Tetyana Oharkova (46) and Volodymyr Yermolenko (45) are the husband-and-wife team who run the writer’s group Pen Ukraine. They produce political and cultural podcasts in three languages, organise poetry evenings for civilians and soldiers in frontline areas and deliver vehicles, books and supplies to the war zone. Their new book, Life on the Edge: Ukraine, Culture and War, will be published in Kyiv this autumn and in Paris next February.
I meet the couple at Pen’s headquarters on a hillside in Podil, the oldest neighbourhood in Kyiv, a kilometre from the prestigious Kyiv-Mohyla Academy where both teach. We talk inside a glassed-in, book-lined room while a half dozen young people work away in the large, sunny, outer office filled with computer workstations, cardboard boxes and piles of books.
We begin with a discussion about the meaning of the words “recognition” and “root causes”. Unlike Donald Trump, the Europeans will never recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Yermolenko says, “because the Europeans think of themselves – and rightly so – as the guardians of international law.”
When Vladimir Putin demands to address the “root causes” of the war, Oharkova says, “he means that Ukraine has no right to exist independently of Russia”.
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“Ukraine is a diverse, individualistic country prone to heated debates,” says Yermolenko. “Putin thinks he can destroy us by provoking disunity.”
The Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1918-20 failed and was subsumed into the Soviet Union because of internal division.
The disparity between the frontline regions of the south and east and the rest of the country divides people, Yermolenko continues. “Some Ukrainians live almost normally, while others suffer terribly, and that can cause lasting bitterness.”
Oharkova and Yermolenko met 25 years ago at Kyiv-Mohyla, where he studied philosophy and she majored in literature. They married a decade later, when the first of their three daughters was born. They studied abroad, in Budapest and Paris. “We were people who spent our time with books,” says Yermolenko. Outside Ukraine during the 2004 Orange Revolution, they demonstrated with the diaspora.
The 2013/4 Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” marked the beginning of their profound commitment to Ukraine’s independence. A moderator at an event in Paris recently introduced them as “the Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir of Ukraine”. Oharkova, who teaches French literature, wants no comparison with Sartre and de Beauvoir’s accommodations with the Nazi occupation. “Fortunately, the moderator added that we were like Sartre and de Beauvoir ‘if they had resisted’.”
The Ukrainian tradition of politically committed “intellectuels engagés” is part of a European tradition, says Yermolenko. It was embodied by Taras Shevchenko, the 19th century writer and Ukraine’s national poet, and was perpetuated by subsequent generations. “There are no Ukrainian writers who believe in art for art’s sake, as Flaubert did,” he says. “All Ukrainian writers resisted, because all lived under an empire that wanted to extinguish their language. For Ukrainian writers, political engagement is not an exception; it’s the rule.”
Yermolenko and Oharkova have ceased contacts with friends among the Russian intelligentsia. “Their response to the full-scale invasion has been to disengage,” he explains. “They place themselves above events and describe them in a detached way. We describe events too, but we are involved.”
Stalin almost snuffed out Ukrainian culture, language and literature through persecution of the “Executed Renaissance” in the 1930s. The Soviets cracked down on the Ukrainian underground and Sixtiers movement in the 1960s and 70s. Alla Horska, a talented artist, was murdered, probably by the KGB. The poet Vasyl Stus died in a Soviet labour camp.
“In Ukraine, it is impossible to be an intellectual without being politically committed,” says Oharkova. “Whereas in Russia, intellectuals are crushed. Ukrainians are active pessimists; Russians passive pessimists. In 1850, Turgenev wrote a novella called The Diary of a Superfluous Man. The ‘superfluous man’ – often an aristocrat who is well-educated and filled with idealism – is incapable of action. He is the archetype of 19th and 20th century Russian literature.”
The writer, human rights researcher and Pen member Victoria Amelina found and published the occupation diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a fellow writer who was murdered by the Russians. “I’m inside a new Executed Renaissance. As in the 1930s, Ukrainian artists are killed, their manuscripts disappear, and their memory is erased,” she wrote. Amelina died in a missile strike on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk in June 2023.
[ Uncovering the buried diary of an executed Ukrainian writerOpens in new window ]
More than 200 cultural figures have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion, according to the ministry of culture. Oharkova and Yermolenko participated in a colloquium with the soldier-poet Serhiy Zhadan and his Kharkiv circle, to debate whether the “Executed Renaissance” is being repeated.
“We decided it is not,” says Yermolenko. “They were victims who tried to resist, but resistance is futile in a totalitarian state. Our conditions are different. We have a state and an army, and we are resisting.”
