This has not come to existence yesterday, nor on February 24, nor in 2014. The brutality of russian violence against Ukraine, the imperial cult of sadism and humiliation, have been here for centuries. Russia acted in Eastern Europe as an arrogant slave-owner who saw freedom as a major anomaly. It scorches the earth, turning life into death, freedom into slavery, and energy into indifference. Erasing, destroying, devouring any testimony that rebelled against it.

Conversely, this stubborn and fearless resistance of Ukraine against this aggression has deep roots behind. It has lived here for centuries, occasionally manifesting itself in uprisings and resistance. These roots are enwombed in the Ukrainian black soil, down to the heart of this land. They are buried in the memory of those who died, but did not break. This resistance lives in their breath, which can still be felt in rebel songs.

Many people ask us today: Who are you? Where did you come from? Why don’t you give up? We are finally starting to talk about ourselves. Finally, are they ready (as we believe) to listen to us.

Let me tell you about us. More specifically, about the Ukrainian culture. Let it be a few strokes to the portrait.

1. Ukrainian political culture is anti-tyrannical. The tyrant, the autocrat, the king is its major enemy. In the eternal dispute between the idea of empire and the idea of a republic, it takes the position of a republic. Ukrainian republicanism can be seen in the political organization of the Cossacks, free warriors who are regenerating today into fighters of the 21st century. We can see it in the Pacta et constitutiones of Hetman Pylyp Orlyk at the beginning of the 18th century; in the interpretation of the agreement between the Ukrainian Cossacks and 17th-century Muscovy, as a contract with mutual obligations, rather than as a slave subordination, as the Moscow tsar believed. We can see the republican idea in opposition to the “autocratic domination” expressed by Ukrainian intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century; in the idea of the community as the basic organism of political life in the texts of a key Ukrainian philosopher of that time, Mykhaylo Drahomanov. This confrontation to tyranny stretches through the Ukrainian uprisings and liberation movement — all the way to the Ukrainian Maidans of the 21st century. We can draw a line from Ukrainian political culture to the “noble republic” of the Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to the decentralized system of medieval Russia described in the nineteenth century by a Ukrainian historian, Mykola Kostomarov; to the “German law” that regulated the autonomy of cities in Eastern Europe, and which, in turn, was rooted in the idea of autonomy of German and Italian city-states. This line goes back centuries ago, down to the Ancient Greece idea of a policy and the interpretation of the state as a polythea, an association of free and responsible citizens. When Drahomanov wrote about the Ukrainian “community” as the basis for politics, as a teacher of ancient history, he describes it roughly as Aristotle describes the origin of the policy. Ukrainian political culture interprets politics as a “bottom-up” process, as an association of people into communities, of communities into a state, of states into interstate unions, rather than as an imperial process of “top-down” politics, where everything is decided at the top of the pyramid, and politics turns into a vertical movement of orders and punishments. Staying in Eastern Europe, at the point of collision of different empires, often with tyrannical models of government, Ukraine amazingly stretched through the centuries this European idea of a republic and ancient polythea.

2. Ukrainian culture has its own peculiar attitude to time. There is no great conflict between the past and the future, between tradition and modernity. Past and future are intertwined in this culture, like patterns in botanical ornaments of Ukrainian houses. Because it often developed in a context where foreign conquerors waged wars against its tradition, the eras of cultural emancipation and cultural revival were characterized by a double leap — into a deep tradition and into an unparalleled future. The main gap of the last few centuries in Europe, since the French Revolution until today, the gap between tradition and modernity, is much less characteristic of Ukrainian culture. Taras Shevchenko, the “founding father” of Ukrainian literature, rediscovers the Ukrainian tradition. However, for his time, he was a modernist revolutionary. That is why Dmytro Horbachov, one of the most prominent experts in the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, compared his texts with the texts of the futurists of the early twentieth century. The key “modernists” of the fin de siècle era, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, Olha Kobylianska, Vasyl Stefanyk, modernized the Ukrainian language and style of Ukrainian literature, while at the same time making a leap into the deep past or traditions of Ukrainian peasants. The Ukrainian avant-garde, from futurists to Malevich, saw in the Ukrainian visual and verbal tradition the basis for a revolutionary leap. And even today, the main trend of Ukrainian music is a combination of ethnic traditions and modern rhythms. Listen to DakhaBrakha, Onuka, Go-A, Kalush Orchestra, Mariana Sadovska — and you will feel it very well.

3. Land is one of the key archetypes and leitmotifs of Ukrainian culture. This culture has a lot of botanical, floral, and organic elements. Words and sounds in this culture grow from the ground and return to it. Even in Skovoroda, a key Ukrainian Baroque philosopher, you can see the identification of thought with seed. It is the old Christian (and ancient agrarian) metaphor, which finds yet another soil for itself in Ukraine. The founders of their modern literatures of the nineteenth century, the Ukrainian Shevchenko and the Russian Pushkin, are radically different: Pushkin created a literary Russian language, transferring there the cult of lightness of the French belles lettres from the Rococo era, weaving words into the air, which produces a pleasant and embellished effect, but non-obligatory and politically flexible. On the other hand, Shevchenko extracts his words as if from the ground; they germinate in him and through him, like Polissia forests; they have grown their roots in this land and are not going anywhere from it — therefore they are politically unbreakable. When the Russian writer and landowner Turgenev described to his Russian friends the “Folk Stories” of the young writer Maria Markovich (Marko Vovchok), he said that “all this grows from the ground like a sapling.” Ukrainian literature was created from earth and fire, rather than from the air. Therefore, it was always intransigent and firm about the empire. It scalded, and did not give away its land.

4. Despite these organic metaphors, Ukrainian culture is often the subject of choice. It is quite inclusive, accepting those who have chosen to be Ukrainian. Olha Kobylianska could be a German-writing author but she chose the Ukrainian language for her writing. Yurii Shevelov, one of the key Ukrainian intellectuals of the twentieth century, was a German by birth. Mike Johansen, one of the most interesting writers of the “shot Renaissance” era also was of German origin. Ukrainian identity was chosen by Wilhelm von Habsburg, the second cousin of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, calling himself Vasyl Vyshyvany. He also became a colonel of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and aspired to become the “king of Ukraine”. One of the archetypal Ukrainian heroes is Aeneas — a Roman Trojan, who was transformed into a Ukrainian Cossack by Kotlyarevsky, since his poem and further. It laid yet another bridge from the Dnipro River to the Mediterranean. Ukrainian identity was chosen by Poles Volodymyr Antonovych, Viacheslav Lypynsky, Michal Tchaikovskyi, Michal Grabowski, and many others. Today, in addition to ethnic Ukrainians, there are also Ukrainian Crimean Tatars, Jews, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and many more. A Crimean Tatar singer, Jamala, is today one of the most riveting Ukrainian musicians; Crimean Tatars Akhtem Seitablayev and Nariman Aliyev are some of the most interesting film directors.

5. Ukrainian culture has an amazing ability to regenerate. The metaphor of palingenesis, the passage through death, was a key metaphor for the 19th-century European romanticism — and that is how it came to Ukraine. But, apparently, in no other country has it been tested for durability like here. Our Renaissance and rebirth were destroyed, burned, wiped off the face of the earth — to rise again from the ashes later. Ukraine-Rus almost disappeared from the European map after the Mongol conquests in the 13th century, but it revived in the early modern era, in the 16–17th century. The Russian Empire erased it from the face of the earth and its own memory in the 18th century, to the extent that at the beginning of the 19th century there was a void in Ukraine. But out of a sudden, as if from the earth, Shevchenko came up. “As if a new head had grown to the decapitated body of the people,” according to a Ukrainian intellectual of the 20th century, Yevhen Malaniuk. For many generations, Shevchenko became a Ukrainian hetman, a president, a high priest, and a military commander. The Ukrainian language was banned in the Russian Empire for almost half a century, but the stronger came the outburst of the Ukrainian cultural revival in the 1910–1920s. This revival was repeatedly shot and destroyed in the 1930s — to burst out with renewed vigor in the 1960s, and later, after Ukrainian independence, in the 1990s. Today, Russians are trying to obliterate it again. But the Ukrainians proved that they are able to go through death. They are able to be reborn from the seed. Capable of being a collective phoenix. They are created by earth and fire — and these elements do not destroy them, but rather empower them.

6. Women play a special role in Ukrainian culture. I think, the greatest writer of the Ukrainian canon is a woman, Lesya Ukrainka. No one can compare to her, neither with the sharpness of her texts, nor in the scale of thought. In the nineteenth century, when feminism in Europe was still in its infancy, when women writers had to hide behind male pen-names, there were several prominent female authors in Ukrainian literature already: Marko Vovchok, Anna Barvinok, Olena Pchilka, Olha Kobylianska, and Lesia Ukrainka herself. An Austrian author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who was born in Lviv and had keen sentiments for Galicia, described Ukrainian women as having “the ideas of freedom and equality in their blood. She is a Democrat.” In today’s Ukrainian culture, women’s voices so often give an incredibly true and personal human touch to reality.

7. Ukrainian culture has always seen itself as part of the European culture. Our discussions between nationalism and liberalism, tradition and modernity, community and individualism largely involved a common denominator: unity with the European context. This is a grand difference from Russia, where the main consensus is the opposition of Russia and Europe. Even when Russia includes “Western ideas” (in the days of Peter I and Catherine II, in the days of Alexander I, in the days of the Bolshevik coup, in the days of the “capitalist” revolution of 1991), they are subsequently used to build a new anti-Western empire. To become worse than before.

In Ukraine, everything is the opposite. Our Slavophilism was European (much more closely related to the Western Slavs than to Russians); our Marxism was European; our conservatism was European, and, of course, our liberalism, too.

Over the past decades, Ukraine has sought to return to the European home, to the European family. But today it gives Europe no less than it receives. It is becoming a home for Europe, too. It makes Europe feel like a family again. Passing through death and suffering, having an amazing ability to revive and be born anew, today, Ukraine gives a chance to Europe to be re-born, too.

13 October 2022

The Ukrainian version of the text was written for the Ukrainian weekly magazine “Krayina”, translated into English for the “Wars.Ukrainians.Humanity.” programme and published with the consent of the author.