotions which transcend time, place, and culture. While each play is about Ukraine, the playwrights often address the traumas of life in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Nezhdana’s Condensation, for example, explores the efforts of four women who did not know one another to find a way to survive even as they do not—and do not want to—remember how they ended up sharing the same six-sided dark room. They are unable to see their fingers, the sky, or the ground outside. Their journey, from screaming in terror to retracing their paths step by step, leads the protagonists to realize that the road to survival lies within themselves.

HONG KONG CELEBRATES WARTIME 141 In Blok’s Fur, an ordinary woman decides to start a new life, taking her children on countless night trains to some indeterminate location. One day, inexplicable brown spots—symbolic of the ache of war—grow on her dull and painful thighs. At first worried about beauty, the woman comes to feel comparatively lucky as others suffer greater tragedy as a result of war.

In Astaseva’s A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, a woman takes her daughter to Italy immediately upon hearing of the Russian invasion on February 24. She leaves Kyiv grateful for escape yet guilty about leaving others behind to suffer. She fantasizes that only those who have been shot or violated have the right to suffer, as the hardships of evacuation are trivial in comparison.

Neda Nezhdana’s Closed Sky is an epic drama based on four women’s true stories of the Russian attacks on Mariupol. Nina Zakhozhenko’s Tooth tells the tale of an old Jewish dentist who recalls his military childhood while consulting a patient with a toothache over the phone, all while trying to get ready to evacuate. All of the plays connect the disruptions and horrors of war with the most mundane human situations.

The effort to pull together the festival had a profound impact on Chung, Sze, and Wong. Chung found the experience helped him appreciate the purpose of the arts in times of conflict. “Artists have continued to create in extreme situations, and I am deeply touched and encouraged”, he said. Sze saw an opportunity for theater “to share the real story of individuals with the Hong Kong audience, which has been receiving information about the war through numbers and statistics”. Wong saw the works of the Ukrainian playwrights as an opportunity to prompt Hong Kongers to deal with the traumas of their own recent history.

The playwrights were surprised by the welcome from Hong Kong audiences. Astaseva said that she hopes her work “will find its audience, touch the hearts, [and] enhance understanding of Ukraine and of our emotions”. Pologenceva is grateful for the interest in and support for her work, hoping that there will be light after a period of darkness and that only the good heroes will win in Ukraine as well as in Hong Kong.

142 THE ARTS OF WAR The plays helped Hong Kong audiences to understand what was happening in Ukraine in a new, more direct way than the sporadic stories appearing in local media. The works also spoke to their own ordeals in perhaps unexpected ways. According to Chung, “the works created a distance (physical, aesthetic, emotional) for the audience to reflect on their own experiences, which they have been unable to do. Some were shocked, some were touched. And then silence”. He continued, “after two to three hours in the theater, audiences were able to experience a good time collectively, and then were better equipped to return to their own lives with more energy”.

Recounting several post-show audience discussions, Wong observed that “the audience members were in tears; sharing the play reminded them of how they fought against tyranny in 2019. It seemed to me that these works actually helped the audience to ease their pain and made them feel less lonely”.

Beyond possible parallels between recent Ukrainian and Hong Kong history, all three festival organizers found the Ukrainian works addressed general human themes about war, suffering, the wrenching experience of civilians in conflict, and grappled with how to mobilize feeling like a victim to positive ends.

The organizers were also interested in distinctions between the countries. Sze, for example, “became intrigued by the language differences in Ukrainian and Cantonese, especially the difference in our ways of speaking, even when we are trying to use humor or sarcasm”. All three are interested in producing more Ukrainian works.

The Hong Kong festival reminds us that as Ukrainian playwrights struggle with what has happened to their country and to themselves, they speak to a broader human condition, bringing wisdom and insight from various cultures and societies across national lines. These works speak to Ukrainians and, it turns out, to people in Hong Kong as well. Theater accentuates the particular while shining light on all that is human.

40: The Lviv National Opera’s Remarkable Wartime Season, Exhibiting Life “Full-Face” December 16, 2022 One recent Sunday evening, the Lviv National Opera presented the world premiere of Yevhen Stankovych’s three-act opera, The Terrible Revenge (Strashna Pomsta) to mark the composer’s eightieth birthday. There would be nothing particularly noteworthy about such a production at another time. But the November 13 premiere of a large-scale new work in a time of war merits special attention.

Lviv thus far has been spared the widespread disruptions of electricity and water afflicting Ukrainian cities to the east, but it has endured bombing attacks and other wartime disruptions. The Lviv National Opera’s pursuit of a full season constitutes a powerful rebuke to the Russian invasion.

Russians honor Mykola (Nikolai) Gogol as a founder of the Russian literary tradition and arguably the first Russian-language realist writer; Ukrainians honor his strong ties with Ukrainian themes and folklore. Throughout his life, Gogol returned often to the Ukrainian folklore he heard growing up in the town of Nizhyn.

His earliest works, such as the stories contained in the Dikanka collection and his epic Taras Bulba, based on the history of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, reveal a profound connection to Ukrainian legends.

Gogol’s short story “The Terrible Revenge” (better known in English as “A Terrible Vengeance”) is among his earliest works, written when he was in his twenties. Included in his first collection of short stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1832), the tale transplants German mythology to the Ukrainian steppes. The story has been made into plays and films and is well suited for a grand opera.

The arrival of two holy icons at a Cossack wedding transforms a stranger into a sorcerer, who then disappears. The bride Katerina 143

144 THE ARTS OF WAR goes mad after her father shoots her new husband Danilo in the arm. The sorcerer returns to bring Katerina back to sanity so that she can marry. He ends up killing her with the knife that she pulls to drive him away. The themes of revenge in the story speak directly to the passions of war, especially now. Clouds part to reveal Crimea, the Carpathians, and a hulking knight riding down to smite the sorcerer. The story ends with the corpses of ancestors waiting to devour the sorcerer’s body for eternity. The new opera highlights the story’s inherent mysticism with lively—and at times bloody—action.

Yevhen Stankovych was born in what is today the city of Svaliava in western Ukraine. He studied composition with the Polish composer Adam Soltys at the Lviv Conservatory before moving to Kyiv to study with Ukrainian composers Borys Lyatoshynsky and Myroslav Skoryk at the conservatory there. He eventually taught at the Kyiv Conservatory and served as a chair of the National Union of Composers of Ukraine. He has composed twelve symphonies, five ballets, concertos, film scores, chamber music, and now an opera.

Andreas Weirich directed this Ukrainian-German coproduction, with Anna Schöttl designing the sets, Serhyi Naenko choreographing the action, and Volodymyr Sirenko and Ivan Cherednichenko conducting the music. The opportunity to conduct this premiere had special meaning for Cherednichenko, whose parents were killed by Russian soldiers in Irpin.

The leading roles are played by soprano Daria Litovchenko, bass Taras Berezhansky (known for his powerful performances as Attila), Latvian tenor Roman Trohimuk, and up-and-coming soprano Marianna Tsvetinska. Several of the singers returned from the front to perform.

In accordance with wartime protocols, the audience is limited to the capacity of the theater’s bomb shelter. The Ukrainian Armed Forces embraced this production, which received financial support from Ukraine’s Stabilization Fund. Should air raid sirens sound for an hour or less, the performance will continue.

The premiere proved a fantastic success. The audience’s enthusiasm extended beyond simply being able to attend a full-scale

THE LVIV NATIONAL OPERA’S REMARKABLE WARTIME SEASON 145 live opera after the restrictions imposed by COVID and then war.

Social media posts from audience members highly praised the performances and its score. The Terrible Revenge will enter into the company’s repertoire.

The Lviv National Opera has been committed to mounting a full season of works. This ambitious premiere captures an idea expressed by Gogol in an 1848 letter: “It’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life”. Audiences attending the Lviv National Opera during this remarkable season are viewing life full-face.

41: A Portrait of Artistic Defiance in Kherson January 13, 2023 The stories coming from recently liberated Kherson are horrific.

The Russian occupying forces killed, tortured, abducted and interned residents whom they suspected of espionage, sabotage, and an unwillingness to accept their new lives inside the Russian Federation. Families were split, as some headed west further into Ukraine and abroad and others relocated, often involuntarily, east, into Russia.

Captured during the first days of the war, many residents had no place to go as their province, which had a prewar population of 290,000, fell quickly to the invading army. Some no doubt welcomed the arriving Russians, and some chose to collaborate with the occupation administration. Many more did not, trying various ways to preserve their humanity and their Ukrainianness.

The city was founded late in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great and her favorite, Grigory Potemkin. The original fort and shipyards supported the empress’s campaign to capture southern territories along the Black Sea from the Turks. The city grew as an important port and shipbuilding and military center. The Nazis and Soviets fought bitterly over the industrial center during World War II, leading to slow postwar redevelopment and a declining Russian population. A once-vibrant Jewish community, which had made up a quarter of the city’s population, was annihilated during the Holocaust.

Over 90 percent of the more than 80 percent of Kherson’s eligible voters cast their ballots in favor of Ukrainian independence in 1991, and three-quarters of the city’s residents proclaimed themselves to be Ukrainian in the 2001 Ukrainian census. And even if voters gave the preponderance of their support to so-called “proRussian” and “Euro-skeptic” parties and candidates over the past three decades, attempts to provoke a pro-Russian backlash against the Ukrainian government were marginal.

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148 THE ARTS OF WAR Resistance grew throughout the eight-month occupation in the face of the increasingly predatory policies of Russian authorities. Schoolteachers quietly greeted their classes each morning with the patriotic slogan “Glory to Ukraine!” (“Slava Ukraini!”). Grandmothers refused to give accurate directions to Russian soldiers. The arts became important too.

Young performance artist Daria returned to her native Kherson a year ago to work at a local television station. While under occupation, she helped people connect with relatives and provided aid to the elderly and to children. She soon came under Russian scrutiny and made her way through Crimea to Georgia and into exile. She used her presence on social media to build a network in opposition to her city’s occupation.

As a final act of defiance before heading into exile, Daria filmed a music video based on Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Oles’s poem “The Charms of the Night” (“Chary nochi”) celebrating Kherson, its monuments and countryside. Oles (1878–1944), whose real name was Oleksandr Kandyba, was a prominent Ukrainian poet and father of the well-known poet and nationalist activist Oleh Olzhych, who perished in a Nazi labor camp in 1944. These associations strengthen the video’s contempt for the Russians who occupied her city.

Other artistic acts of protest were more modest, but no less powerful. Members of Yellow Ribbon, an informal group of activist-artists, spray painted yellow and blue symbols of Ukraine on Russian billboards, banks, passport agencies, and other symbols of occupation. The Ukrainian letter “Ï” (“Yee”, as in “Kиїв”), a letter which exists in the Ukrainian but not the Russian alphabet, became a favorite tag.

The Russians took a great interest in signs of Ukrainian culture. They infamously stole Potemkin’s bones from his tomb and returned them to Russia for reburial (apparently doubting the security of their new “forever” Russian city of Kherson). When the call came to evacuate to more defensible positions across the Dnipro River, Russian troops took the time to steal 15,000 pictures from the Kherson Art Museum. The Russian zookeeper at the local children’s zoo absconded with llamas, racoons, and other animals

A PORTRAIT OF ARTISTIC DEFIANCE IN KHERSON 149 from the collection. These last-ditch, criminal efforts to remove Kherson’s cultural legacy failed to prevent the reality that the city is once again Ukrainian.

The war in Kherson is hardly over. Russians are just across the river. As elsewhere in Ukraine, the Russians have targeted water systems, electrical services, and other critical infrastructure. Russian bombs fall regularly on civilians, and families remain tragically scattered around the world. The remaining winter months promise little but hardship. But memories of the joy of liberation captured through song, images sprayed on walls, and the knowledge of having endured will carry the city and its residents through.

42: Amplifying Opera in a Time of War January 20, 2023 Ukraine’s music scene constantly surprises. Opera Aperta opened at a time when some critics bemoaned the possibility of a contemporary opera catalogue, but the company has found ways to survive during wartime, creating new opportunities to address the current moment. Founded by Roman Hryhoriv and Illia Razumeiko, Opera Aperta has emerged as a noteworthy opera incubator.

Hryhoriv is a multi-instrumentalist, conductor, and composer in his early thirties from Ivano-Frankivsk who started out pursuing a passion for rock music. An encounter with Vasyl Stefanyk, a talented professor, opened the world of classical music. By the mid2010s, Hryhoriv was performing and managing projects in Ukraine and as far afield as the US and China.

He began collaborating with composer Razumeiko at this time. Five years younger than Hryhoriv, Razumeiko studied composition in Kyiv and Vienna, wrote film scores, and began writing operas. His partnership with Hryhoriv naturally evolved out of Ukraine’s vibrant contemporary music scene.

The current war prompted an unexpected collaboration in October with Genesis: An Opera of Memory in thirteen mise-en-scènes at Kyiv’s Khanenko Museum. The project was created by a multidisciplinary team of Ukrainian artists, including choreographer Khystyna Slobodianiuk, theater designer Kateryna Markush, performer and visual artist Evhen Bal, media artist Georgyi Potopalskyi, and a cast of singers, dancers, performers, and instrumentalists.

The story of the Khanenko Museum tracks the traumas of Kyiv over the past century and a half. The merchant Bohdan Khanenko (1849–1917) and his wife Varvara Tereshchenko (1852– 1922) founded the museum as a private collection. Their collection of European art from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries was acquired during the couple’s four decades of travel to European 151

152 THE ARTS OF WAR galleries. In 1918, Madame Khanenko bequeathed the collection and its neo-classical building to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Within a few years, the new Bolshevik regime removed the Khanenko name from the collection and nationalized its works.

Much of the collection was moved east to Ufa in Bashkortistan for safekeeping during World War II. Nazi occupiers pillaged the art that remained. The diminished collection remained closed between 1986 and 1998, reopening in 1999 as the Khanenko Art Museum. The new permanent collection included European and Asian works dating from the sixth to the twentieth centuries. Located across Taras Shevchenko Park from Kyiv National University in central Kyiv, the revived museum quickly found a ready audience.

Hryhoriv and Razumeiko were fascinated with the collection’s history and fate. They discovered, for example, that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1526 painting Adam and Eve, once owned by the Khanenkos, had been sold and resold, first by the Bolsheviks and then by European art dealers. This painting corresponded chronologically with Giulio Camillo’s 1544 treatise The Idea of Theater, which informed the creative team’s notions about the “theater of memory”.

Camillo lived in the intellectually turbulent worlds of late fifteenth century northern Italy and early sixteenth century Paris. In 1530, he outlined his ideas concerning the idea of theater for Francis I of France. For Camillo, theater was an intellectual act, a means of engaging in philosophical discourse rather than an instrument of the physical senses. His ideas were recovered in the twentieth century by those who promoted theater as an act of memory.

When the Russians invaded Ukraine in February, museum workers whisked the collection into safe storage, leaving its thirteen exhibition galleries empty. A few months into the war, Hryhoriv and Razumeiko began to explore how they could bring their interest in Camillo’s work together with its connection to the Khanenko Museum through Cranach’s painting, and the realities of an art museum now devoid of art. The result was Genesis.

A multimedia extravaganza staged in the Khanenko Museum’s empty galleries, Genesis connects the biblical creation story with the formation of the arts. The first seven galleries—parallel to

AMPLIFYING OPERA IN A TIME OF WAR 153 the seven days of creation in the Bible—track the formation of the planet, from light and sound to consecration by the muses. The remaining five rooms focus on the “theater of memory”, as sound and light illuminate the world, prompting memories of varied histories.

Spectators follow the performers—ten opera singers and ten instrumentalists—from room to room (or virtually on webcasts). The resulting performance animates the emptiness of loss from war.

Hryhoriv and Razumeiko’s opera prompts audience members to slow down and consider a history torn asunder by war. This attempt becomes a step towards recovery. Their opera’s performance during wartime offers a compelling example of how Ukrainians are wrestling with their past and current realities in order to move into a once unanticipated future.

43: A Twelve-Year-Old Ukrainian Girl’s Wartime Diary to Appear February 3, 2023 Yeva Skalietska turned twelve on Valentine’s Day, 2022. Yeva lived with her grandmother in a simple, yet comfortable, apartment on the east side of Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her grandmother’s room looked out over open fields to the Russian border nearby. Yeva spent her birthday celebrating with schoolmates, and her mother came from Istanbul to be with her for the day. The following Saturday she celebrated more, with a bowling party at a nearby shopping mall.

She was the epitome of a happy girl eagerly anticipating becoming a teenager. She enjoyed studying geography, math, English, and German in school and was turning into a talented painter.

She also kept a diary as Russian rockets began to fall on her city.

Together with her neighbors, Yeva and her grandmother spent the first days of war hunkered down in a makeshift basement bomb shelter, trying to decide what to do. As the shelling became more intense, they moved to a friend’s place on the western side of the city. They were there when word arrived that their apartment had received a direct hit from a Russian bomb on day six of the war.

Yeva recorded the intense fear and sadness of her realization that the Russians had begun a real war. She managed to keep in touch with her schoolmates via iPhone, though she left her phone charger in the apartment, along with her favorite pink toy cat, Chupapelya. Fortunately, she grabbed her trusty diary before fleeing. Excerpts of it have now been published in You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine.

Learning that her childhood home was in tatters, she became depressed. The attack on her home was, for her, an attack on a piece of her. As she records: “There were such memories there! Our Italian furniture, our fancy dinner sets, the glass table. All those memories blown to bits. Tears are streaming down my face, and that’s only a fraction of my sorrow. I don’t care as much about the things themselves as much as I do the memories they held”.

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156 THE ARTS OF WAR Yeva also mourns the loss of her city. She writes that “Kharkiv has loads of beautiful places. The city center, the Shevchenko City Garden, the zoo, and Gorky Park. . . . There is a beautifully paved street that leads up to Derzhprom, a group of tall buildings in Freedom Square. And whenever Granny and I need to soothe our souls, we visit the Svyato-Pokrovs’kyy Monastery”.

She records her trip with her grandmother first to the relative safety of Dnipro, and then, in an endless train ride west across Ukraine, to the border city of Uzhorod. Their trek is harrowing and comforting. Frightening uncertainty is balanced by the kindness of strangers who help along the way, including helpful train conductors and border officials.

By day nine of the war, as Yeva and her grandmother are leaving the train in Uzhorod trying to figure out what to do next, she encounters Flavian Charuel, a reporter from Channel 4, the British TV station. Charuel and Paraic O’Brien, an Irish reporter working for Channel 4, probably picked Yeva out of the stream of arriving displaced persons because she is photogenic and can speak English.

They featured her in a news story and then helped Yeva and her grandmother on their way. Eventually, they will support Yeva in publishing her diary.

Several days later, with the help of Hungarian hosts and the Channel 4 news crew, they take an unforgettable nighttime boat ride along the Danube from Budapest and make their way to Dublin in time to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Once in Dublin, Yeva enrolls in an Irish school. She has reunited in Ireland with her pink toy cat, Chupapelya, saved by former neighbors, along with a handful of other mementos, from the wreckage of her bedroom.

For all her good fortune, Yeva remains mindful of how much worse everything could be. By day twenty-five, she records that “each day weights heavier on my soul”. Her grandmother, meanwhile, rejects any notion of being a “refugee”. Yeva adds the stories of classmates Khrystyna, Olha, Kostya, Alena, all of whom have tales even more harrowing than her own. At the end, she writes, “it pains me to see all this chaos around us. The tears, the sorrow, the hurry, the fear. But there’s nothing more painful than watching a loved one go to war”.

UKRAINIAN GIRL’S WARTIME DIARY TO APPEAR 157 At the end, in her acknowledgments, Yeva says, “I have met lots of different people since the beginning of the war. I’m grateful to many of them, but some of them I’d rather forget. Those terrible days have taken off a great number of masks”.

We all should be grateful to Yeva Skalietska for telling all of us about the terrifying, harrowing, and pitiless brutality of war, and for reminding us of the incalculable compassion and generosity that humans summon in return.

44: A Musical Homage for Izium’s Ancient Stone Figures and Recent Lost Souls February 10, 2023 Lithuanian pianist Darius Mažintas carefully adjusted his black bulletproof vest, with its blue and yellow patch and embroidered Canadian flag, as he pulled it over his formal black concert attire. A few moments later, he walked out into a cold December fog on Mount Kremyanec near Izium in Ukraine. Barely visible, his concert grand piano stood shrouded in mist, facing a row of large, stone, female figures built by the Polovtsians centuries ago.

The nomadic Polovtsians left their sacred sculptures behind when they made a hasty retreat from the Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century. Their stories inspired Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, which includes the composer’s well-known “Polovtsian Dances”. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov subsequently reworked Borodin’s original score into a stand-alone performance piece.

The statues survived the Mongol marauders, and numerous other conquering armies, relatively unscathed over the centuries, at least until the Russians arrived last year. In March 2022, they launched a battle for the strategically important transportation hub at Izium. Their campaign lasted until September, when Ukrainian forces retook what had once been a town of 45,000 residents. Returning Ukrainian troops discovered a mass grave of 449 civilians and countless tales of war crimes and Russian atrocities.

Russian troops destroyed one of the nine Polovstian stone statues completely and heavily damaged the others. Mažintas intended to play a concert to heal the spiritual wound inflicted by the invaders. The audience consisted of the remaining stone women as well as local residents who happened by.

As the war began, Mažintas turned to exploring the work of Ukrainian composers, discovering the works of Valentyn Silvestrov as part of that journey. Silvestrov, who now lives in Berlin, has been a figure on the Kyiv music scene since graduating from the Kyiv 159

160 THE ARTS OF WAR Conservatory in 1964. He was often at odds with Soviet authorities after he walked out of an official composers’ meeting convened to endorse the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. His music is known for a postmodern style which emphasizes a tapestry of dramatic textures through traditional tonal and modal techniques.

Following Ukrainian independence, Silvestrov rediscovered his student notebooks, which included the beginnings of a delicately beautiful song cycle that he brought together as Naïve Music.

These quiet, elegant piano solos provided the perfect emotional expression of loss, quietude, and beauty necessary to pay homage to the damaged sacred figures and the hundreds of those tortured and killed by the Russians.

Mažintas, now forty, has already checked off many of the accomplishments expected of a rising concert pianist. He pursued conservatory training, entered numerous prestigious music competitions, and performed to good reviews in concert halls across Europe. He entered politics, serving as Lithuanian Vice Minister of Culture in 2013 and 2014. His December 2022 recital in a mist-covered Ukrainian field was unlike anything he had done before.

Mažintas’s performance was arranged and sponsored by Canada’s Looking at the Stars Foundation. Created by Soviet-era refugee and current Toronto-based tech executive Dmitri Kanovich, Looking at the Stars seeks to assert humanity through the gift of classical music, since it offers positive energy and affirms hope and dignity in a world in which both are in short supply. The foundation sponsors classical recitals such as that by Mažintas in correctional and long-term care facilities throughout Canada.

Kanovich brought his approach to healing through music to Ukraine shortly after the Russian invasion in early 2022. The first foundation-sponsored concert took place on April 26 in Kyiv, to honor those who died in the devastated city of Irpin. Mažintas’s Izium recital was the second such performance in Ukraine.

For a brief moment last December, Mažintas’s quiet performance of Silvestrov’s ethereal score brought a quiet moment of dignity and peace to a fog-covered field in a war-torn country. The music spoke of a beauty that is waiting to return.

45: Kyiv’s Puppet Company Provides New Year’s Cheer February 17, 2023 Another New Year’s has arrived in Kyiv, one unlike any other since independence. New Year’s has long been the high point of the Ukrainian capital’s holiday season. Elevated by the Bolsheviks in order to discourage the celebration of Christmas, the holiday appropriated all the trappings of the discarded fete: Grandfather Frost (who looks a lot like Santa Claus), exchange of gifts, family dinners, and a New Year’s tree (ialynka) looking every bit like a Christmas tree.

Religious celebrations continued, often surreptitiously, during the Soviet era. In a country of divided faith, such celebrations rarely coincided. Following independence, Protestants and Roman Catholics celebrated Our Lord’s arrival on December 25, according to the Gregorian calendar. Orthodox Christians and Greek Catholics celebrate on January 7, per the Julian calendar. Anyone still looking to celebrate added “Old New Year’s” (another vestige of the Julian calendar falling on January 14, according to the Gregorian timetable). The especially playful might even recognize the Chinese Lunar New Year. Toss in the Jewish and Muslim calendars and the holidays indeed became a season.

This year is different, with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church celebrating Christmas on December 25 (Orthodox believers continuing to worship with the Moscow Patriarchate observe Christmas on January 7).

For over a century, “New” New Year’s has offered the one moment of celebration shared by all. New Year’s in Kyiv has traditionally been filled with light, entertainment, and noisy joyous celebrations. In 2015, a new official celebration area opened in the square in front of historic St. Sophia Cathedral (completed 1018) and the chain of small parks nearby. A giant, lighted ialynka presided over central Independence Square until this year.

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162 THE ARTS OF WAR Russian rocket assaults on power plants, electricity lines and transformers, public infrastructure, and civilians rendered such a holiday impossible this year. Bombs falling from the skies failed to obliterate all seasonal magic, however. The puppets and performers of the Kyiv Academic Puppet Theater remained in place, displaying their craft in the company’s enchanting “Castle on the Mountain”, a few steps uphill from the city’s most central metro stations.

Founded in 1927, the company is Ukraine’s oldest puppet theater, established by the much-revered Iryna Deeva and Oleksandr Solomarskyi. The troupe has continued to provide entertainment for the city’s children and their parents in times that included genocidal famine, the Holocaust, world war, brutal repression, and Putin’s unrelenting destructiveness. Over the decades, the puppet theater’s productions have provided a respite from the tensions of everyday life, cherished by children and adults alike.

For many of its early years, the theater lacked official status and moved around, sustained by the energy of Deeva and Solomarskyi. Part of the grassroots movement to create a Ukrainian theater, the puppets and their masters eventually fell under the tight control of the People’s Commissariat of Education. Following the end of World War II, the company fell into the determined reach of Soviet cultural officials resolved to subdue all signs of cultural independence.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the theater connected with other youth theaters around the Soviet Union, entering into a productive partnership with the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music, and Film in particular. For many years, the theater operated in what had been the Romanesque and Moorish revival Brodsky Choral Synagogue (completed 1898).

Following Ukrainian independence, Kyiv’s Jewish community reclaimed the synagogue, which now serves as home to the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine. The company moved to a fancifully restored Dnipro cinema building, converted into a delightful faux castle near the Museum of Water on the river bluffs forming the gorgeous Khreshchatyy Park.

KYIV’S PUPPET COMPANY PROVIDES NEW YEAR’S CHEER 163 The company quickly established its place within Kyiv’s exploding post-independence cultural scene, one rooted in part in the warm memories of childhood visits held close by Kyivan adults.

Kyiv’s puppet masters expanded their international connections, hosting important puppetry festivals and participating in similar celebrations across Europe, North America, and Asia.

A martial law proclamation governed the theater once Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24. Forced to go dark, the company released its artists and staff to support Ukraine’s military and civil defense efforts. Some company members headed to the front to fight; others sought refuge in western Ukraine and abroad. The theater turned its facilities over to authorities to use as a logistical coordinating point, even as actors and puppets performed for charity benefits, displaced children, and wounded soldiers. All the while, company members made plans to return to the stage. In late October, the theater announced that it would be opening its doors to audiences again, “no matter what!”

As the holidays approached and Russian attacks became more frequent and vicious, the company performed at noon on weekdays and at eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon on weekends. December’s bill featured multiple performances of Dmytro Drapikovsky’s Moroz-Morozenko, a forty-five-minute production full of snow, frost, and holiday bliss. Following New Year weekend, the company switched to performing Yuriy Sikalo’s new rendition of Charles Perrault’s Cinderella (Popelyushka). Running under an hour, the show’s magical ballroom setting made for an appropriate holiday celebration.

Creating illusions is never more important than at moments of existential threat. As the company of the Kyiv Academic Theater reminded everyone this January, puppets—animated dolls which recall childhood for the old and create a new childhood for the young—enable performers and audiences to transcend their daily challenges and to renew their energy to fight for their own humanity once the holiday and the show are over.

46: Ukrainian Women Artists Set Their Own Paths in a Time of War February 24, 2023 Artist Dana Kavelina, a native of now-occupied Melitopol, did not need to wait and see what would happen to Ukraine when Russian forces came over the border in February 2022. She had seen what had happened in 2014 when pro-Russian separatists declared their “independence” in Luhansk and Donetsk. Women would be brutalized again, with rape being used as a weapon intended to destroy their humanity. Kavelina was already engaged in a long-term project called “Mother Srebrenica Mother Donbass”, bringing sketches, interviews, linear narrations, and video together to weave a story of women’s war experiences in the Donbas, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and elsewhere. She understood that, in terms of dehumanization and terror, “every war is a war against women.”

The need to reclaim agency in the face of horrendous brutality emerges as a central theme in the powerful new art exhibit, Women at War, fashioned by New York curator Monika Fabijanska. She brings together the creations of a dozen women artists from Ukraine working in genres ranging from sketch and oil painting to photography and video to offer a potent condemnation of the current conflict in Ukraine. Yevgenia Belorusets, Oksana Chepelyk, Olia Fedorova, Alena Grom, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alevtina Kakhidze, Dana Kavelina, Lesia Khomenko, Vlada Ralko, Anna Scherbyna, Kateryna Yermolaeva, and Alla Horska share intensely personal visions of the horrors inflicted on Ukrainian women, juxtaposing traditional and contemporary gender roles in order to undermine notions of victimhood. These women emerge as powerful agents of their own destinies despite the brutally misogynist attacks unleashed by occupying armies.

Fabijanska initially mounted the exhibition at New York City’s Fridman Gallery in cooperation with Kyiv’s Voloshyn Gallery (currently operating in Miami) in the summer of 2022. After a stop at

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166 THE ARTS OF WAR Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the show moved to Washington, DC’s Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in January of 2023, where it ran until March. Bringing the exhibit to Washington afforded policymakers the chance to experience the power of Ukraine’s wartime art, something experienced in Ukraine many times over.

Each of the artists in Women at War compiled an impressive artistic record in Ukraine and internationally, and each was nurtured by an independent Ukraine threatened by the return of patriarchal authoritarianism, should Russia emerge victorious.

The exhibit’s power begins with the artists’ explorations of gender roles and the gender divide in a time of war. Their pieces shed light on the historical context of the Donbas in particular. Long the center of the Russian Empire’s, and then the Soviet Union’s, heavy industrial belt, the region developed a culture rooted in mining, heavy industry, and male heroism. As the artists reveal through painting and video montage, the Soviet regime elevated the masculine hero-worker to the status of a saint. Women, however, played a major role in the region’s economy and culture.

Moreover, as Lesia Khomenko’s oversized portrait Max in the Army reveals, the very workers portrayed as heroes of socialist labor at times resisted the drive of Soviet overseers to squeeze more from them. Donetsk mining specialist Volodymyr Klebanov, for example, founded the Soviet Union’s first—short-lived—independent trade union in the 1970s after more than a decade of struggle.

For the women of Donbas, the crisis triggered by the loss of home and family—both personal and public—dates back to 2014.

For earlier artists, such as Alla Horska (1929–1970), the story dates to the movement of dissident artists in the 1960s (and even before).

In 1962, Horska investigated an eyewitness report of mass graves in the town of Bykivina near Kyiv dating from the 1920s and 1930s.

As a result, she served seven years in a labor camp and five years in internal exile. Afterwards, she worked in Donetsk until she was murdered in 1970, most likely at the hands of the KGB. One of her linocuts appears in the exhibit. At the other end of the arc is Olia

UKRAINIAN WOMEN ARTISTS SET THEIR OWN PATHS 167 Fedorova, an artist in her twenties, who created and then photographed an outdoor installation of anti-tank “hedgehogs” made out of paper.

Taken together, this work underscores the continuity of artistic achievement, the rejection of patriarchal glorification, and the conflict of national identities in the efforts to form a new Ukrainian narrative. The exhibit’s power rests on the ability of Ukrainian women to define for themselves who they are in this instance, through art.

47: Coming to Terms with Putin Requires a “Process”, Not Just a “Trial” March 3, 2023 Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine runs deeper than a single event.

As a recent Ukrainian-German theatrical collaboration underlines, coming to terms with Putin and Putinism requires a process involving everyone. This frame empowers the actors to explore the war and Putinism from multiple perspectives, ranging from the individual to those of official institutions.

Cologne’s Theater der Keller’s recent German-Ukrainian joint production Putinprozess results from the work of an artistic team involving partners from both countries. Financial assistance from the Goethe Institute allowed the theater to include director-actor Andriy May, choreographer Viktor Ruban, costume designer Katya Markush, video and sound engineer Yevhen Yakshin, and singerperformer Tetiana Zigura from Kyiv, working with German dramaturge Ulrike Janssen, actor Timon Ballenberger, and others.

The war has been deeply personal for Ukrainian artists. Theater director May, founder of the Vsevolod Meyerhold Center in Kherson, headed west to protect his child as Russian troops neared his city. Ukrainian authorities permitted him to leave the country as a single parent, and he landed in Cologne. Once settled into the ancient city on the Rhine, he reached out to the German theater community and found like-minded partners in the city’s celebrated Theater der Keller.

Founded in 1955 by Marianne Jentgens and Heinz Opfinger, Cologne’s oldest private theater opened in an air raid shelter (hence the name, “in the cellar”). The company moved several times, Jentgens assuming the stewardship following Opfinger’s death, and followed in turn by several distinguished leaders. The theater garnered numerous awards along the way and continues to be considered among Germany’s most innovative theater companies.

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170 THE ARTS OF WAR Wartime’s life-changing events led May to reflect on the nature of modern authoritarianism and its effect on society and citizens. He began to work with the theater’s dramaturge Janssen to interrogate authoritarianism generally, and Vladimir Putin specifically. Janssen advanced May’s engagement with the Cologne theater community. Previously, she worked as a freelance author and director of radio plays following her 2001 doctoral degree in philosophy. By 2014, she was creating award-winning works for theater, joining Theater der Keller in 2018.

Together, Janssen and May brought Kyiv artist-activist-theater historian Ruban onto their creative team as choreographer, together with designers Markush and Yakshin. Actors Zigura and Ballenberger joined May on stage in this three-character play. On November 18, 2022, their collaboration resulted in the premiere of Putinprozess, an eighty-minute theater work exploring the creation of “little Putins” in everyday life. The play was in the theater’s repertoire throughout the winter.

As Janssen has explained, “Putinprozess is not about a trial. Instead, we are dealing with the double sense of a process, to which we are all at the mercy. The performance works on different levels, from the private positions of the performers to the propaganda of Russian institutions. The play lets the audience think about the question: what is my position, what is my role in this process?”

Several German theater critics engaged such issues in their reviews. The Nachtkritik reviewer said, on November 19, “Trial? It would be nice. The German-Ukrainian production ‘Putinprozess’ . . . has to do with completely different things”. As the Choices critic noted in November, “The characters move between tenderness and apathy with stories about exclusion, political persecution, and longing for artistic development. The ensemble reminds us of the value of listening, of sympathy”. Kölnische Rundschau reported on November 22, “May’s ‘Putinprozess’ is not a tribunal; it is about the difficult process of orienting yourself in a constantly changing scenario”.

This melding of Ukrainian and German perspectives on totalitarian violence creates fresh possibilities for understanding how

PUTIN REQUIRES A “PROCESS”, NOT JUST A “TRIAL” 171 such aggression occurs in societies entrapped in authoritarian moments. As May observed, “Putin himself is not interesting”. Perhaps the collaborative design of theater emphasizes process more than the current widespread fascination with Putin as a personality.

Theater der Keller’s Putinprozess exposes the process by which the ruthlessness and cruelty of Putin’s regime insinuated itself into Russian society. Modern totalitarian regimes rest on a noxious combination of top-down ruthless willfulness and bottom-up passivity and disorientation. There will come a time to sort through the Putin regime’s multitude of enablers. Theater works such as Putinprozess will be invaluable in helping to craft paths forward to foreclose yet another authoritarian horror tale.

48: Returning Home The Odesa Philharmonic Celebrates a New Year in its Old Home March 10, 2023 The Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra has returned home to play concerts in its own hall, following nearly a year of wartime disruptions.

The orchestra played its traditional Orthodox New Year’s Eve concert (January 13, 2023) in front of 1,000 listeners in the sold-out Philharmonic Hall. Everyone on stage and in the hall sat in the dark, as a blackout took hold just as the concert was scheduled to begin. A few lights on stage and numerous cellphone flashlights shone through the gloom, as did the spirit of Odesans intent on imposing their reality onto a cityscape scarred by Russian attacks.

A rousing opening rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem picked up where the orchestra had left off nearly a year before. On the Saturday evening prior to the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, Maestro Hobart Earle brought down his baton, following a galvanizing interpretation of the overture to Mykola Lysenko’s opera Taras Bulba. The audience rose to its feet in patriotic fervor as the orchestra played further and further into this unexpected encore. No one could imagine how the year would unfold. Now, as the musicians return to their home stage, everyone understands that Ukraine will endure.

The path from last year’s closing concert to this year’s return home has been long, difficult, and tortuous. The orchestra scattered as hostilities began. Some musicians joined the country’s defense at the front; others sought refuge throughout Ukraine and abroad.

Their city came under attack. Most put down their instruments not knowing when they would be able to pick them up again.

September offered a moment of hope, as the prestigious Berliner Musikfest invited the orchestra to perform. Ninety musicians gathered together for the first time since the war began, with the assistance of the Ukrainian and German governments and funders.

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174 THE ARTS OF WAR Several rehearsals in Odesa, followed by a trial concert in a concert in Chisinau, Moldova, led up to an emotional and critically acclaimed performance in Berlin.

The orchestra’s Berlin triumph introduced European audiences to the hauntingly beautiful music of Ukrainian composers Myroslav Skoryk, Mykola Lysenko, and Crimea native Alemdar Karamanov. Following the intermission, the orchestra played Jean Sibelius’s magnificent Symphony No. 2, with a performance that garnered interest in classical music circles. In January 2023, the orchestra’s recording of that work was featured on the BBC’s Afternoon Concert series, together with the fourth movement of Mykola Kolessa’s Symphony No. 1.

The orchestra members appreciated such international recognition. Nothing, however, could match the entire orchestra’s return under Maestro Earle to play on their home stage before a hall full of their local fans. Despite some performances in Odesa with guest conductors, such a large-scale homecoming appeared out of reach as Russian attacks on the city’s infrastructure and residential neighborhoods ground on. Not to be denied, the orchestra quietly planned for precisely such an expansive re-entrance in early 2023.

The January 13 concert—which was repeated two days later with lights—continued the orchestra’s tradition of celebrating the New Year with beloved music. The program of Johann Strauss II waltzes, polkas, and marches touched off a warm and festive audience response that filled the room with an energy more powerful than that generated by electric lights.

On January 23, the orchestra followed with a concert marking the thirtieth anniversary of its founding in its post-independence incarnation (the Soviet-era orchestra was established in 1937). That concert featured Mozart’s Adagio from his Clarinet Concerto and Alemdar Karamanov’s stunning “Moonlit Sea” from Symphony No. 7, written in 1958 and first performed in 1977.

Londoners of a certain age affectionately recall the weekday concerts organized at the National Gallery throughout the Blitz by pianist Myra Hess. Hess and Gallery Director Kenneth Clark converted the museum into a concert hall offering weekday performances, without a single cancelation from October 1939 to April

RETURNING HOME 175 1946. More than 750,000 Londoners attended these lunchtime concerts over the six-and-a-half years of war and early postwar reconstruction. Perhaps there will be people from Odesa who will look back on their orchestra’s wartime return with similar appreciation and fondness.

49: Acting Out Wartime Emotions March 17, 2023 “When you hear the sound of a shell flying at your house, at first you feel fear, then hatred. Hatred for whoever did it. For all of Russia, for all its inhabitants without exception”. This line, from the first-person narrator in Olena Astaseva’s play A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, reveals more about the future of UkrainianRussian relations than all the well-meaning calls for peace tumbling forth from formal and informal media outlets.

Theater’s artificiality at times opens up opportunities for truth-telling uninhibited by the injunctions of ordinary life. A collection of twenty plays written by Ukrainian playwrights in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of their country provides a range of deeply personal—even confessional—stories and observations about the current war. Compiled, edited, and introduced by John Freedman, A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works

by Ukrainian Playwrights should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to work through what has happened, and will happen, in Ukraine.

The heroine of Iryna Harets’s play Planting an Apple Tree simultaneously tries to carry on something of a normal life. Living in the countryside, her character admits that “I even feel guilty that my sister is being bombed in Kharkiv, and my family is being bombed in Kyiv. I try not to think about the many places where people are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe, without water, food, medicine, and where children die of dehydration”. She does not forget their suffering; she responds differently to it. She plants an apple tree. She does so because “one needs love and humanity in these days of rage and hatred”.

Astaseva and Harets are two among a dozen-and-a-half authors from throughout Ukraine who have contributed to the volume, including Pavlo Arie, Ihor Bilyts, Natalia Blok, Andriy Bondarenko, Vitaliy Chenskiy, Julia Gonchar, Oksana Grytsenko, Olena Hapieieva, Iryna Harets, Maksym Kurochkin, Tetiana 177

178 THE ARTS OF WAR Kytsenko, Kena Lagushonkova, Yevhen Markovskiy, Olha Maciupa, Kateryna Penkova, Oksana Savcjenko, Liudmyla Tymoshenko, and Natalka Vorozhbyt.

The plays by Astaseva, Harets, and others contained in this essential volume speak to the rawest and most revealing emotions of war. A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War emerged from the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project and Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights mainly during the opening days of the war (seventeen were penned in March 2022, two in late June, and one was completed in November). These works have been read and performed around the world. Translated and published together, the new book offers opportunities to reach new audiences and readers.

Internationally recognized Ukrainian dramatist Maksym Kurochkin returned to Kyiv in recent years and was working to open the new Theater of Playwrights dedicated to Ukrainian works in March 2022. The war altered his plans only slightly. Many of the works contained in this book were read at a triumphant marathon session in the theater’s unfinished basement on June 24, 2022.

Theater writer John Freedman—working with Philip Arnoult at the Center for International Theater Development (CITD) in Baltimore—made the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project Baltimore CITD’s signature initiative, providing $1,000 commissions to twenty-three playwrights. The project has supported new works to be read and performed around the world.

To date, the project has entered 129 plays by more than fortyfive Ukrainian writers into an ongoing database. The project has sponsored more than 295 readings in twenty-nine countries and nineteen languages, reaching an audience of over 12,000. Cumulatively, these events have raised tens of thousands of dollars for direct aid, medical supplies, and food for Ukrainian hospitals, shelters, food distribution centers, and elder care facilities.

The plays collectively respond to the experience of Ukrainians on the ground, trying to answer unanswerable questions, such as, why are Ukrainians fighting so ferociously? Perhaps Hapieieva tells us what we need to know in her play The Bowels of the Earth:

RETURNING HOME 179 I remember the crumbly black earth in my grandmother’s garden. It had such an intoxicating smell. Your hands would be dry, black, and cracked.

Now we all sit in the bowels of the earth. They want to take someone else’s land. The earth protects. It hides. It covers. Ukrainians are defending this earth with their weapons. The occupiers’ boots tread on this earth. Such young men from the Russian hinterlands. Stupid and aggressively naïve.

They stomp on the graves of my forebears. They burn them with fire and level them with the earth. They themselves fall and smolder on the earth.

The earth burns their feet, breaks their hearts.

Such primal sentiments are too crude, perhaps, for refereed social science journals and government policy briefs. These words are made for the stage, where profound truths of human existence can be expressed more openly.

50: Whack-a-Mole Culture January 27, 2023 The more Russian forces try to destroy Ukrainian culture, the more it springs back to life. As the essays in this collection reveal, adaptable Ukrainian artists in every genre have kept creating, no matter what the Russians have thrown at them. The arts rise into prominence whenever danger wanes. Ukrainian artists and their audiences seek out basements and street corners, bomb shelters and public squares, and concert halls and galleries abroad to celebrate what it means to be Ukrainian.

When Russian rocket blasts shut down electricity and water in the east, some Ukrainian performers head to their country’s western provinces, where they find sanctuary, peers, and fans. The Transcarpathian regional capital of Uzhhorod has come to play an ever more vital role in promoting Ukrainian culture.

For centuries before the upheavals unleashed by World War I and the subsequent imperial collapse in Eastern Europe, Uzhhorod—then known as Ungvár—remained under Hungarian rule. Over the past century, the town has been part of Czechoslovakia, Nazi-controlled Hungary, and the Soviet Union. This history has not been kind to the city and its residents. The Germans exterminated its once large and vibrant Jewish community during the Holocaust; the Soviets expelled its Hungarian majority after the war. Over the past three-quarters of a century, Uzhhorod has been an important transit point between the Soviet Union––now Ukraine––and Central Europe.

A city of 120,000 mostly Ukrainian residents prior to the outbreak of the current war, Uzhhorod’s Hapsburgian charms made the town a popular jumping-off point for alpine tourism in the surrounding Carpathian Mountains. Uzhhorod developed a cultural scene distinctive in Ukraine, as it fell within the field of gravity of such European cultural centers as Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin.

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182 THE ARTS OF WAR Still largely unscathed by Russian attacks, that scene is becoming a creative, safe haven for Ukrainian artists from the country’s eastern regions. Once in Uzhhorod, displaced artists receive sustained support for their work from local communities and institutions embracing the newcomers and their creativity.

The Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic has emerged as an important artistic patron. The orchestra came into being at the very end of World War II. A year later, the USSR Ministry of Culture turned the synagogue of the city’s massacred Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish community over to the philharmonic to serve as its primary concert hall. Built in 1904 by architects Gyula Papp and Sabolcs Ferenc on the same plans as their synagogue project in Vienna, the building combined the romantic, Byzantine, and Moorish styles in vogue throughout fin de siècle Central Europe. Carefully restored and maintained, the building is an exquisite jewel box dedicated to music.

The philharmonic and its constituent groups—including a symphony orchestra, wind orchestra, chamber orchestra, and folkloric ensemble—have continued to perform over the past several months, featuring European classical, Transcarpathian vernacular, and “pops” music. In addition, it has hosted productions by UZHIK, the Theater Company of Re-settlers, featuring displaced Ukrainian theater artists. UZHIK features young performers who have entered local colleges and universities to continue their studies. Andrey Kurkov, writing for the Kyiv Post, praised the group’s recent productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He found the portrayals of Vladimir, by Irpin schoolteacher Oleksiy Dashkovsky, and Estragon, by Kryvyi Rih refugee Sophia Almas, noteworthy.

The symphony continues its own recitals, promoting its younger members as well as visiting headliners. These range from People’s Artist of Ukraine Taras Petrynenko in a duet with People’s Artist of Ukraine Tetyana Horobets, to charismatic New Wave singer Shumei, to an evening of music composed by the early twentieth-century Russian colorist Alexander Scriabin. The Armed Forces of Ukraine have supported these events, underscoring the importance of the arts to the Ukrainian war effort.

RETURNING HOME 183 The Russian war machine has attacked Ukrainian cultural and educational institutions unrelentingly from the earliest days of its campaign to reclaim Ukraine as Russian. It has bombed and pillaged theaters, libraries, and museums; it has outlawed Ukrainian language conversation in areas it has occupied; it has strived to convince the world that there is no such thing as Ukrainian culture.

These efforts have only made the Ukrainian artistic community more resilient. Displaced theater artists from Irpin and Kryvyi Rih, to mention just two examples, find ways to perform in relatively safe havens such as Uzhhorod. Like the children’s game of “Whack-a-Mole”, every time the Russians bring their hammer down in one place, Ukrainian artists find ways to reassert themselves elsewhere.

Acknowledgments This project would have been impossible without the enthusiastic support of Mykhailo Minakov and Izabella Tabarovsky, the editors of the Woodrow Wilson Center Kennan Institute’s Focus Ukraine blog. Two master copy editors—Marjorie Pannell and Sabrina Detlef—improved my initial drafts through their rigorous enforcement of proper grammar, style, and logic. The support and efforts of the entire Kennan Institute staff have remained indispensable throughout. I wish to thank Director William Pomeranz, Joseph Dresen, Victoria Pardini, and others for making this series possible.

A special thanks is due Scott Buchholtz for preparing the Index.

More than most authors, I have been especially indebted to the many artists from across Ukraine, Europe, Asia, and the United States who have been willing to respond to my queries at this most challenging time. Whenever possible, Ukrainian artists have participated directly in the presentation of their own stories. I particularly wish to express my gratitude for cooperation, insights, and criticisms from Philip Arnoult, Volovymyr Boiko, Hanna Bondarewska, Barbara Bryan, Irena Chalupa, Donald Chung, Vladislav Davidzon, Taras Demko, Olga Diatel, Hobart Earle, John Freedman, Aakhu Freeman, Linda Hodsoll, Ulrike Janssen, Alona Karavai, Lesa Khomenko, Sydnee Lipset, Andriy May, Sonya Michel, Natalia Mouissenko, Dassia N. Posner, Yaroslav Pylynsky, Tatyana Rappaport, A. Lorraine Robinson, Ari Roth, Viktor Ruban, Walter Ruby, Amy Sze, and William Wong.

In the end, these articles are about the indominable spirit and inspiring creativity of the artists about whom I have written. These stories are completely their own. I am honored to do what I can to call attention to them. Together, they reflect the power and grandeur of the Ukrainian people who, when it mattered most, banded together to proclaim their dignity, courage, and reality.

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About the author Blair. A. Ruble, a Distinguished Scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, previously served as the center’s vice president for programs and the director of its Kennan Institute. Educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of Toronto, he is the author of seven book-length works. His 2016 book, The Muse of Urban Delirium: How the Performing Arts Paradoxically Transform Conflict-Ridden Cities into Centers of Cultural Innovation, is now available in Ukrainian translation. He received an honorary doctorate from the Ukrainian Modern Art Research Institute.

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Index 32 Jazz Club 102

Baltimore 23, 57, 178 Center for International Theater Development 23, 57, 178

Abramova, Yulia 123 Ackermann, Hans 110 Adler, Stella 50

CITD 178

Afanasiev, Dmitry 37, 39

Banská Bystrica 91

Agregate 38

Barenboim, Daniel 110

Akhmatova, Anna 75

BBC 174

Aladdin 132

Afternoon Concert 174

Albrechtsberger, Johann Georg 81

Beckett, Samuel 182

Aleichem, Shalom 51

Beethoven, Ludwig van 27, 81

Waiting for Godot 182

Alexander I 16

Beethoven, Ludwig von 27, 81

Almas, Sophia 182

Belorusets, Yevgenia 165

Anisimova, Sasha 85, 86, 87

Berezhansky, Taras 144

Antokhina, Olena 32

Bergonier, Auguste 78

Arie, Pavlo 177

Berlin 37, 38, 50, 62, 70, 72, 109, 110, 111, 112, 159, 174, 181

Arnoult, Philip 23, 57, 178, 185 Aronson, Boris 32

Kreuzberg 72 Pierre Boulez Saal 110

Art Deco 32

Berlin, Irving 37, 38, 50, 62, 70, 72, 109, 110, 111, 112, 159, 174, 181

Assortymetna Kimnata 103, 104 Assortment Room 103

Astasyeva, Yelena 23, 58

Berliner Musikfest 109, 110, 173

A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War 23, 58, 141, 177, 178

Berlusconi, Silvio 12 Birksted-Breen, Noah 23, 57

Atlanta 49

Birnbaum, Nathan 50

Babayev, Ruslan 37, 39

Blok, Natalya

Babbitt, Milton 111

Fur 140, 141

Babel, Isaac 15, 75, 76, 132

Blok, Natasha 24, 58, 140, 141, 177

Grandmothers 132, 148

Bach, Johann Sebastian 81

Our Children 24, 57, 58

Bal, Evhen 151

Boiko, Volodymyr 185

Ballenberger, Timon 169, 170

Bolero 125

Ballet 20, 89, 125, 126

Bolotnia 115

Ballets Russe 32

189

190 THE ARTS OF WAR Bondarenko, Andriy 25, 58, 134, 140, 177 Survivor Syndrome 140

Chensky, Vitaly 25 Robinson 25, 58, 185

Chepelyk, Oksana 165

Bondarenko, Moisey 25, 58, 134, 140, 177

Cherednichenko, Ivan 144

Bondarewska, Hannah 58, 185

Chernivtsi 49, 50, 51

Bondarkenko, Andriy Peace and Tranquility 25, 58

Borodin, Alexander 159 Prince Igor 159

Borovensky, Alex 77 Renaissance 77, 78 Renaissance 77

Chernihiv 65, 66 Chernivtsi Regional Philharmonic 49 Chernobyl 99, 115 Chief Rabbi of Ukraine 162 Chisinau 111, 174 Chişinău 31

Boulanger, Nadia 50

Choices 170

Bourgogne Theater 78 Bratislava 91

Chung, Donald 139, 140, 141, 142, 185

Brezhnev, Leonid 17

Clark, Kenneth 174

Brigyn, Mikita Oleksiiovych 76

Cleveland 110

Brown, Lew 75

Clug, Edward 20

Brukhovetsky, Vyzcheslav 72

Cologne 169, 170

Bryan, Barbara 185 Bucha 35, 62, 121 Buchholtz, Scott 185 Budapest 70, 156, 181 Buenos Aires 29, 33 Buiak, Petro 135, 136, 137 Bunin, Ivan 75, 76 Bykivina 166 Bytom 105

Theater der Keller 169, 170, 171

Cone, Edward 111 Conover, Willis 101 Voice of America Jazz Hour 101

Copland, Aaron 49, 50, 51 Appalachian Spring 49 Billy the Kid 49 Dean of American Composers 49 Rodeo 49 Symphony No. 3 49

Camillo, Giulio 152

Coviello, Will 53

Cardinal Richelieu 16

Cubo-Futurism 32

Caro, Ezechiel 62

DakhaBrakha 53, 54

Catherine the Great 16, 147

Dankevych, Kostiantyn 125, 126

Chalupa, Irena 185 Charuel, Flavian 156 Chekhov, Anton 59 The Cherry Orchard 59

Chemerov, Sasha 114

Bohdan Khmelnytsky 126 Lileya 125, 126 Nazar Stodolya 126

Dankevych, Kostiatyn Lileya

INDEX 191 Lily 125 Dashkovsky, Oleksiy 182

A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War

20 Short Works by Ukrainian

Davidzon, Vladislav 185

Playwrights 177

De Ribas y Boyons, José Pascual Domingo

Freeman, Aakhu 58, 185

Deribas, Osip Mikhailovich 16

French impressionism 91

Dead Souls 132

Gambit 53

Deeva, Iryna 162

Garentska, Nina 53

Demko, Taras 185

Gdansk 106

Denysyuk, Yaryna 69, 70

Klub Żak 106

Derzhypilsky, Rostislav 46

Gelman, Alexander 78

Detlef, Sabrina 185 Diatel, Olga 185

Benches 78

Genesis An Opera of Memory 151

Dnipro 20, 71, 105, 113, 148, 156, 162

Geneva 120

Donetsk 24, 37, 38, 103, 125, 165, 166

Gimmelfarb, Jozef 131, 132

Aleksandrovka 38 Stalino 38

Drapikovsky, Dmytro 163 Moroz-Morozenko 163

Dresen, Joseph 185

Gimmelfarb, Evgeniy 131, 132 Giselle 62, 63 Glazunov, Alexander 159 Global Battle of the Bands 37 Goethe Institute 169

Druce, Jockii 113, 114

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 169

Dublin 156

Gogol, Mykola

Dymshits, Eduard 117 Earle, Hobart 15, 109, 110, 111, 112, 173, 174, 185 Ekster, Oleksandra 32 European Parliament 89 Fabijanska, Monika 165 Women at War 165, 166

Fedorova, Olia 165, 167 Ferenc, Sabolcs 182

Dikanka 143 Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka 143 Gogol, Nikolai 143, 145 Taras Bulba 15, 109, 110, 143, 173

Golden Gates 28 Golenko, Maksym 97 Gonchar, Julia 25, 177 A Foretaste of War 25

Folk kitsch 116

Gorbachev, Mikhail 42

Francis I 152

Gordonstoun School 111

Franko, Ivan 104

Gorgolewski, Zygmunt 62

Freedman, John 23, 57, 98, 177, 178, 185

Goya, Francisco 100 Gritsenko, Oksana 23

192 THE ARTS OF WAR The Peed-Upon Armored Personnel Carrier 23

Grom, Alena 165

In Jazz 102 Inber, Vera 75

Grosu, Igor 111

Independence Square 27, 123, 161

Grunge 99

Ipatieva, Anna 32

Grytsenko, Oksana 177 Gulliver in the Land of the Lilliputs 132

Irpin 35, 121, 123, 126, 144, 160, 182, 183

Halanevuch, Marko 53

Isakowicz, Izaak Mykolaj 62

Hapieieva, Olena 177, 178

Istanbul 155

The Bowels of the Earth 178

Harets, Iryna 177, 178 Planting an Apple Tree 177

Hasler, Lukas 81, 82 Herashchenko, Ihor 97 Herod 42 Hess, Myra 174 Hodsoll, Linda 185 Hodsoll, Lisa 58, 185 Hollywood 33, 51, 58 Holovach, Olesya 46 Homer 119, 121 Hong Kong 23, 139, 140, 141, 142 Blank Space Studio HK 139

Irpin House of Culture 126

Ivankiv 115, 116 Ivano-Frankivsk 103, 135, 151 Franshyza group 135 Franyk 104 Stanisławów 104

Ivanova, Anastasia 105, 106 Ivashchyshyn, Markiyan 102 Izium 159, 160 Mount Kremyanec 159

Jabotinsky, Ze’ev 75 Janssen, Ulrike 169, 170, 185 Jazz 101, 102 Jazz on the Terrace 102 Jazz Vibes 102 Jentgens, Marianne 169

Horobets, Tetyana 182

Jinjer 38

Horska, Alla 165, 166

Johannesburg 114

House of Culture 94, 126

Joyce, James 119

Hryhoriv, Roman 151, 152, 153 Hryhoruk, Denys 97 Hughes, John 38 Huizinga, Johan 130 Homo Ludens 130

Hummel, Johan Nepomuk 81 Hutsul folklore 135 Ilf, Ilya 75, 76 Ilf, Ilya, and Petrov, Yevgeny The Twelfth Chair 76

Ulysses 119

Kadyrova, Zhanna 165 Kakhidze, Alevtina 165 Kaloyan, Armen 90 Kaminsky, Ilya 75 Kanovich, Dmitri 160 Looking at the Stars Foundation 160

Karajan, Herbert von 111 Karamanov, Alemdar 109, 110, 111, 174

INDEX 193 Symphony No. 7 174

Karamzin University 46

Khomenko, Lesa 103, 165, 166, 185

Karavai, Alona 103, 104, 185

Khvylovy, Mykola 77

Kataev, Valentin 75

King, Liz 105, 182

Kaunas 90

Kirik, Daryna 62

Kavelina, Dana 165

Kirovske 35

KGB 42, 166

Klaipeda 90

Khanenko, Bohdan 151, 152

Klebanov, Volodymyr 166

Kharkiv 9, 22, 42, 45, 46, 47, 59, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 94, 103, 119, 124, 133, 155, 156, 177

Klitina, Alexandra 100

Alena 156, 165 Derzhprom 156 Freedom Square 89, 156 Gorky Park 156 Khrystyna 156 Kostya 156 Olha 156, 178 Shevchenko City Garden 156 Svyato-Pokrovs’kyy Monastery 156 Viktor 21, 100, 102, 120, 133, 169, 185

Kölnische Rundschau 170

Kharkiv National Theater of Opera and Ballet 45 Kharkiv National Theater 45 Vyshyvaniy

The King of Ukraine 45, 47

Kolessa, Mykola 174 Symphony No. 1 174

Korban, Sasha 35, 36 Kosodiy, Anastasia 120 Kostiumynskyi, Dmytro 119, 120, 121 Crimea, 5 am 120 DollMen Theater Company 119 Hamlet. Babylon 120 Ukrainian Odyssey 119, 120, 121

Koval, Darya 105, 106 Kovalenko, Iryna 53 Kovtun, Valery 125, 126 Kozlov, Volodymyr 45, 47

Kharkiv National University of the Arts 45

Krakow 61, 98

Kharkiv Opera House 22

Kryvyi Rih 182, 183

Kharkiv Philharmonic 89

Kubar, Zinaida 100

Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater

Kurkov, Andrey 75, 182

East Opera 89, 90, 91, 92

Skhid Opera 89 East Opera 89

Kherson 24, 147, 148, 149, 169 Daria 144, 148 Kherson Art Museum 148 Vsevolod Meyerhold Center 169

Krymov, Dmitri 59

Kurochkin, Maksym 23, 57, 98, 140, 177, 178 Red Swallow 140

Kuźmińki, Maciej 105, 106 Every Minute Motherland 106

194 THE ARTS OF WAR Kyiv 9, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 46, 53, 55, 57, 65, 66, 71, 72, 76, 77, 90, 91, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 115, 117, 119, 123, 125, 126, 133, 141, 144, 151, 152, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 177, 178, 182

L’Ecole de Mouvement School of Movement 33

Lagushonkova, Kena 178 Lansky, Paul 111 Leningrad 37, 162 Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music, and Film 162

Independence Square 27, 123, 161 Khanenko Museum 151, 152

Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theater 77

Khanenko Art Museum 152

Hey You, Hi There! 78 Juliette and Romeo 78

Khreshchatyy Park 162 Kontraktova Square 71, 72 Kyiv Academic Puppet Theater 162 Kyiv Conservatory 90, 91, 126, 144, 160 Kyiv National University 53, 152 Kyiv University 90 Podil 28, 71, 72, 99 Podil 71 Taras Shevchenko Park 152 Theater of Playwrights 23, 57, 98, 178 Voloshyn Gallery 165

Kyiv Modern Ballet Theater 31 Carmen 31 KMBT 31, 33 Sleeping Beauty 31 The Little Prince 31 The Long Christmas Dinner 31 Women in D Minor 31

Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts 53 Kyiv Opera House 20, 21 Kyiv Post 100, 182 Kyiv Symphony Orchestra 27 Kyiv-Mohyla Academy 72, 103 Center for Contemporary Art 103 Kyiv Theological Academy 72

Kytsenko, Tetiana 178

Lesya Ukrainka Theater 77

Lipset, Sydnee 185 Litovchenko, Daria 144 Łódź 106 Materia 106

Logsdon, Kent 111 Logvyn, Varvara 123 Lohov, Anton 100 London 20, 23, 32, 33, 57, 97, 139 National Gallery 174

Lopatynsky, Roman 90 Los Angeles 33 Lucas Cranach the Elder 152 Luhansk 24, 165 Lutsk 93, 94, 95 Górka Polonka hill 95 Volyn State University 93, 95

Lviv 9, 41, 42, 43, 61, 62, 81, 82, 94, 98, 102, 105, 116, 119, 120, 143, 144, 145 Lemberg 61, 81, 82 Leopolis 82 Lviv Academic Dramatic Lesia Theater 120 Lwiwhorod 82 Lwów 82 Sheptytsky National Museum 116 Yevhena Malanyuka Square 82

INDEX 195 Львов 82 82 ‫לעמבערג‬

Lviv National Opera House 61 Lviv Organ Hall 81 Lyatoshynsky Trio 90 Lysenko, Mykola 15, 109, 173, 174 Elegy 109 Taras Bulba 15, 109, 110, 143, 173

Miller, William Green 20 Milstein, Nathan 17 Minakov, Mykhailo 185 Minkus, Ludwig 20 La Bayadère 20

Minsk 32 Miystetskyi Arsenal 32 Monk, Thelonius 101 Monte Carlo 33

Maazel, Lorin 111

Moorish revival 162

Maciupa, Olha 178

Moscow 15, 20, 25, 32, 37, 38, 57, 59, 91, 97, 98, 131, 139, 161

Makarenko, Herman 27 Makarova, Natalia 20 Maleev-Babel, Andrei 15 Manchester 38

Maxim Gorky Literature Institute 97 Moscow Art Theater 131 Moscow Conservatory 91

March 15, 19, 23, 31, 46, 66, 115, 159, 166, 169, 173, 177, 178

Moscow Patriarchate 161

Mariupol 121, 141

Mouissenko, Natalia 185

Mariyinsky Park 28

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 81, 82, 91, 174

Markovskiy, Yevhen 178 Markush, Kateryna 151, 169, 170 Martynyuk, Olena 99 Marx Brothers 51 Marynchuk, Fedir 115 Marynchuk, Vasyl 115 Matsiupa, Olga 140 Flowering 140

Matvienko, Denys 20, 21 May, Andriy 49, 53, 57, 58, 61, 90, 100, 169, 170, 171, 185 Mažintas, Darius 159, 160 Melitopol 165 Melnyk, Andrej 109 Mendelssohn, Felix 81 Miami 110, 165 Michel, Sonya 185

Clarinet Concerto 174

Adagio 174 Mozart, Franz Xaver Wolfgang 81, 82, 91, 174 Requiem 82, 91

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Constanze 81, 82, 91, 174 Mykolaiv 129, 133 Mykolaiv Academic Art Drama Theater 129

Russian Drama Theater 77 Nikolaev 129 Pavel 133 Rock Hata 133

Myloslavska, Anna 105, 106 Nachtkritik 170 Naenko, Serhyi 144 Naples 16

196 THE ARTS OF WAR National Ballet of Ukraine 20, 125, 126 National Union of Composers of Ukraine 144 Natocha, Ninel 97 Neformat 69 Neo-Baroque 62 Network of Northern German Art Houses 103 Netzwerk der Künstlerhäuser Norddeutschland 103

NKN 103 Neukomm, Sigismund von 81 New Orleans 17, 29, 53, 54, 101 New Orleans Jazz Fest 53

New Russian Drama 57, 59 New Wave 182 New York 20, 32, 50, 58, 59, 72, 102, 114, 124, 165 Brooklyn 15, 50 Fridman Gallery 165 Manhattan 50, 101

Lower East Side 50 SoHo 72, 124

Nezhdana, Neda 24, 26, 140, 141 Condensation 140 Pussycat for Memories about Darkness 24

Nihoyan, Serhiy 36 Nijinska, Bronislava 32, 33 Nijinsky, Vaslav 32 Nizhyn 143 NKVD 15 Noll, Stephanie 32 Obraztsov, Sergey 131 State Central Puppet Theater 131

Odesa 9, 15, 16, 17, 22, 32, 75, 76, 97, 109, 110, 111, 112, 119, 126, 129, 131, 132, 173, 174, 175 Derybasivska Street 76 Museum of Western and Eastern Art 131 Odesa Conservatory 126 Odesa Regional Puppet Theater 131 Odessa 15, 76 Philharmonic Hall 173 Zhukovskoho Street 76

Odesa Literature Museum 75 Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra 15, 109, 110, 111, 173 Odesa Regional Puppet Theater A Scientific Tale with Professor Kolobochkin 132

Odessa Literary and Artistic Society 76 Palace of Prince Gagarin 75

Odessa Stories 15 Odysseus 16 Oistrakh, David 17 Okhotnichenko, Iryna 97 Oles, Oleksandr 148 Kandyba, Oleksandr 148

Olzhych, Oleh 148 On Time 99 Opera 21, 22, 45, 61, 62, 63, 77, 89, 143, 145, 151 Opera Aperta 151 Opfinger, Heinz 169 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan 62 Pannell, Marjorie 185 Papp, Gyula 182 Parajanov, Sergei 109 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 109

Pardini, Victoria 185

INDEX 197 Paris 16, 32, 33, 50, 62, 72, 75, 76, 115, 152 Marais 72

Paris Review 75, 76 Penkova, Kateryna 178 Pennsylvania Avenue 58 People and Puppets Theater 41, 42, 43 I Liudy, I Lialky 42

Perepelytsia, Oleksandr 111 Perm 32 Perrault, Charles 163 Cinderella 163

Popelyushka 163

Potopalskyi, Georgyi 151 Prague 61, 181 Prince Vytautas 94 Princeton University 111 Prymanchenko, Maria Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine 116

Punk rock 69 Puppetry 41, 43 Pushkin, Alexander 75 Putin, Vladimir 11, 12, 22, 23, 24, 26, 54, 57, 59, 60, 65, 73, 98, 112, 136, 162, 169, 170, 171

Petrov, Yevgeny 75, 76

Putinprozess 169, 170, 171

Petrynenko, Taras 182

Pylynsky, Yaroslav 185

Philadelphia 59, 110

Rachmaninoff, Sergei 91

Wilma Theater 59

Ralko, Vlada 165

Photography 65

Rappaport, Tatyana 185

Picasso, Pablo 100, 115

Rastrelli, Bartolomeo 27

Pilyts, Ihor 177

Razumeiko, Illia 151, 152, 153

Pittsburgh 38

Red Army Choir 126

Pluzhnyk, Yevhen 77

Reverend Garfel 62

Poklitaru, Radu 31, 33

Revolution of Dignity 11, 36, 73

Polish Dance Network 105 Polish Dance Theater 105

Reznikovych, Mykhailo Yuriiovych 78

Pologenceva, Polina 140, 141

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 159

Save the Light 140

Pomeranz, William 185

Rio de Janeiro 114

Porytski, Pavlo 93

Robinson, A. Lorraine 25, 58, 185

Porytski, Ruslana 93

Romanesque 91, 162

Porytski, Ruslana and Pavlo

Romeo and Juliet 78

Dogory Drygom 94 Princely Banquet 94

Posner, Dassia N. 185 Potemkin, Prince Grigory 129, 147, 148 Potocki family 104

Roth, Ari 109, 185 Roth, Claudia 109, 185 German Minister of State for Culture 109

Royal Shakespeare Company 97

198 THE ARTS OF WAR Ruban, Viktor 120, 121, 169, 170, 185 Ruban Production ITP 120

Sich Riflemen 45 Sich Riflement Sichovi Striltsi 45

Ruble, Blair A. 10, 187

Siemiradzki, Henryk 62

Ruby, Walter 185

Sienkiewicz, Henryk 62

Russian Drama Theater 77

Sikalo, Yuriy 163

Russian Orthodox Church 59

Silvestrov, Valentyn 159, 160

Russian World 12, 13, 89, 114, 115 Rutgers University 99 Zimmerli Art Museum 99

Salieri, Antonio 81 Salzburg 61, 81 Samusenko, Oleksandr 97 San Francisco 124

Naïve Music 160

Sinoptik 37, 38 Interplanet Overdrive 37

Sirenko, Volodymyr 144 Skalietska, Yeva 155, 157 You Don’t Know What War Is

The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine 155

Sarasota 15

Skoryk, Myroslav 109, 144, 174

Savcjenko, Oksana 178

Slobodianiuk, Khrystyna 151

Savin, Aleksandr 37, 39

Slovene National Theater 21

Savkiv, Viktor 102

Snake Island 123

Scherbyna, Anna 165

Social media 145

Schöttl, Anna 144

Soloviy, Khristina 114

Schreiber, Wolfgang 110

Soltys, Adam 144

Schumann, Robert 91

Soviet rock ‚n‘ roll

Scriabin, Alexander 91, 182 Semenko, Mykhailo 77 Semyoushkina, Olya 46 Senin, Ivan 86

Akvarium 37 Zvuki Mu 37

Spies, Claudio 111 Sputnik Theatre 23, 57

Shadrin, Oleksiy 90

Srebrenica 165

Shakespeare, William 78, 105, 120, 182

Stalin, Joseph 15, 17, 91

King Lear 182

Shumei 182 Shvartsman, Alex 75

St. Petersburg 20 Stankovych, Yevhen 143, 144 The Terrible Revenge 143, 145

Strashna Pomsta 143

Shyshko, Kost 94

Stefanovich, Tamara 109, 110

Sibelius, Jean 109, 110, 174

Stefanyk, Vasyl 151

Second Symphony 109

Sibelius, Jean Symphony No. 2 109, 174

Strasberg, Lee 51 Strauss, Johann II 174

INDEX 199 Street art 36, 124

Trohimuk, Roman 144

Süddeutsche Zeitung 110

Troitskyi, Vladislav 53

Svaliava 144

Trump, Donald 12

Svistun, Artem 130

Tsvetinska, Marianna 144

Svitu, Karta 114

Tsybulska, Olena 53

Sydney 15

Tulovsky, Julia 99

Sydorenko, Viktor 100

Tuluzov, Igor 90

Symphony 49, 109, 174

Twain, Mark 16

Sze, Amy 139, 140, 141, 142, 185

Tychyna, Pavlo 77

Sze, Wing 139, 140, 141, 142, 185

Tymoshenko, Lyudmyla 178

Tabarovsky, Izabella 185

Ukrainian Academy of Arts’ Contemporary Art Research Institute 19

Tango 22 Tarnovsky Museum of Antiquities 66 Tchaikovsky, Petr Swan Lake 31, 126

Ufa 152

Ukrainian Academy of Sciences 152

Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilych 91

Ukrainian Armed Forces 49, 144

Tel Aviv 15

Ukrainian Baroque 66

Teliga, Olena 77

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church 161

Tereshchenko, Varvara 151 The Little Mermaid 132 The Simpsons 13 Theater Company of Re-settlers 182 UZHIK 182

Thomas, Michael Tilson 51 Thompson, Robert Farris 14, 22 Tango

The Art History of Love 22 TikTok 65, 73, 113 Tomashefsky, Boris Tomashefsky, Bessie 51 Toronto 15, 160, 187 Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic 182 Trento 61 Trocina, Robert 49

Ukrainian Ministry of Culture 21 Ukrainian Orthodox Church 161 Ukrainka, Lesya 77, 78, 79, 94 Forest Song 94 Kosach, Larysa Petrivna 77

USSR Ministry of Culture 182 Utyosov, Leonid 17 Uzhhorod 69, 70, 103, 181, 182, 183 Ungvár 69, 181

Vaisberg, Matvei 100 Vaskiv, Vitalia 105, 106 Vatican 89 Venice 116 Venice Biennale 116

200 THE ARTS OF WAR Vienna 29, 46, 61, 81, 90, 98, 111, 151, 181, 182 Ehrbar Saal 90 Singverein 111 University of Music and Performing Arts 111

Vilnius 90 Vogue 86 Vorozhbit, Natal`ya 24, 140 Vorozhbit, Natal`ya Bad Roads 24, 97, 140 Vorozhbyt, Natalka 97, 98, 120, 178 Bad Roads 24, 97, 140 Sasha, Take Out the Trash 97 School 33, 98 The Grain Store 97

Vovkun, Vasyl 61, 62 Vozdyzhenska Arts House Gallery of Contemporary Art 102 Warsaw 32 Washington Arts Club 58 Washington, DC 10, 58, 166, 187 Stanford in Washington Art Gallery 166 U Street 124

Wesleyan University 166 Wong, William 139, 140, 141, 142, 185 Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project 23, 57, 58, 98, 139, 140, 178 Yakshin, Yevhen 169, 170 Yanukovych, Viktor 21 Yekaterinburg 57, 131 Sverdlovsk 131

Yellow Ribbon 148 Yermolaeva, Kateryna 165 Young Communist League 38 Komsomol 38

Zahaykevych, Alla 46 Zakharov, Mykhailo 90 Zakhozhenko, Nina 141 Tooth 141

Zelensky, Volodymyr 12 Servant of the People 12

Zerov, Mykola 77 Zhadan and Dogs 114 Zhadan, Serhiy 46, 86, 114 Zhytomyr 90 Zigura, Tetiana 169, 170

Wehrmacht 41, 69

Zinkovsky, Hamlet 86, 87, 124

Weirich, Andreas 144

Zlobin, Andriy 32

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