“People of Culture Taken Away by the War” is a series of literary portraits designed as an online project and launched by PEN Ukraine and The Ukrainians Media. While working on the stories, the project team researches the fallen heroes’ heritage and talks to their relatives and colleagues. The special project is aimed to preserve the memory of the people of whom the war has deprived the Ukrainian culture and to testify about Russia’s genocidal intentions.
“The cultural figures killed during the Russian-Ukrainian full-scale war include dozens of men and women who were writers, musicians, translators, librarians, artists, photographers, archeologists, conductors… Some of these individuals were known to the public, while others were familiar only to a narrow circle of colleagues. Two things united them: firstly, their work made up the fabric of Ukrainian culture. Secondly, they were all killed by Russia,” says Sasha Dovzhyk, scholar and the project’s curator, former fellow at the IWM and Documenting Ukraine grantee.
It was Victoria Amelina’s [Documenting Ukraine grantee] death from a Russian missile that prompted the launch of this series. In her foreword to the occupational diary kept by Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, tortured to death by Russians, Victoria wrote: “an artist is still alive until they are read”.
The special project is available in the Ukrainian and English languages. The illustrations are created by Daria Kovtun. The authors of the literary portraits are Sasha Dovzhyk, Olena Kozar, Mariana Matveichuk, and Hanna Ustynova. The first five essays—about the writer Victoria Amelina, photographer Denys Kryvyi, historian Vyacheslav Zaitsev, conductor Kostiantyn Starovytskyi, and researcher of the Ukrainian cuisine Olha Pavlenko-Kolyorovo—are already available on the website.
“We often state that it is our duty to know and remember the names of those killed by the war. Yet it’s also important that they are not a mere list or statistics for us, since behind every name, there are human fates, dreams, unrealized ideas and unaccomplished business. Our project aims to collect and share the stories of all these people, so that their voices would still be heard and their work would continue. I often tell how many projects and initiatives in my life would not have been launched if not for Victoria Amelina. It was largely with Victoria’s invisible presence and support that this project was set off as well, based on our shared pain, our memory, our love, and our gratitude,” says Tetyana Teren, executive director of PEN Ukraine and initiator of the special project “People of Culture Taken Away by the War”.
Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, PEN Ukraine keeps tracking losses among cultural activists whose stories appear in the information field or are reported by the relatives and colleagues of the fallen heroes. This information is available in the 2022 and 2023 monitoring which are constantly updated. As of today, we have collected at least 76 names of Ukrainian cultural activists killed by the war. This is not an official monitoring. PEN Ukraine stresses that there are many more deceased artists than we know of due to the lack of reliable data from the occupied territories of Ukraine.
