Kyiv: Death and Other Borders

It takes a long time to get to Kyiv these days. From across the Atlantic, at least one night in the air, another on a train. And once there, daily life is strenuous. The air raid alarm goes off unpredictably, and lasts for unpredictable lengths of time—perhaps several minutes, perhaps several hours. As of August 14 there had been 1,773 air raid alarms in the capital since the beginning of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. Given the frequency, my Ukrainian friends don’t run to the bomb shelter at every alarm—it’s too disruptive. One has to live. Locals tend to go to the shelter only on select occasions, in response to specific intelligence posted on Telegram channels. That said, no one ever forgets about the war. Everyone lives in a state of perpetual readiness and has made adjustments accordingly: women have abandoned stilettos in favor of running shoes, even with skirts.

This was my fourth visit to Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion. I was there this time for the annual Kyiv Book Arsenal, a large literary festival that I guest-curated this year. I’d known and admired my co-curator—the writer, translator, and editor Oksana Forostyna—since the Maidan, the 2013–2014 Ukrainian revolution on Kyiv’s central square. For a year Oksana and I worked with the Arsenal organizers to develop a program around our chosen theme, “Everything Is Translation.” When I arrived, I was momentarily wonderstruck to see fragments of our curatorial text on huge murals decorating the walls of the Arsenal, once a military factory, since repurposed into an art space.

Тhis was the thirteenth iteration of the festival. In the past pets were not allowed: there are breakable art exhibits and carefully arranged book stands and a play space for small children who could be knocked over by animals. But the war made the organizers reconsider. Ukrainians have responded to the Russians’ dehumanization of people with the humanization of animals, which have been used extensively in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Soldiers and veterans adopt cats or dogs, some of them having been abandoned when their owners fled or were killed. A landmine-sniffing Jack Russell Terrier named Patron has become a national emotional support animal, visiting wounded children in hospitals and starring in an educational cartoon series. This year, then, the rule was changed: pets were permitted, but they had to be carried. And so along with the occasional cat, the Arsenal was filled with dogs—some quite large—being carried like babies, their owners’ arms wrapped around them.

Everyone was exhausted; the city was being bombed night after night, which made it hard to sleep. Late May saw some of the heaviest drone and missile attacks on the capital since the beginning of the war. And yet thousands of people waited in long lines to pass through the security checks to attend a literary festival—some 30,000 visitors over four days. Over a hundred Ukrainian publishing houses had set up book stands. In half a dozen or so performance spaces writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, and critics held debates, readings, and performances. Among the events Oksana and I organized were discussions about translation in wartime; about the poetry of suffering and the poetics of empathy; about the secrets divulged by untranslatable expressions; about bridge-building across oceans and borders—between Ukrainians and African Americans, between Ukraine and the global South.

At times the discussions were interrupted by air raid sirens: then the book stands closed, speakers left the stage, and we descended underground. During one such spell in the bomb shelter, a Ukrainian student of mine from Yale named Nataliia, who had just arrived by train from Odessa, wanted to know whether this was a good time to discuss her comments on my book manuscript on phenomenology. It was. We took a photo underground and I sent it to two of my historian colleagues who had taught Nataliia at Central European University’s Invisible University for Ukraine. “Inter arma NON silent Musae!,” one replied—in times of war the Muses do not stay silent.

We titled one event on the festival’s second day “Muttersprache/Mördersprache,” inspired by the incandescent poetry of the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, who wrote in German, the language that was both mother tongue and murderer’s tongue to him. Chernivtsi, now in Ukraine, was Celan’s hometown. His mother was shot to death in a camp in Transnistria. What Celan did with the German language after that no one had ever done before. The Odesa-born American poet Ilya Kaminsky, who was with us at the Arsenal, described Celan as having “broken” and “reclaimed” German, wrecked the language to wake it up. The Ukrainian translator Jurko Prochasko described Celan’s poetry as revealing German as a language capable not only of murder but also of suicide, a language with the potential to destroy itself.

In the first days after the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina slept on the floor of the closet in her Lviv apartment. It was best, if a bomb struck her building, to have walls between herself and the windows. She brought a volume of Celan’s poetry into the closet, and there on the floor whispered his poem Todesfuge—“Death Fugue”—to herself.

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken. . .

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink

The following summer, in 2023, Victoria was killed by a Russian Iskander missile fired at a pizzeria in Kramatorsk. The pizzeria was a gathering place for both locals and those who ventured east—and it was known that writers and journalists were there. She was, at the time, traveling to the Donbas with Colombian writers she’d recently met in Kyiv; her Latin American colleagues wanted to see the horrors of the war more closely. They did—they were there with her.

“Muttersprache/Mördersprache” was among the festival’s most delicate onstage conversations. Ukraine has always been a multilingual country—voluble with Polish, Yiddish, Crimean Tatar, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek—and in recent decades a country deeply bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian. Before the war, Russian-language literature had flourished in Ukraine. Some of the greatest contemporary Russophone writers are Ukrainian. Now many of them are renouncing Russian. What does it mean for writers to give up their native language? To translate themselves? Is it amputation—or liberation? Or some ineffable combination of both? And what, conversely, does it mean to refuse to give up the Mördersprache to the Mörder?

The attempt to extricate the Russian language from the book festival—in a city where Russian is native to most inhabitants—feels sui generis. I had studied the Czech National Revival of the nineteenth century, with its determined shift from German to Czech, and the Polish resistance to linguistic Russification that followed the 1863 January Uprising in the tsarist empire. I had studied early Zionist attitudes toward Yiddish and the attempt to build a Jewish state with a language symbolically freed from the humiliations of the diaspora. Yet before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I had never before experienced such a large-scale collective relinquishing of a native language, the mass excising of a part of oneself. Amid thousands of books at the festival, I saw not a single one in Russian.

One of our speakers was the Yiddish poet and linguist Dov-Ber Kerler, who grew up bilingual in Moscow, the son of a Yiddish poet imprisoned in the gulag. In the early 1970s Dov-Ber’s family emigrated to Jerusalem; later he studied at Oxford; for the past quarter-century he has been a professor in Bloomington, Indiana. Fluent in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, he could follow Ukrainian but not speak it. The Russian language that was as deeply his own as the Yiddish of his poetry now had broken his heart. Before his panel on Yiddish as a Ukrainian language, he offered to speak in any language his Ukrainian colleagues preferred. They chose English, sensing that the audience preferred to listen via earphones to simultaneous translation from English to Ukrainian, rather than listen nakedly to a language they no longer wished to be their own.

Russian has become the Mördersprache, as German had once been for Jews. The forceful separation from the Russian language is a desire for hard borders, borders that would signify a nonporous distinction between good and evil, life and death.

In this violence-soaked twenty-first century, death is the hardest border. Twentieth-century thought had involved much talk of more porous deaths. “These modern ‘deaths’—of God, metaphysics, philosophy and, by implication, positivism,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “have become events of considerable historical consequence.” The Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has revolted against these allusive “deaths” in quotation marks. “Death is not a metaphor,” he has insisted:

Death is not just a word. It was kind of sick to see how the word “death” became popular in the twentieth century. We talked about the death of culture, the death of modernity, the death of idealism, the death of metaphysics, and in all this we kind of played with the word death. I think death became less scary for us. It became something very far away with which we can play. But for Ukrainians right now, death is not an abstract word: it’s a physical death, it’s a real death, it’s a void that you feel when your close people die, when your husbands die, when your kids die, when your parents die, when your friends die.

I was thinking of this when one night during the Arsenal two friends, both of whom had served in the army, took me to dinner with the filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko. In 2014 Alisa, then twenty-six years old, had been documenting the early days of the war in the Donbas when she was taken captive by Russian-backed separatists. What she survived during those four days made her promise herself that if the war were to come to all of Ukraine, she would pick up a gun and fight. In 2022 she parted from her French husband and their four-year son, Theo, and joined a Ukrainian battalion. On the front lines she started filming a video diary for Theo, wanting to show him the landscape “of beauty and death”—and to leave a record for him if she were not to return. “Our lives are hard to hold onto,” she tells him. Many of her brothers-in-arms who appear in My Dear Theo (2025) did not live to see the documentary’s completion.

Alisa dreads having to tell her son one day what happened to her in captivity. In the film she admits only that what she fears most is being taken captive again. Alisa and I and our two mutual friends—one of whom, H., had served with Alisa in her unit—were at a restaurant not far from the Arsenal, eating fish from the Black Sea; her husband and Theo joined us there. I had just met President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was visiting the Book Arsenal, and I told Alisa that I had restrained myself from apologizing for the shameful way he was treated in my own country, when Donald Trump and J.D. Vance made a repulsive attempt at inflicting ritual humiliation. “You must say thank you” is what the secret police told the victims of the Stalinist purges during their interrogations. It is what the abusive husband says to his wife after he beats her. When I mentioned this to Alisa, she told me that when she was released in 2014, her Russian captor also demanded that she thank him.

It is a matter of good luck that Alisa and H. are still alive. The same is true of Stanislav Aseyev, another speaker at the Arsenal and one of the great writers of his generation, who was among a handful of soldiers in his unit who survived last summer’s battles on the front. Overall tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. More than twice as many Russian soldiers have been killed, in the hundreds of thousands, but the Russian commanders care much less. Among H.’s tasks had been monitoring Russian army radio communications, and over dinner at the restaurant he described the conversations he had heard:

Dmitry, you go.
I’m not Dmitry. Dmitry’s dead.
So Andrei—
Andrei’s dead, too.
So who’s this?
Ivan.
Okay, Ivan, so you go.

“The philosophical question,” H. wrote me later, is “why does Ivan end up going (and dying) each time?” That question is connected to another one: Will there be a revolution in Russia? What would it take?

This, it seems to me, is what separates Ukrainians and Russians today, more than language and certainly more than ethnicity: the experience of revolution. Recently the Italian Arendtian philosopher Olivia Guaraldo translated my book The Ukrainian Night (2018), about the revolution on the Maidan, the beginnings of the war in the Donbas, and the ways these experiences changed the people who lived them. In her preface to the Italian edition, Olivia suggests that the European failure to appreciate the Maidan was connected to the West’s having forgotten what revolution means. For Arendt it meant natality, the human capacity to give birth to something new. “The new,” Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958), “always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”

On Sunday evening the festival came to an end. On Monday I spent the hours before our train’s departure with Amelia Glaser from San Diego, a professor of literature and translator of poetry from Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Russian. We visited the publishing house Dukh i litera (Spirit and Letter). Did I still have the typewriter I wrote on when I was young—before computers? the editor Leonid Finberg asked me. Was there any chance I could find it? He kept a collection at the office—typewriters that had once belonged to writers the house published.

Leonid and the philosopher Constantin Sigov dug around in pile after pile of books, pulling out one after another to give to us—in Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, Polish. Amelia and I were running out of time, and space in our luggage. In the meantime Leonid’s wife, the physician Elena Finberg, offered us chocolate. It was difficult to leave—Leonid kept thinking of another book we surely needed. And each book came with a story about its author and how it had come into being. Constantin wanted me to read the work of the theologian Ihor Kozlovskyi from Donetsk, who survived two years of captivity. Released in a prisoner exchange at the end of 2017, he died suddenly of a heart attack in 2023, at the age of sixty-nine. He had been Stanislav Aseyev’s professor. Today Stanislav is one of the writers who has given up Russian, a language in which he is a master stylist. His memoir about his own 962 days in captivity is extraordinary. Both Ihor and Stanislav were subjected to ghastly torture by Russian-backed separatists.

For Ukrainians, evil—like death—is not a metaphor. On the last day of the Book Arsenal, Volodymyr Yermolenko and I held a discussion about Hannah Arendt and the problem of evil. In Jerusalem in 1961, watching the trial of the organizer of the Final Solution, the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, Arendt had been shaken by the juxtaposition between the ordinariness of Eichmann the person and the atrociousness of his deeds. It had struck her that the evil he carried out had its source in his failure to think. This in no way exonerated him or made him better than other kinds of murderers—on the contrary, if anything, for Arendt, it made him still worse. She contemplated the connection between evildoing and thoughtlessness. Thinking as such, she became convinced, was a moral imperative.

Now Volodymyr and I discussed this imperative. Arendt’s idea of “the banality of evil” felt essential to understanding the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers like “Ivan” thoughtlessly following orders, bombing Ukrainian cities and burying children under rubble. But what about their commanders ordering the bombing? The dictator in the Kremlin whose evil felt much less banal? The gratuitous, sadistic cruelty carried out by those who held Alisa Kovalenko and Stanislav Aseyev and Ihor Kozlovskyi captive, who attached wires to their prisoners’ limbs and ears and genitals and electrocuted them?

It was early afternoon. The air raid alarm had just been lifted after some ten hours; the Arsenal had reopened; and the space around the stage was packed with listeners, for whom the problem of evil was not at all abstract. In Ukraine today all ideas are sharply embodied. They pierce and startle.

Among our audience was a war veteran in a wheelchair. Even indoors he wore sunglasses, with orange lenses that matched the fur of the tortoiseshell cat whose head rested on his knee. At one point my conversation with Volodymyr was interrupted by an announcement that the cat had run away. The former soldier became agitated and had to be calmed. The cat was found under a stage—and Volodymyr and I continued our conversation about evil.

The seduction of Kyiv is this intensity of life, intellectual and otherwise—a luminousness born of desperation. It is a point Volodymyr has been making since this war began. “There is something happening in Ukraine right now which we should pay attention to,” he said in an interview last autumn. “This experience of facing a war, facing the fragility of life, and facing death, which is very painful, but at the same time might be the origin of thinking.”