BBC Radio Scotland, 1st Feb 2025 - listen here 55 mins in
Full text:
They do Christmas lights better than we do, in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, and the decorations were still up when I visited recently, brightening the winter-wartime gloom.
All through the park the dark branches of trees were glowing with giant fairy lights, blue and red, gently illuminating the paths below - and a big tinsel-tunnel for children to run through, all the way down the main street.
Of course this is nothing compared to pre-war Kharkiv, when there were still 1.4 million people crowding this huge city; when the famous tree in Freedom Square drew visitors from all over Ukraine - it was, somehow, 130 ft tall.

Now the little stand-in tree is underground, in a tube station, where people can enjoy it away from the threat of ballistic missile or drone strike.
So, too, are the children - the city authorities have built underground schools, as the war has dragged on.
So why have Christmas lights at all, you might ask.
Well - because the war is dragging on. Because there are still many, many people here who want to enjoy some semblance of normality.
And I was one of them, for a week or so. Back in Kharkiv, the city that, some six years ago, first really sparked my love for Ukraine.
I arrived just before the US changed presidents. At home everyone was talking about Trump, and I'd been asked over and over what his return would mean for Ukraine's fight.
'I don't know', I invariably answered. I don't think anybody knows, still.
But then I got to Kharkiv, and didn't bother with him for a whole week.
Instead, there was poetry, art, theatre; there were long, deep discussions about everything else under the sun.
I spent time learning more about the bewildering layers of architectural history round every corner in this historic city; from the oldest red-brick merchant houses, to glimpses of rare Ukrainian Moderne decoration, similar to Art Deco - to the discovery, in a courtyard, of a stunning Soviet-era mural, etched into layers of coloured plaster ('sgraffito', the technique is called).
I spent my time in reclaimed warehouses, down by the river Lopan, where the city's relentlessly creative inhabitants have made new social spaces, new recording studios. There we celebrated the launch of my friend Ivanna's extraordinary book of poetry - she's been writing all through the war, somehow finding time in between volunteering, fundraising for the army, and launching new podcasts - and in between the daily grind of air raid sirens and explosions and worry.
In her poems I recognised places we visited together, in the first year of the war. One described an evening by a reservoir in Donbas, looking across the water to the striped smokestacks of a power plant, watching skeins of geese fly overhead. Now those towering chimneys are gone, destroyed by the Russians and the whole place under their occupation. But the chimneys are there still, in Ivanna's book.
In another former warehouse, every seat in the new auditorium full, I watched a one-woman play, a piece of physical theatre. The performer's fluid movements were so perfectly in sync with the soundtrack you almost moved along with her. It was about the reality of life in Kharkiv now, the strange absurdity it can involve.
There was new art and sculpture at the literary museum that explored the same questions - imagining the battered city as a ship in a storm, the bomb shelters as the ship's hold, a place of dark safety from the world above.
And this literary museum doesn't just preserve manuscripts and stage exhibitions – it runs a residency where writers can stay, in the famous 'House of the Word' building, which in the 1920s housed the city's novelists and playwrights and poets, before the regime turned on them. Most were shot in the Russian gulag.
I was staying there, in what had been the flat of Petro Lisoviy, a writer and journalist murdered by Moscow's men in 1937. The building has enormous significance for many in Kharkiv, and more broadly in Ukraine, today - for those looking to the past to understand the present, to understand the patterns of Russian violence, Russian empire.
Outside, on Literatura Street many windows are boarded up and facades shattered from previous bombardments, but in Lisoviy's flat it was warm and cosy, and one night we invited people in for a book reading - my own, this time. They call it 'kvartyrnyk' - a flat party - from the Soviet-era dissident tradition of gathering behind closed doors.
Earnest young people, some clad in berets, packed in to sit on cushions on the floor, and we talked all evening - about the limbo of wartime life, the ways in which we've all changed (and haven't) - and about love and food and hope: all the important things.
But we did not talk about Trump.
ENDS
Notes
For more on the House of the Word and it's 'executed renaissance' generation of the 1920s, see my recent Prospect magazine long-read: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/europe/ukraine/68559/ukraine-kharkiv-derzhprom-defiance
Ivanna Skyba-Yakubova's poetry collection Замість Яблук is published by Stary Lev in Lviv https://starylev.com.ua/knyga-zamist-yabluk?srsltid=AfmBOoqCQzlSF7iV-JjeVE3KRk9XDoiaupnlnlJotYzJFVgLnwSh9K7j
Theatre performer was @nina.hyzhna, play by @florianska_l
More about the performance and Teatr Nafta: https://www.instagram.com/p/C6JkDyotUvG/
The exhibition by Kostiantyn Zorkin & others, in Kharkiv Literary Museum has been covered here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/05/there-is-a-sense-of-safety-here-the-artists-keeping-culture-alive-in-kharkiv-ukraine and https://mobile.x.com/ukraine_world/status/1795783330937360613



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