The Ukrainian Book Institute told NPR that bookstore chains have opened dozens of new stores in the past year alone and that independent bookshops such as Sens, in Kyiv, are thriving. Ukraine’s largest bookstore chain added 22 new stores in 2023 and plans to add another 22 this year. Litvinets says Vivat, which is based in Kharkiv, has doubled its staff and book stock since the war began and tripled the number of bookstores from three to nine.
“And now, with all the power cuts, when there’s no electricity or internet, books are even more popular,” he says. “People read them by flashlight or candlelight and escape into another world.”
Artem Litvinets, the editor-in-chief of the Vivat publishing house, poses for a portrait in a park in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on May 26.
/Laurel Chor for NPR
Litvinets says mysteries and romantic fiction are especially popular; Ukrainian authors are in high demand.
“Since the war, there’s this interest in everything Ukrainian,” he says, “and that includes Ukrainian literature.”
“Don’t stop! Survive!”
Inside one of Vivat’s bookstores in Kharkiv, Kuzma Zhytnyk, an 18-year-old economics student, is perusing the colorful, well-stocked shelves. He says checking out the latest releases at the bookstore is part of his everyday routine.
“I love sitting on the sofa at home and leafing through a book,” Zhytnyk says. “It drives away bad thoughts.”
People peruse the bookshelves at the bookstore of Vivat, one of Ukraine’s largest publishing houses, on May 26. A printing house used by Vivat was hit by a Russian strike a few days prior, killing seven workers.
/Laurel Chor for NPR
He selects the Ukrainian-language edition of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson. Zhytnyk constantly worries about what will happen to Ukraine, he says, and wonders if it will lose its sovereignty and defined borders as well as “a national idea that holds everyone together.”
“In order to save the country, we need to save our minds,” he says.
Though many in Kharkiv spoke primarily Russian before 2022, not a single book in Vivat’s collection is in Russian. “We have totally rejected the Russian language, which Russia has used as a weapon to extinguish the Ukrainian language,” says Litvinets, the Vivat editor.
At a colorful Mexican bar and restaurant in Kharkiv, poets are performing verses in Ukrainian at a popular poetry slam. Artem Elf, founder of the event, called Lit Slam UA, says Russians do not accept that Ukrainians “have our own culture, our own artists who are not connected to Russia. They don’t want to admit we exist.”
A contestant performs at the “Lit Slam All Stars” at the Taco Loco Mexican restaurant in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on June 1.
/Laurel Chor for NPR
One of the poets, 18-year-old Yulia Lypneva, says Russia’s war on her country has made her poetry darker and sharper. She recites a poem about smoke covering “the broken edge of Kharkiv’s heart.”
“Don’t stop! Don’t die! Survive!”
A co-organizer of the Lit Slam All Stars, Artem Elf, poses for a portrait in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on June 1.
/Laurel Chor for NPR
Echoes of the Executed Renaissance
Lypneva says she and other young Ukrainian writers want to fill the void left by writers killed by Russian forces. They include Volodymyr Vakulenko, a beloved children’s author, and Victoria Amelina, an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist. Russian paramilitaries executed Vakulenko near his home in northeastern Ukraine in March 2022 and threw his body in a mass grave.
Amelina, who helped find and promote Vakulenko’s war-time diary, was killed in a Russian strike on a pizzeria in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk last summer. Another poet, Maksym Kryvtsov, was killed in action in January while serving in the Ukrainian military.
Ukrainians often compare the losses to the Executed Renaissance, a literary generation murdered by the Soviets almost a century ago. More than 200 Ukrainian writers were arrested in the 1920s and 1930s, and many were killed.
The repression prompted Ukrainian novelist Mykola Khvylovy to take his own life in 1933 in the Slovo House, an apartment building in Kharkiv where Soviets relocated writers in order to spy on them.
The building still stands in Kharkiv today. One apartment is used by Kharkiv’s Literary Museum for writer residencies. At the museum, which is devoted to Ukrainian literature, director Tetyana Pylypchuk picks up a book by Khvylovy that’s part of an ongoing exhibition about the war.
The exterior of Slovo House, a historical building that housed Ukrainian writers in Soviet times in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on May 30.
/Laurel Chor for NPR
“He forces us to think that even our own memories are not what we think they are,” Pylypchuk says.
She gives an example. When Pylypchuk was a child, her mother used to read her fairy tales by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin.
“These became my warm emotional memories, and this is how I perceived Pushkin and Russian,” she said. “It took me a while to see that we did not have an emotional connection to Ukrainians writers because this connection was not allowed to develop.”
Ukraine invasion — explained
Ukraine’s Kharkiv has withstood Russia’s relentless strikes. Locals fear what’s next
Before the war, she says, Ukrainians could choose whether to identify with either Russian or Ukrainian culture.
But now that choice is a “question of life and death.”
“Words and bullets”
Russia continues to attack Ukraine with missiles and glide bombs. Serhii Polituchyi, who owns the Factor Druk book-printing plant destroyed by a Russian missile in May, says that has not deterred him from plans to reopen the plant. Ukrainian Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said the foundation of U.S. businessman and philanthropist Howard Buffett would finance its rebuilding.
“Kharkiv is and will continue to be Ukraine’s capital of publishing and printing,” Polituchyi says.
Days after a Russian missile strike hit the Factor Druk printing house, a worker salvages printed sheets of paper while surrounded by the wreckage of a destroyed building, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on May 27.
/Laurel Chor for NPR
The attack destroyed copies of Words and Bullets, a collection of interviews with writers on the war’s frontlines, including Amelina and Kryvtsov, who were both killed. The book was set to be released last month.
Instead, the burned copies were included in a somber exhibit at Kyiv’s Book Arsenal in May. The display was simply titled: “Books Destroyed by Russia.”
NPR producer Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this report from Kyiv.