Slovo: More than a word

by Ada Wordsworth

Upon first arriving in Kharkiv as part of a convoy delivering ambulances and aid early in the summer of 2022, I realized that I knew shamefully little about the city. I had met thousands of Kharkiviany over the months since the start of the full-scale invasion started while volunteering on the Polish-Ukrainian border, but their descriptions were marred by trauma; they would tell me of sleeping in the metro, or of finding so-called butterfly mines in the parks where they used to walk their dogs, or of shattered glass and sleepless nights. The city blended in with the tens of others I heard about daily. On that first trip to Kharkiv, I learned very little else about the place. Still surrounded on two sides by russian troops with several explosions audible per hour, the city remained a site of trauma. Driving through north Saltivka delivering food parcels to the few residents who’d remained, it was difficult to imagine it as anything other than a warzone, scrubbed of its former identity. A few days after that first trip, however, I met an old man sitting on a bench in Lviv who asked me if I could help him to work out something with his phone. We got to talking and he told me that he was from Kharkiv. I replied that I had just returned from there, and he asked how I had found it. My honest answer was that I had found it horrific; the suffering etched on the faces of every resident and in the battered, boarded up windows of every building had overwhelmed my perception so much that I had been unable to notice anything else. This answer was clearly unsatisfactory to him, and he proceeded to tell me of the city he knew; he spoke about its galleries and theatres, its architecture, and Slovo, the writer’s house where the greats of Ukrainian literature had once lived. A thousand kilometres away in Lviv, Kharkiv came alive for me.

When I returned to Kharkiv, I looked for Slovo. The house in which some of the greatest figures of Ukrainian culture once lived stays standing on a quiet, residential street in the center of the city, an unassuming testament to the Ukrainian ability to survive. Situated on the intersection of Vulitsa kul’tury (Culture Street) and Vulitsa Literaturna (Literature Street), this building today looks from the front identical to any other early-Soviet apartment block in the area with a few windows still boarded up after nearby shelling, a mismatch of balconies added years after the building’s completion jutting outwards, and a private dentist situated in the basement. Walk around the corner, however, and you will notice a large plaque, listing the writers, dramaturgs and other creatives who lived there: Khvylovyi, Kulish, Kurbas among tens of others. For the most part, the house is longer inhabited by writers, with the exception of one apartment kept by the LitMuseum for residencies, but it stands nonetheless.

Since the beginning of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv has become famous for the destruction leveled upon it. News article after news article has talked about how the “russian-speaking second largest city of Ukraine” has been pummelled by missiles. Yet by centering the “russian-speaking” nature of Kharkiv–itself an increasingly untrue description as more and more of the city’s residence switch to Ukrainian–newspapers are ignoring quite how rich Kharkiv’s Ukrainian language cultural history is. Slovo provides a microcosm of this history. After the capital of Ukraine was moved from Kyiv to Kharkiv in 1919, writers and artists flooded in from across the country. From Lviv, Odesa and Donetsk, they came and settled in Kharkiv. With the brief respite from the repressions that had plagued Ukrainian culture under Tsarist rule, universities were able to offer courses in Ukrainian literature, whilst publishing houses flourished and journals printing works in Ukrainian sprung up throughout the country – but in Kharkiv most of all. Once the authors arrived in Kharkiv, however, it became clear that the living conditions affordable to most writers were not conducive to creativity. So, they figured, if every other profession was housed together, why oughtn’t they be too? Stable, spacious housing would provide them the opportunity to produce better quality work. The authors funded most of the building process themselves, and only in the final stages approached Moscow for assistance. Stalin personally approved the funding. In the winter of 1929, they began to move to the house. Predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, the house also became home to a variety of Yiddish and russian speaking writers; it housed a cross-section of Kharkiv’s broad and diverse society. These writers were the core of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance.

It did not take long for Moscow to turn the pure intentions of the house’s residents against them. The phones installed in each apartment were tapped; the NKVD monitored all movements in and out of the building; some residents turned on others and began to actively work with the state. Over the years that followed, 44 of the 60 writers were either executed, exiled, or driven to suicide. Those who were killed came from across Ukraine and had vastly varying opinions on communism, but that some were from Lviv and Rivne and others Donetsk and Dnipro made no difference to their ultimate fate. Their Ukrainianness and their belief in Ukraine as its own entity, separate from russia, condemned them in the eyes of Moscow. As Oksana Zabuzhko, herself a one-time participant in the Slovo residency said, “if Sandarmokh [the massacre of Ukrainian intellectuals in Siberia, including many Slovo residents] were as deep-seated in the minds of Ukrainians as, for example, Katyn is in the minds of the Polish, nobody’s tongue would ever turn to make any separatist calls.”

In 2014, as russia annexed Crimea and began the war in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, they also attempted to stage a rebellion in Kharkiv. The city, just 30 kilometres from the russian border, was believed by russia to be an intrinsic part of their russkyi mir (russian world). “Protestors” were bussed in from the neighboring russian city of Belgorod, occupied the state administration building, and at one point broke into the city’s cultural center and set fire to the Ukrainian-language books stored there. The attempts to create a Kharkiv People’s Republic under the control of Moscow failed, but years later, in 2022, Kharkiv once again was a focal point of Moscow’s plans for the subjugation of Ukraine. Tanks crossed the border into Kharkiv Oblast at multiple points, only to be met by fierce resistance by soldiers and civilians alike, and ultimately Russia failed to take the city for even a day. Both in 2014 and in 2022, Moscow fatally misunderstood Kharkiv. It forgot that it was in this city that Khvylovyi, the great Ukrainian modernist and Slovo resident, coined the phrase “get away from Moscow”; that Kharkiv, long before it was the “russian-speaking second city of Ukraine,” was the site of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance. Moscow forgot that, even after the murder and exile of tens of Ukrainian cultural figures, Slovo continued to stand.

slovo, april 2023

One of the repaired entryways to Slovo after it was hit by Russian shelling earlier during the full-scale invasion

In the months prior to her death, the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina would regularly stay in Slovo as part of the LitMuseum residency. At the time she was researching war crimes in the Kharkiv region, including the murder of the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko outside Izium. It made perfect sense, she told her friends: she was a writer and it was a house built for writers. It was only right that she should live there, and that, even as Kharkiv was subjected to numerous bombardments per day by the Russian troops on its doorstep, a writer should be writing in Slovo. It is a bleak sign of the ways in which history is repeating itself. Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile attack in July 2023. It would not be hard to become superstitious about the house; it would be unsurprising if the general sentiment were that it ought to be torn down, a graveyard of Ukraine’s best writers situated in central Kharkiv. Indeed, the house was once nicknamed “the crematorium.” That this is not the general feeling toward the house is testament to the defiance of Ukrainian culture. The house, Maryna Kutsenko, a local expert and employee of the LitMuseum, tells me as we walked briskly through the crisp Kharkiv autumn weather to the building, stopping briefly to pay our respects at Khvylovyi’s grave situated in a park ten minutes away, should be a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, not of Ukrainian suffering. As we looked up at the plaque listing the names of the writers who had lived here, an air raid siren sounded around us. The sound intermingled with children’s voices in the playground in Slovo’s yard. Many of the writers whose names are on the plaque outside Slovo have been lost to time. Their works are unknown even to the most learned of Ukrainian scholars. Inevitably, some may have been forgotten regardless of russia’s deliberate attempts to quash their memories, but one can’t help but wonder the scale of this loss. Much remains, though: maybe one day soon Ostap Vyshnia will take his place among the great satirists; Maik Yohansen will be remembered as one of the twentieth century’s best experimentalists; Valerian Pidmohylnyi will be known to all lovers of the urban novel.

Ukrainian literature continues to persevere, and Ukrainian writers continue to spend weeks in Slovo, writing about Ukraine in Ukrainian, in defiance of the repressions imposed upon their forefathers ninety years ago, and of the missiles that may fall today. Children still play in the yard outside Slovo, and perhaps those children will take up the mantel of the former residents of their apartments. After the liberation of the majority of Kharkiv Oblast last September, posters were put up around the city: Kharkiv zhyve! they proclaim: Kharkiv lives!. Slovo serves as a reminder that Kharkiv’s life has been threatened before, but that it has always prevailed.

Ada Wordsworth is a master’s student in Slavonic studies at the University of Oxford. She is also the co-founder of KHARPP, a grassroots project repairing homes in Eastern Ukraine.