Each morning we remind ourselves of all the lives that have been lost.

In the afternoon, we savor the sun shining outside the window.
The fresh grass rising up among dead rocks.
And in the evening we remind ourselves once again
Of all the lives that have been lost. 
— Serhiy Zhadan, “Three years now we’ve been talking about the war” (2017)

I

The forest-girt village of Kapytolivka is situated on the easterly side of the Siverskyi Donets River, not far from the city of Izyum in Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast. It is a modest, unpretending settlement where time has stood relatively still, boasting of a nursery school and a high school, a general store and a commercial bakery, a post office and a grand total of eight bus stops. Occupying pride of place in Kapytolivka is what surely ranks as one of the prettiest churches in all Ukraine, the classically-styled, azure blue-painted Saint Varvara’s, a sort of Taj Mahal erected in 1823 by Peter Stepanovich Kotlyarevsky in loving memory of his wife, Varvara Ivanovna, who had died in agony during childbirth. Kapytolivka, huddled in the shade of Saint Varvara’s graceful dome and dignified bell tower, has one other claim to fame, for it was here that the renowned poet, novelist, children’s writer, and activist Volodymyr Volodymyrovych Vakulenko was born in 1972.

The philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda found a refuge in Pan-Ivanivka, the poet Ivan Kotliarevsky had his cottage in Poltava, Lesya Ukrainka produced some of her finest verses in the Green Grove near Hadiach, while the exiled national bard Taras Shevchenko dreamt of a writer’s retreat in Pekari; Volodymyr Vakulenko, for his part, had his cherished native village, where he lived for nearly half a century. So enamored was he with Kapytolivka that he signed his name Volodymyr Vakulenko-K. in its honor (though that abbreviation’s association with Franz Kafka’s protagonists in Der Proceß and Das Schloß can hardly be ignored). It was in Kapytolivka that he penned the poems, short stories, and novels that would earn him awards including the Silver Trident, the Golden Trident, the Oles Ulyanenko International Literary Prize, and the top spot in the Les Martovych All-Ukrainian Competition. It was in Kapytolivka that he organized literary festivals and helped publish almanacs and magazines. It was in Kapytolivka that he cared for his autistic son Vitalik. It was in Kapytolivka that he tended to his lush garden overflowing with irises and ferns and fruit trees. And it was in Kapytolivka that Volodymyr Volodymyrovych Vakulenko — Volodya to those that knew him best — would lose his life. (RELATED: Ukraine Is More Alive Than Ever, While Its Enemy Is Rotting From the Inside Out)

In his youth, Vakulenko had been conscripted into the Soviet-era military, only to be subjected to severe beatings that left him with lifelong disabilities. His parlous physical state was worsened still by head trauma suffered while participating in the 2014 Maidan Uprising, so when the Russian army invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, there was no question of the forty-nine year-old Vakulenko taking up arms. What was more, Vitalik’s autism spectrum disorder precluded his leaving home for the sake of an unfamiliar life as a refugee, so the family made the difficult decision to remain together in an increasingly beleaguered Kapytolivka. Like his fellow writer in nearby Kharkiv, Serhiy Zhadan, Vakulenko’s service to the nation would take the form of volunteer work, collecting money and supplies for his fellow villagers, and for Ukrainian soldiers stationed at nearby checkpoints. In his spare time he continued writing, maintaining a diary written with a looping hand in red, black, and blue ballpoint ink, filling every last centimeter of his graph paper with daily observations, philosophical musings, and unstinting self-examination. (READ MORE: Keep Fighting, Ukraine. You Will Prevail)

The reverberations of artillery salvoes and counter-battery fire shook the ground more and more each day as the fighting approached, wrote Vakulenko in his diary, “like an angry viper crawling closer and closer to my hometown.” Initially the poet took a modicum of comfort in the constant explosions, which he supposed were “even pleasing to hear during the occupation, depending on the direction. If there were battles, it means that the city is standing, it means that our boys are alive.” Kharkiv held out against incredible odds, but Kapytolivka and Izyum eventually fell to the invaders, who proceeded to set up roadblocks and conduct house-to-house searches. Vakulenko complained of how “they were constantly searching, even empty bags … I was terribly upset that my nerves could not stand such humiliation,” while lamenting that “any kind of heroism, such as stopping an armored personnel carrier, takes place in big cities, and we are a small village, where the maximum that can be done is to gather patriotic people — no more than 2-3 people. I knew this for a long time, so I lived as a hermit.” 

Given his history as a prominent Maidan activist, Vakulenko presented an obvious target for the occupiers, but he continued to make life as comfortable as possible for his son, while volunteering in the community and carefully recording his wartime experiences with his trusty biros. On March 21, 2022, which happened to be World Poetry Day, Vakulenko caught sight of a sedge of cranes returning from their winter migration. In Ukrainian folklore the zhuravel, or common crane, is a symbol of exile and longing for the motherland, but also a welcome portent of spring and rebirth, so the birds’ arrival seemed like an omen of sorts after nearly a month of war and occupation. The poet made the following entry, which turned out to be his last:

At first, I dreamed of numbers, old calendars, my friends, and the boys [Ukrainian soldiers], as if I were hugging them, meeting them. I’m afraid to think what happened to them. In the first days of the occupation, I gave up a little because of my half-starved state in general. Now I have pulled myself together, even worked in the garden a little and brought potatoes into the house. Birds chirp only in the morning … Finally, in the evening, music on my cell phone saves me. And today, on the Day of Poetry, a small flock of cranes congratulated me from the sky, seeming to say: “Vse bude Ukraïna [Everything will be Ukraine]!” I believe in victory!

The very next day, five Russian soldiers arrived at the Vakulenko household. Volodymyr’s father, also named Volodymyr, answered the door, and was asked: “Where is your nationalist?” Volodymyr and his son Vitalik were taken away, their rooms ransacked, and their books, phones, and computers confiscated. Vakulenko’s captors threatened to shoot him in the kneecaps, but by evening he and his traumatized son had been released. The writing was very much on the wall, and Vakulenko acted quickly when day broke the following morning, taking his thirty-six page diary, rolling it into a canister, wrapping the container in a plastic bag, and burying it all beneath a cherry tree in the leaf-filled garden bed, instructing his father to unearth the document only when Ukrainian forces had liberated Kapytolivka. 

Russian paramilitaries returned a day later, on March 24, 2022, in a vehicle emblazoned with the fascistic “Z” symbol, to abduct the Ukrainian writer for a second and final time. Never again would Volodya be seen among the living, and never again would Volodya see his son, his parents, his house, his mementoes, his manuscripts, or his beloved village of Kapytolivka.

II

On September 24, 2022, the Ukrainian poet, novelist, and essayist Victoria Yuriivna Amelina — Vika to those who knew her best — arrived in Kapytolivka, and was welcomed into the grief-stricken Vakulenko family home. Volodymyr’s parents, Olena and Volodymyr, led her into the garden, which six months after their son’s disappearance had become an untamed, tangled riot of greenery. Amelina’s visit to Vakulenko’s native village was made possible by the stunningly successful Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive, which had begun eighteen days earlier and had liberated some five hundred settlements, including Izyum and Kapytolivka. Once it was deemed sufficiently safe, Amelina could venture to this remote corner of Kharkiv Oblast in order to fulfill the terms of Volodymyr Vakulenko’s final wish, that his diary be disinterred once his hometown had been freed from Russia’s murderous clutches.

It took several hours of scrabbling and digging out shovel test pits in the Vakulenkos’ garden, but the diary was eventually discovered in its hiding place beneath one of the cherry trees. Despite being entirely sodden, the manuscript was still legible, and with the Vakulenko family’s permission Amelina sent it off to the Kharkivs’kyy Literaturnyy Muzey for restoration, safekeeping, and digitization. “When you’re digging up the diary of a kidnapped writer from under a cherry tree,” she told a reporter in the aftermath of her successful excavation, “you feel you’re somewhere in the Thirties, when our writers were shot. Or in the Forties, under Nazi occupation.” In her pocket, from that day forward, she would carry an acorn she collected from the Vakulenko garden, a reminder of her fellow writer’s extraordinary life and tragic fate.

Six months after his abduction, Vakulenko was still officially considered a “kidnapped writer.” There had been rumors, overheard by Vakulenko’s mother, that the writer “was taken to Russia, where he will be tried.” Readers of Stanislav Aseyev’s harrowing account of his time in captivity in the infamous Donetsk Izolyatsia prison, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street (2021), may have some inkling of the horrors Vakulenko would have experienced in a Russian detention center, but even that would be mere conjecture. Investigators were hard at work sifting through evidence uncovered in the abandoned Russian torture chambers scattered across Izyum — at School No. 6, School No. 12, the Central Police Station, the City Railway Polyclinic, the Izyum Optical and Mechanical Plant, the Izyum Municipal Industrial Water Supply and Sewerage Company, and various private homes — but nothing was pointing to the missing poet’s whereabouts. 

The slim possibility that Vakulenko might, like the imprisoned writer Stanislav Aseyev, be redeemed from Russian captivity was ultimately extinguished by the discovery of a handwritten ritual service ledger, which listed him among those buried in the mass graves dug by the former occupiers in the gloomy pine forest outside Izyum:

319 1.07.72 Вакуленко. 

The body of an unknown individual, roughly fifty years of age with long, dark hair, was exhumed from grave No. 319 on October 20, but it was not until November 29 that Kharkiv Regional Deputy Police Chief Serhii Bolvinov could announce that DNA tests had confirmed that the heavily-decomposed remains were indeed those of Volodymyr Vakulenko. His body had two bullet wounds, caused by 9x18mm rounds from a Soviet-era Makarov pistol; the extent of decomposition indicated that the body had been left lying in the open for at least a month. Local residents testified that they had been forced to bury a corpse found near Kapytolivka on May 12. A more definite reconstruction of the final days and hours of Vakulenko’s life may prove impossible.

Victoria Amelina had, however, safeguarded a significant portion of Vakulenko’s literary afterlife. On May 22, 2023, the International Publisher’s Association awarded the 2023 Prix Voltaire Special Award to Volodymyr Vakulenko, at a ceremony in Lillehammer, Norway, and it was Amelina who accepted the award on her slain colleague’s behalf. And a month later, on June 22, Vakulenko’s diary was presented at the International Book Festival held at the Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex in Kyiv, published under the title I’m Transforming: Diary of Occupation, a copy of which was purchased by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife Olena Zelenska during their visit to the festival. In her introduction to I’m Transforming, Amelina described her exhumation of the manuscript, and how “that very evening, as soon as I got to a village where a mobile connection worked, I photographed every page of the diary and sent the pictures to Tetyana Pylypchuk, director of the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and Tetyana Teren, director of PEN Ukraine. It was then that I felt a little easier: Volodymyr’s message was saved even if the next day, I had to step on some anti-infantry mine. As long as a writer is read, he’s alive.” When the naïve painter Polina Raiko’s beautifully-decorated residence was destroyed by the floodwaters unleashed by the wanton destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, Amelina responded in a similar fashion: “art lives as long as the world sees it.”

Five days after the book festival, Amelina found herself in the frontline city of Kramatorsk, a little more than an hour’s drive from Kapytolivka, together with a Colombian delegation including the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, the former peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, and the reporter Catalina Gómez, who were visiting eastern Ukraine as part of the solidarity campaign ¡Aguanta Ucrania!, or Stay Strong, Ukraine!. As the group was dining at the Ria Lounge pizza restaurant, a Russian Iskander ballistic missile slammed into the building, instantly reducing it to calcined rubble. The pathologically dishonest Russian Defense Ministry would later assert that the popular restaurant was a “a temporary command post” of the Ukrainian military; in reality, the thirteen victims included a seventeen year-old girl, and the fourteen year-old twin sisters Yulia and Anna Aksenchenko. Members of the Colombian deputation were wounded by shrapnel, and when Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro accused Russia of “violating the protocols of war,” the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bogotá responded in typically loathsome fashion, advising the Colombian government that Kramatorsk “is not an appropriate place to taste Ukrainian cuisine [no es un lugar apropiado para degustar platos de cocina ucraniana].”

One of the severely wounded victims of the Kramatorsk atrocity was Victoria Amelina, who was hit by a piece of iron reinforcement from the collapsed roof, and was discovered by first responders unconscious, still seated in her chair. Héctor Abad Faciolince later recalled how she sat there “motionless in her chair,” her head tilted, her face “pale as a wax candle.” Sergio Jaramillo and Catalina Gómez tried to rouse her, “but she didn’t react at all.” Amelina was taken to the Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro, but the writer succumbed to her injuries on July 1, 2023, leaving behind her husband Oleksandr and her twelve year-old son. Her passing took place on Volodymyr Vakulenko’s birthday. The two writers had never met, but their paths had crossed in Kapytolivka, and their fates proved to be inextricably intertwined. In the early days of the war, Amelina had written a poem, “Sirens,” which described the psychological toll of “air-raid sirens across the country,” and how under Russian bombardment “it feels like everyone is brought out/For execution.” The poem ended with an “all clear” — “this time, not you,” but on that tragic day in Kramatorsk it was Vika’s turn to be executed by the Russians, like her colleague Volodya, and like millions of Ukrainians before her.

III

Victoria Amelina’s road to Kapytolivka was very different from that of her colleague Vakulenko. She was born in Lviv, on the opposite side of Ukraine, on January 1, 1986, and spent part of her childhood in Canada. Having pursued her studies at Lviv Polytechnic University, she worked in the IT field before transitioning to a literary career. Success came quickly, with her first novel, The Fall Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens (2014), shortlisted for the Valerii Shevchuk Prize, and her follow-up effort, Dom’s Dream Kingdom (2017), proclaimed the best book of the year by the Zaporizhzhya Knyzhkova Toloka (Book Festival), and shortlisted for the LitAccent 2017 Prize, the UNESCO City of Literature Prize, and the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2021, the year Amelina was presented with the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize, she founded the New York Literature Festival, which was aimed at younger readers and was meant to be held annually in the curiously-named town of New York in the Donetsk region, at least until its cultural center, a site of absolutely no military significance, was pulverized by a Russian warhead on May 26, 2023. 

Amelina, like Vakulenko, Zhadan, and other Ukrainian writers, undertook volunteer work during the war, hosting displaced persons, delivering humanitarian aid, organizing a “Fight Them with Poetry” initiative in Donetsk, and serving as a war crimes field researcher with the non-governmental organization Truth Hounds, but, as evidenced by her efforts on behalf of Vakulenko’s manuscript, her true cause célèbre was the preservation of Ukrainian culture. Her stirring March 31, 2022 contribution to Eurozine, “Cancel culture vs. execute culture: Why Russian manuscripts don’t burn, but Ukrainian manuscripts burn all too well,” remains the most trenchant analysis of Russia’s age-old and ongoing campaign of cultural genocide against the Ukrainian people. Amelina’s essay should be required reading for that particular type of cultural commentator who never quite manages to find the time to address the numerous instances of physical and cultural genocide inflicted by Russians upon the Ukrainian people over the centuries, yet emerges every so often to engage in overwrought hand-wringing about the supposed “cancellation” of “Great Russian Culture.” 

The essay also provides a powerful rejoinder to the pro-Russian position adopted by certain members of both the political left and right, typified by Peter Hitchens’ infamous 2013 Bristol University lecture “Why I Like Putin,” which included the admission that “one of the troubles with liking Russia is you become, as I have, as much as I am a British patriot, something of a Great Russian Chauvinist. I don’t myself believe that the borders which Russia was forced at the end of the Cold War were just borders, or correct borders, or sustainable borders.” Neither the squalid, blood-soaked history of czarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet despotism, nor the qualities of Dostoevsky’s prose or Rimsky-Korsakov’s serenades, will ever justify the subjection of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Estonians, Poles, and other formerly or currently captive nations to perpetual genocidal subjugation, no matter how many times this ludicrous rationalization is rehashed, and few were able to convey this immutable historical truth more eloquently than Victoria Amelina.

The most heartfelt passages in “Cancel culture vs. execute culture” concern the long-lasting effects of the Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, the “Executed Renaissance,” when Soviet authorities imprisoned and slaughtered Ukrainian intellectuals en masse in the 1920s and 1930s.

Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs. For me, it would mean the majority of my friends get killed. For an average Westerner, it would only mean never seeing their paintings, never hearing them read their poems, or never reading the novels that they have yet to write. “Manuscripts don’t burn,” says the devil in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The devil then turns to his servant, a cat, “Come on, Behemoth, let us have the novel.” Russian manuscripts don’t burn; that might be true. But Ukrainians can only laugh bitterly. It’s imperial manuscripts that don’t burn; ours do. Have you ever read The Woodsnipes by the Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy? Nor have I. And the devil from the Russian book won’t help us out. Russians destroyed the second part of Khvylovy’s manuscript, confiscating all the copies of the Ukrainian magazine that featured it. Not a single copy was ever found.

Amelina was determined to ensure that the fate of Khvylovy’s lost manuscript would not befall Vakuleno’s diary, and so she ventured to war-torn Kapytolivka in a desperate effort to forestall yet  another Executed Renaissance. It was the devastating legacy of the Stalinist repressions that fueled Amelina’s campaign for cultural preservation. She knew just how much had been lost when Ukrainian artists including Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Volodymyr Svidzinskyi, Mykola Kulish, Valerian Pidmohylny, Mykhail Semenko, Mykola Zerov, Klym Polishchuk, Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska, Maik Yohansen, Mykhailo Boychuk, and Hryhorii Epik had all been murdered by the Soviet regime because of the language they wrote in and the vision they had for their nation. She knew just how much had been lost when kobzars and bandurists including Oleksandr Borodai, Heorhiy Kopan, Hryhoriy Andriychyk, Mykola Bohuslavsky, Nykyfor Chumak, Fedir Doroshko, Viktor Sohohub, and Mykola Bohuslavsky were murdered by the Soviet regime because of the folk music they played and the ancient traditions they sustained. She knew just how much had been lost when, more recently, Volodymyr Vakulenko was murdered in Kapytolivka by agents of Putin’s regime. And now we know just how much was lost when her own life was taken in Kramatorsk. 

It is in no small part thanks to those fallen writers, as Serhiy Zhadan put it in his haunting 2017 poem “Three years now we’ve been talking about the war,” that

We have the words to express our anger.
We have the words to express our grief.
We have the words to express our contempt.
We have words for curses, words for prayers,
We have all the necessary words
To talk about ourselves in this time of war.

Yet the extraordinary thing about Volodya and Vika was how they put those words into action. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in a January 22, 1811 letter to Karl Friedrich Graf von Reinhard, recalled “a complimentary reproach once made by a friend of my youth. He said, What you live is better than what you write, and it would please me if that were still true.” Both Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina were tremendous novelists, poets, and essayists, but it was in their lives, in their selfless wartime actions, and in their ultimate sacrifices, in addition to their literary output, that they came to embody the struggle of the Ukrainian people, and of free people everywhere, against the inhuman forces of genocide and cultural destruction.

IV

A memorial service for Victoria Amelina was held on July 4, 2023, in Saint Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv, the site of so many similar ceremonies for Ukrainian soldiers who have given their lives in the ongoing struggle for national survival. Her funeral service was held the following day, at the Church of the Most Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in her hometown of Lviv. Founded in 1610, the church was converted during the Soviet era into a warehouse, but in 2010 was handed back to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for use as a garrison church and center for military chaplaincy. As her coffin was conveyed to the Lychakiv Cemetery, past monuments to the poet Taras Shevchenko and the medieval Ruthenian King Danylo of Galicia, pedestrians along the route solemnly knelt down, as Victoria Amelina was given all the honors due to Heroyamy-Zakhysnykamy Ukrayiny, the hero-defenders of Ukraine.

At the gravesite, a band performed a song with lyrics written by the dissident Vasyl Semenovych Stus, who had bravely protested against the Soviet oppression of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, leading to his arrest for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and “anti-Soviet activity,” and his death on September 4, 1985 in the Perm-36 forced labor camp. On January 6, 2023, Amelina had observed Stus’s birthday, noting that “his last volume of poems, on which he worked in the Russian camp, was confiscated. Stus was murdered in 1985. The KGB just destroyed the manuscripts, likely. But what if we can find them after victory?” Had her life not been cut so tragically short, perhaps she would have one day tracked them down, just as she had Vakulenko’s diary. Some of Stus’ challenging lyrics did survive, however, including those that filled the air as Vika was laid to rest:

All around me is a cemetery of souls
Atop the white cemetery of the nation.
I’m swimming in tears. I’m looking for a ford.
A May bug flies over the cherry trees.
Spring. And the sun. And foliage.
The gardens are like dandelions.
The belated stars, like crabs
Stuck in the sky, form a background.
The candle is lit, the candle is burning,
Casting wandering shadows over your shoulder.
Silent shadows. And faces,
Only the mouths and eyes are lipless
Whispering: we are the subjects of destruction,
And tears freeze on our cheeks.
We lost our lives.
Likely we took a wrong turn along the way,
Becoming friends with horror
Amidst the howling of these stormy days. 

Все буде Україна! Я вірю в перемогу!