July 24, 2024 –
Anna Kolomititseva
Marcel Krueger
–
Articles and Commentary
The Derzhprom (or Gosprom) building, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Photo: Ekaterina Polischuk / wikipedia.org
In the 1929 Soviet silent movie “Fragment of an Empire” [Обломок империи], the main protagonist, a former soldier who lost his memory during the Russian Civil War, returns to his hometown of St. Petersburg after ten years. Stepping from the train with a full beard and in a tattered old military coat, he finds his hometown changed: a large statue of Lenin greets him as he leaves the train station; the tram he rides is full of beautiful women in dresses baring their calves; clean-shaven workers laugh and enjoy themselves on their way to their shift. When he spots the Narva Arch with its six horse statues, his face lights up and he leaves the tram. He lovingly gazes up at the arch, but when he turns around his heart sinks: he is faced with a seemingly randomly constructed building ensemble rising into the sky, like a series of sea cliffs hewn into random shapes by the sea, the harsh edges of its towers and corners linked by concrete bridges high over the traffic on the square below. This scenery does not exist in reality: opposite the Narva Arch is a long avenue and not much else.
The tall constructivist building, the first Soviet skyscraper and the tallest building in Europe for a while, was instead constructed in Kharkiv. Setting it in St. Petersburg in the movie, however, is exemplary of the ideological cultural and historical narrative of the USSR, and indeed also today’s Russia: using Ukraine and its identity as needed without caring about reality. Derzhprom [Держпром], as the building is called, was constructed in the year the movie was made, 1928, as one of the showcase projects of the new capital of the Ukrainian SSR, designed by the architects Sergei Serafimov, Samuel Kravets and Mark Felger. Despite its apparent randomness it is a symmetrical building but this symmetry can only be seen directly from the centre of the square in front. Derzhprom, in its radical modernity rising to the sky, is representative of a time when Ukrainian identity and culture was flourishing in the then-capital of Soviet Ukraine – a legacy that lasts until today.
An intense longing
There is a German word Sehnsuchtsort, which literally means a place of longing. That longing can come from secondary memory or upbringing, as well as stories of places where grandparents and parents had a blessed childhood or defining experiences. The term can also mean a place that one has visited before and which for one contains all the ideals of this world. Thirdly, it can also mean a place one dreams of visiting for the fine things one might find there.
One of my Sehnsuchtsorte for a good while has been Kharkiv, and sadly I have not made it there yet. Part of this fascination is surely my interest in border cities, with their sharp edges, changing loyalties and fickle identities. After all, I live in one myself, in Dundalk in Ireland. Kharkiv is a frontier town in many regards: it was founded as a border fortress between the steppe and the Crimean Khanate. The settlement sits at the banks of the Kharkiv, Lopan and Udy rivers that flow into the Siverskyi Donets watershed. From 1919 to 1934 it was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and is the second city of Ukraine today. Thirty kilometres from the Russian border, it has also been a Hero City of Ukraine since February 2022, resisting constant Russian air attacks. Then there is the distance: I love taking the train. I have long cherished the thought of taking one of the famed Ukrainian night trains to Kharkiv, from Lviv perhaps or Ivano-Frankivsk.
The new reality and I had a deal. Okay, I said, I agree to tolerate my forced displacement if I am allowed to pay a visit to Kharkiv at least twice a year. The first time in May, when the lilac trees bloom and there is a strong scent of life and joy in the air, when I can sit on my balcony, sip a glass of wine, and listen to the screams of the jackdaws. I would watch the sun go down and imagine the planes flying towards Kharkiv Osnova airport. I used to know the flights by heart: this one is from Kyiv Boryspil and that one from Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen. The second time I would step off the train in Kharkiv would be in autumn, when the air smells like wet soil, burnt leaves and thick fog. This was the deal. So this May, I had a ticket too, but then…
Then the people of the world learned the names of two towns in the Kharkiv region: Vovchansk and Lyptsy. Not too many had heard of them before the Russians’ advance this spring. Knowing there are only 20 kilometres from there to Kharkiv, and knowing what the Russian artillery can sound like, I cancelled the journey of two full days and multiple stops. In daytime, I kept blaming myself for being the coward I was. At night, I blessed destiny and the German government for the luxury of falling asleep, sure to wake up the next morning.
A good city for me needs a handful of clanking trams drizzled across it, and I am happy that Kharkiv has had trams on its streets since 1906. The first 12 carriages that used its rails were built at Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG in Germany. The trams of Kharkiv today have seen better days. They are so old they sometimes veer off the rails, so the inhabitants jokingly call Kharkiv the city of drifting trams. And like any good city there are urban planning decisions made in Kharkiv that are highly contested, even in wartime. In 2022, Mayor Ihor Terekhov decided that Line 26 was no longer needed and established Line 12 again in 2023, all to some harsh criticism from parts of the public. Yet despite the attempt of Russia to disrupt and destroy life in Ukraine for over two years now, the Kharkiv trams are still running.
I always make sense of the world through topography and literature, so the first places I always hit in a new city are the streets. I have already lined out my first excursion: from Kharkiv-Pasazhyrsʹkyy station I would take tram number 12 to Trinklera Street, from where I would walk down to Svobody (Freedom) Square to look at Derzhprom (of course) and from there walk through Shevchenko City Garden down towards the famous Mirror Stream Fountain. Following that, it would be time for books: I would love to visit the nearby “Ye” bookstore on Sumska Street, or the shop of the Vivat publishing house on Kvitky-Osnov’yanenka Street. Of course, there is also the Literature Museum on Bahaliia Street, where the staff keep the museum safe and running throughout constant Russian attacks. Kharkiv is truly a city of books – and it even has houses built like letters.
History near and far
After the First World War, the October Revolution and the lost War of Independence, Kharkiv emerged as the cultural centre of a renaissance of Ukrainian artistic identity. Free from the repressions against Ukrainian culture under Tsarist rule and supported by a new policy from Moscow giving cultural freedoms to individual Soviet republics, the arts and especially literature in Ukrainian flourished. Kharkiv was at the centre of this movement, where iconoclastic writers and poets drafted slogans like “Death to Dostoyevskyism! Up with the Cultural Renaissance!” and “Away from Moscow! Go to Europe!” Due to a housing crisis in Kharkiv, writers’ collectives approached Moscow for permission to build a literary and cultural centre where writers could live and work. The outcome of this was that on today’s Kul’tury Street a house was built to house both minds and words. In 1929 the building was ready: five entrances, five floors, 66 apartments and even a kindergarten on the ground floor. From above, the house looked like the letter “C”, referring to the beginning of the word “Slovo” [Слово] in Ukrainian, which itself means “word”. And like Derzhprom, Slovo House still stands proudly today.
Artistic freedom in Kharkiv however did not last for long, at first. The phones in each apartment were tapped by the NKVD who also kept tabs on everyone living here, turning some residents into informants. By the end of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin reversed the policies of cultural openness, and reverted to an imperial approach of forced Russification throughout the USSR. The protagonists of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance were among the victims of the first mass execution of the Great Terror in 1937. More than two hundred Ukrainian-language writers were executed and many more imprisoned and persecuted in what became known as the “Executed Renaissance” in Ukraine.
People in Kharkiv do not have the luxury of falling asleep and being sure to wake up alive in the morning, with S-300 missiles falling from the sky at night, or being attacked with a new kind of weapon from the northern border during the day: guided bombs. According to the city’s Mayor Ihor Terekhov, just in May 2024 Kharkiv was attacked with 37 of them, in addition to 25 missiles and 12 Shahed drones. It is hard to believe that people can still live there. It is hard to believe there can be one million people living there. But the truth is, some people are brave enough not only to stay in Kharkiv, but also to celebrate life in the frontline city. Interestingly, it was exactly this dramatic year when two cultural events from pre-invasion times were revived.
One of them is Dance Walking Kharkiv, an initiative of dance therapist Ancha Antonets. She started in 2014, shortly after the outbreak of the hybrid war in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, to elaborate on the fears and tribulations of that time. Ancha would prepare a 60-minute playlist, suggest a city route and a meeting point. Other dancers were supposed to bring their headphones, turn on the music at the same time, start the dance and follow the route. I remember my first dance walking in 2015, when the heat of midsummer was suddenly interrupted by thunder and rainstorm. It seemed like I was dancing with the streets and the sky, with the pedestrians and the traffic lights, with the city as a living being. I had joined the practice of dance walking regularly for many years, and it was one of the things I missed most after leaving Kharkiv. This year, after a two-year break, dance walking returned. In the pictures of Oleksandr Osipov, the setting looks just like it used to: joyful people dancing barefoot on the sunlit Constitution Square. Only the statue of Free Ukraine wrapped in protective tissue, reminds us of the new reality. Fears and tribulations still have to be elaborated, so dance can still happen in the streets of Kharkiv.
Embracing the future
Is it wrong to feel curious about a place under siege in a country at war, to even feel a longing for it? I do not think so, but others might disagree. Two years in, and there are still many across Europe who cannot accept the reality of a genocidal war across the border from Poland. After decades of economic safety and peace, there seems to be a mindset of simplification in the western states of the European Union, an incapability to acknowledge duality and understand the realities of a democratic country at war – a mindset exploited by populists across the EU. For those, Ukrainians can only ever be downtrodden victims, and cultural activities and open restaurants and cafes in Kharkiv and Ukraine are not seen as a necessary part of resistance. Instead, they are seen as an indication that things “are not really that bad” and that Ukrainian refugees are just scroungers exploiting the welfare system. This notion was recently expressed by one of the , amongst others.
I for one hope that all the wonderful places of culture, the restaurants and cafes and shops of Kharkiv stay open; and that Russia is defeated soon. The Literary Museum offers a literary residency in Slovo House, and I hope to make it there. I do not drink anymore but after bookshops I still like to visit the bars when visiting for the first time. After all, most places these days will have alcohol-free beer available. One of the places I had on my list for a long time was Old Hem, a Hemingway-themed boozer in the centre of Kharkiv where, amongst others, the poet and writer Serhiy Zhadan (who since has joined the Ukrainian Army) would perform and drink. In March 2022, a Russian rocket smashed into it, destroyed the bar and killed two people in a flat above it. The bar however has been re-established on Universytets’ka Street, with some of the salvaged interior in place, so I guess my (alcohol-free) beer is still waiting there for me.
This year, La Fête de la Musique took place not only in Paris, Berlin and Potsdam. After a break, it was organized in Kharkiv too. Just like in the previous era, multiple stages were set up all around the city, with one of them in Anton Derbilov Street. It used to bear the name of a Russian writer, now the reality is different. Trying to figure out which street this is, I opened Google Maps and realized this was a curved street with a church nearby. Suddenly, a flashback crossed my mind: I saw a private house and a yard full of busts of Lenin, Karl Marx and other Soviet officials. As a schoolgirl, I passed by this private collection plenty of times. So that street must be somewhere there. I have no idea if the collector still admires that old Soviet legacy. With the “fall” of the official Lenin monument in autumn 2014, followed by the withdrawal of the Pushkin bust in 2024, Kharkiv showed its will to leave the Soviet and Russian past behind. Hence, keeping those busts would definitely mean going against the current. Still, I cannot tell what that person cherishes: the Soviet past or the Ukrainian future. The best way to check is to go to Kharkiv. But the best thing I can do is follow the livestream from Anton Derbilov Street.
I used to know Anton back then, when he was a sculptor, an artist, a musician. Before he decided to put on a uniform and fight for Ukraine’s freedom. Anton was killed in action near Kreminna in April 2023. In May 2024, his band played a concert in the street named after him.
Now the reality of Kharkiv means resisting every minute of the day and reinventing it in a thousand new ways. Culture is resistance; city landscapes are resistance; coffee shops behind broken windows are resistance. Even the blossom of a tiny Sakura tree in the backyard of my Kharkiv house is resistance.
Photo: Anna Kolomititseva
Marcel Krueger is a German non-fiction writer and translator living in Ireland, who explores themes of memory, identity and migration through family history and his own existence as an emigrant. He is a former fellow of the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe and in 2019 worked as the official writer-in-residence of Olsztyn in northern Poland, a region to which he remains closely linked.
Anna Kolomititseva is a conference interpreter, translator and emerging author born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Since her forced displacement due to the Russian war of aggression in April 2022, Anna has lived in Berlin, Germany. Anna published her Kharkiv war journal in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, wrote for the MdR (Central German Broadcaster), and was a writer-in-residence at the “Author’s House”, Zakynthos, Greece. Now Anna is a student of a British-Ukrainian creative writing program and working on a novel. Kharkiv is the biggest source of inspiration for her work.
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Kharkiv, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine
Source link : https://neweasterneurope.eu/2024/07/24/why-dream-of-kharkiv/
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Publish date : 2024-07-24 07:00:00
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