What was it like? Is the question I am often asked when I return from working in Ukraine, where I have been travelling regularly since 2022. There’s an understanding implicit in the question that the answer will not – not quite – lie in the accumulation of reporting. For good reasons the reporter keeps her eyes steady and focused outward, collecting the essential information, conveying it as clearly and smoothly as possible. The reporter reins in and disciplines her subjectivity, while, ideally, recognising its existence and understanding its contours. The reporter knows that the facts of the matter are the thing.
At the same time, feelings and impressions cannot wholly be untangled from the facts. Feelings are inevitable, if you are functioning as a human in any sense at all. They are the tentacles of empathy that reach out in an attempt to understand people and situations. Feelings have an epistemic role – a part to play in acquiring knowledge. Nevertheless, they must be tidied into the background. Respect for your readers and your subjects demands it; the rituals and rules of journalism demand it.
I have recently come back from a month in Ukraine. I write about the war through the lens of culture – considering how artists are shaping the future memory of the war in their work; how language and history and identity are implicated in it. I was behind the lines, in the cities of Kyiv and Lviv as well as Odesa and the Mykolaiv region. Broadly safe places, I suppose, though everything is relative. While I was in Ukraine, a woman sunbathing by the sea in Odesa was killed by a piece of shrapnel from a drone. One of the holiest places in eastern Europe, the Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv, was on fire after a drone hit it. Every morning, the civilian death toll crept up and people dealt with the loss of loved ones, or their homes, or their livelihoods; or they tackled smaller problems: windows and doors blown out, cars smashed up by debris falling from the sky. Ukrainians also laughed at memes of exploding oil refineries in Moscow, and the news headlines talked of Ukraine’s unexpected success on the frontline.
The question what was it like?, though, has little relationship with such headlines. It demands a personal answer. It invites the reporter’s carefully disciplined feelings and impressions back into the room. It is a question for the pub, the long walk. Or maybe not even that. Perhaps the real answer is, for some, too private to be spoken of at all: it is the diary entry; the flicker of images that dances in the mind before sleep; the fugitive layers of memory that are buried and may, perhaps, resurface years later. I realised this once while walking through a park with a journalist who, in the 1990s, had reported from the Balkans. The memories that reappeared 30 years on, for that reporter, were nothing to do with the movement of frontlines or the statements of famous politicians. They were almost cinematically vivid images: the hotel manager still in his suit and neatly knotted tie amid the bombed-out wreckage of his premises; the look in the eyes of the parents who had not been able to contact their child for months. These were not stories. Not in the journalistic sense of the word, or in any sense at all. They were hauntings. They were answers to the question, “What was it like?”.
So what was it like? When I try to respond, I don’t see a narrative line. What I see are layers of experience compressed together too closely and too densely for comfort – an archaeological stratification in which incompatible artefacts have been crushed out of shape into airless proximity. Sometimes, the answer to the question might best be answered by examining the places where those incompatible artefacts touch. For instance, not by telling the story of the ruins of the museum, the hands of the weeping director cradling an unharmed ceramic jug that the firefighters had miraculously found in the wreckage. Nor by describing the conversations on the stages of the literature festival that my colleague, the photographer Julia Kochetova, and I attended together right after we had trodden those ruined rooms. To answer the question, what was it like?, I think of the look on her face as she drove between the two – her talking about the relentlessness of this bombing and killing and maiming and battering and burning, and her asking, “How long will it go on? Until Kyiv is all rubble, all of it? And until how many of us are left?”
What it was like, was noticing the precise way in which, at Lviv railway station, a young father was squatting low with his hands on the knees of his son, who was sitting on the platform, and how his son’s hands in turn were pressing into the hands of his father. But it was not even that: it was how pale the boy looked, how held-in his expression – he was perhaps 10 or 11 years old. As the train pulled in and the family picked up their luggage, it was clear that the boy and his mother were going to Poland and the father, of fighting age and likely already in the army, was not.
What it was like was that it was peony season, and the flower stalls were full of them: pink and cream and scarlet, and the young people were buying them for their sweethearts from the old ladies who had come in from the country. What it was like was à propos of nothing, a friend talking about how she really must update her emergency backpack because she kept eating her emergency food in non-emergency situations.
There is a poem, My Day, by the Ukrainian writer, Iryna Tsylik, which expresses this intense compression, this parade of incompatible experience. “At 4am the air-raid siren woke me./ My son and I hunkered down in the corridor,/ I listened to the rockets flying over us –/ that unmistakable eerie thrum./ But we won that round of Russian roulette./ I dozed another hour./ I read the news of how many killed./ I made pancakes for my son.”
Oksana Maksymchuk, in her collection Still City, has a poem called The Fourth Wall, which also describes this war life, beginning: “No collapse,/ just a gradual shrinking/ of the present.” It ends with a sense of what it’s like to hear an air-raid warning: “We stop what we’re doing/ stand by the curtain, our eyes/ on the sky, fearing/ how normal it all now feels/ how boring.”
The Ukrainian artist Stanislav Turina recently wrote a series of 10 poems, all of them called My Perfect Day, in which he imagines the opening out of this endlessly painful compressed present into a series of possible ideal futures. They are full of joy, these poems. One contains the lines: “The war ended a year ago. Rebuilding time. / We remember the fallen. Internal wounds heal. We recall the disa-/ ster of the war. But pain and fear no longer rule us. Any of us.” It is hard to tell, reading these poems, whether they are optimistic assertions of hope – or desperately speculative fictions.
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Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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Ukrainian Lessons by Charlotte Higgins (Cape, £22) will be published in August. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a time of war with Charlotte Higgins and guests
On Wednesday 30 September, join Charlotte Higgins and our panel of acclaimed Ukrainian writers to reflect on the profound connections between war, art and life. With Olia Hercules, Sasha Dovzhyk, Olesya Khromeychuk, and Shaun Walker. Book tickets here
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