Towards the end of her subtly piercing book about art in wartime, Charlotte Higgins recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the north-east of the country, a short drive from the Russian border. In a tranquil park, she sees a man standing in a stream, making stones balance on top of each other in a teetering tower – “a metaphor of life in that city,” she writes, “that would have seemed too obvious for a novel”. Still, as a good novelist would, Higgins doesn’t seem to beg telling details from a place so much as have them leap to her open eye and ear.
The cartoons a boy is watching that fall silent in a power cut, allowing the distant boom of explosions on the frontline to be heard. A cityscape tattooed on a young poet’s arm that cuts off suddenly where skin from his leg was grafted after he was torn up by shrapnel. Cataracts of larkspur, as Higgins describes them, in a field in the frontline Donbas region, “pouring down the hill, pooling at the bottom into a great lake of blooms … Larkspur thrives on ground where there has been recent disturbance.” This last leads Higgins on to a story her driver tells her about stopping to pee in a roadside ditch and looking down to see the face of a dead Russian soldier staring up at him.
The image of the soldier becoming one with the land he was sent to conquer makes her think in turn of a viral video from the early days of the Russian invasion of 2022, in which an old Ukrainian woman thrusts a packet of sunflower seeds on a Russian soldier, urging him to put them in his pockets so that when he is killed, sunflowers will sprout from his body to adorn the Ukrainian soil. One of the artist heroes of Higgins’s book, Anna Zvyagintseva, designs a bodysuit impregnated with seeds as a piece called Sustainable Costume for an Invader. Another, Marharyta Polovinko, killed in action in 2025 while serving as a drone operator, made macabre pencil drawings about the war, latterly using her own blood as a medium.
One of her pictures shows dogs eating a dead Russian soldier. The image, Higgins says is “gruesome, horrific”; she recalls Achilles’s taunt to Hector in The Iliad before he kills him that he will let his body become dog food. But such explicit transformations are subsidiary to her main matter, the metamorphoses of artists and art itself under conditions of war.
In a city near the frontline she meets Yaroslav Pilunskiy, a cinematographer from the Kyiv-based film collective Babylon 13, now working drones for the army. Little remains for him of his art. Once in a while, when there’s a nice sunset, he flies a drone to a lake where explosions are guaranteed, just for the visuals, but otherwise he’s been transformed into a 21st-century drone soldier.
On the eve of the invasion, he was in Rome, editing a film; by the time Higgins meets him, 19 months later, he can’t remember what it was. Russia’s promiscuous use of missiles and drones against Ukrainian cities, anyway, means that the whole of Ukraine is a frontline and, like most visitors to Kyiv, Higgins gets caught up in air raids. For much of the book the war is noises off stage, but the violence is so deep and wide that every so often a small parenthesis drops with force: the building where 50 people were killed, the conductor shot dead because he refused to take part in an occupation concert.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
