The city of Kharkiv, just 18 miles from the Russian border, is a paradoxical mix of tended-to and broken. Public sculptures are wrapped and coddled in sandbags to protect them from missiles. Flowerbeds in parks are punctiliously maintained. The life of the streets is several notches quieter than you would expect from a European country\u2019s second city \u2013 and yet, bookshops, coffee shops and restaurants are open and doing a steady business.<\/p>\n
But the signs of Russia\u2019s unrelenting attacks on this frontline city are omnipresent. On the roads are rows of rusted lines of the spiky metal tank obstacles known as \u201chedgehogs\u201d. The magnificent 1920s Derzhprom building, a constructivist masterpiece and the architectural pride of the city, is now badly battered<\/a>.<\/p>\n Across the city, windows, blown out from buildings by nightly explosions, have been replaced by sheets of chipboard. One panel in the city centre has been pasted over with a paper cutout of two enfolding arms and the words, \u201cI love you, beloved Kharkiv.\u201d<\/p>\n Two images side by side: left is Serhii Zhadan, a Ukrainian poet and writer; right is a view over Kharkiv, very dark clouds in the foreground, lighter sky in the distance<\/a>Serhii Zhadan, a Ukrainian poet and writer who is now serving in the Khartiia brigade. Right, the view over the city from Karazin Kharkiv National University<\/p>\n Cultural life clings on. But it has largely burrowed below ground: the basements of theatres are now their main stages<\/a>; bookshops\u2019 event venues<\/a> are subterranean. One Kharkiv visual artist, Kostiantyn Zorkin<\/a>, has created an apt metaphor for the atmosphere of this underground world. A series of his works imagines wartime Kharkiv as a ship alone in stormy seas, its inhabitants huddled, in relative safety, in the vessel\u2019s hold.<\/p>\n The city\u2019s population now consists of those who have moved here from places even more dangerous; and those who have stayed in their own city either because they must, or from a refusal to let Kharkiv\u2019s urban life die.<\/p>\n Such resolve to stay involves a having made a personal accommodation with the proximity of death. Air defences in Kharkiv are few, and Russia is near. By the time the air-raid alarm sounds, often the missiles are already falling.<\/p>\n Two images side by side: left, a man sitting with an open book on his knees, shot from the neck down; right, some windows of the Derzhprom building in Kharkiv city centre protected with chipboard.<\/a>Serhii Zhadan reads from Yuliia Paievska\u2019s debut book of poetry at the Meridian Kharkiv festival. Her call-sign is \u2018Taira\u2019 and she also serves in the Khartiia brigade. Right, boarded up windows in the Derzhprom building in Kharkiv city centre<\/p>\n Under these circumstances, something as intimate and emotionally charged as a poetry festival \u2013 such as the recent two-day event in a below-ground venue in the city centre \u2013 takes on a significance and intensity unimaginable in peacetime.<\/p>\n When Kharkiv\u2019s most celebrated poet, novelist and musician Serhii Zhadan performs his own poems, some rapt audience members mouth along, clearly knowing the verses by heart.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are more than a million people in Kharkiv,\u201d says Zhadan, now serving with the local Khartiia brigade, between readings. \u201cThey have cultural needs. The festival is important from a psychological point of view: they see that they are not alone, that they have not been abandoned, that there are many people around them who share their values, are on the same wavelength.\u201d<\/p>\n The festival, organised by publisher Meridian Czernowitz, is the first of its kind in Kharkiv, though the publishing house has conducted events in southern frontline cities such as Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson since 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople from frontline cities can go to a shelter and feel safe and listen to poetry \u2013 and while they are doing that, they are not sitting at home listening to drones or reading Facebook,\u201d says organiser Evgenia Lopata.<\/p>\n People are searching for Ukrainian identity \u2026 and people want Ukrainian literature to read<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Evgenia Lopata<\/p>\n \u201cBeing here means being part of a community that is supporting each other,\u201d she says. It is partly a case of people connecting to fellow Ukrainian speakers in a city that for years has been mainly Russophone, Lopata adds. Though many inhabitants, particularly in the city\u2019s creative community, have shifted to Ukrainian since Russia launched its invasion in 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are searching for Ukrainian identity, a lot of people took a big decision to change language to Ukrainian, and people want Ukrainian literature to read,\u201d says Lopata.<\/p>\n \u201cWe print all our books in Kharkiv,\u201d she adds, \u201cand we can produce our books only because the people employed at the printworks are still working. The least we can do is come here and do readings.\u201d The sizeable printing industry in Kharkiv is precarious, however: in May last year, several S300 bombs badly damaged the city\u2019s Factor Druk printworks<\/a> and killed seven people<\/a>.<\/p>\n The first poet to read at the Kharkiv poetry festival is Yuliia Paievska, a celebrated combat medic with the nom de guerre \u201cTaira\u201d.<\/p>\n Two images side by side: left, Yuliia Paievska seated on stage reads from her debut book of poetry at the Meridian Kharkiv festival; right, deserted streets in Kharkiv city centre<\/a>Yuliia Paievska, call-sign Taira, prepares to read from her debut book of poetry at the festival. Right, deserted streets in Kharkiv city centre<\/p>\n She was captured in March 2022 while treating a civilian in Mariupol, and held in captivity in Russia for several months. She endured appalling conditions and torture until her release in June 2022.<\/p>\n Paievska started writing poems in captivity, she says, by taking a tiny piece of plaster and scratching words into the cell wall \u2013 a forbidden act. \u201cIt pulled me out of the abyss,\u201d she says. Afterwards, she could not remember those fragments with any clarity, only the feelings that had created them. But after her release she began writing poems in earnest.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a way of remaining human, of preserving your mind,\u201d she says of those wall-scratchings after her reading. \u201cI wrote in order to remember who I was \u2026 Everything in the Russian penitentiary system is aimed at making you sure that you cannot control anything.\u201d All she could control, she says, were \u201cmy breathing and poem-making\u201d.<\/p>\n Two images side by side: left, Ukrainian poet and film-maker Iryna Tsilyk, wearing a dark blue dress; and the statue of Mykola Gogol in Kharkiv, wrapped up for protection.<\/a>Poet and film-maker Iryna Tsilyk, and, right, the monument to Mykola Gogol in Kharkiv, wrapped up to protect it from Russian missiles<\/p>\n It is life as a civilian that celebrated film-maker and poet Iryna Tsilyk describes as she takes to the stage, reading, among other poems, My Day<\/a>, an account of the way that contradictory experiences \u2013 sheltering from an air attack, making breakfast for a child, weeping in the shower, choosing wine in the supermarket \u2013 are uncomfortably compressed together in wartime Kyiv.<\/p>\n She speaks too of a mounting preoccupation in Ukraine: how those from different parts of society, coping with widely differing experiences of war and trauma, are divided by mutual incomprehension.<\/p>\n She tells the audience of her own experience, when her husband, novelist Artem Chekh, returned home from the frontline in 2016 (he is now serving in Kyiv, after a stint in the battle for Bakhmut in 2023).<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a date you\u2019ve been waiting for for six months, and a stranger arrives with sunken shoulders and a glassy stare, because he had spent 10 months in the trenches,\u201d she tells the audience.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have no idea how you can be together, how to talk, and how to rebuild a shared space of intimacy. I think that many couples are experiencing this and some, unfortunately, do not survive.\u201d<\/p>\n