Ukrainian Lessons, by Charlotte Higgins review: 'heart-rending'

Charlotte Higgins

Full disclosure: Charlotte Higgins and I were at university at the same time, some – gosh – 36 years ago. I have admired her subsequent work, both as the chief arts writer for the Guardian and her series of books: Under Another Sky about Roman Britain, Red Thread about the image of the labyrinth, and This New Noise, an engaging, critical but caring study of the BBC. They are all fine books, but with this new work – Ukrainian Lessons, significantly subtitled “Art in a Time of War”- there is something of a step change. It is not just fine, clever and eloquent as her previous works were; it is urgent, necessary and poetic. If it does not win a prize there is little justice under the sun.

Having known Charlotte as a classicist – she has also written two more whimsical books, Latin Love Lessons and It’s All Greek To Me – I imagined she might be a Mary Beard replacement in waiting, with a dash of classical music. This, however, is more like a combination of the reportage of Rebecca West and the polemic of Rebecca Solnit. To say that her journalistic work in Ukraine, originally merely about how the nebulous “creative sector” was coping, has been transformative is quite the understatement.

The title is smart in its ambiguity. Are these lessons we are to learn about Ukraine, and its arts, since the Russian invasion, or is this about the lessons we can learn from Ukraine and its artists? It is an ambiguity that Higgins keeps in creative suspension throughout, especially since a sombre tocsin through the book is the question, what point do the arts have in a war? Auden sceptically said that “poetry makes nothing happen”, yet in the same poem – his eulogy to WB Yeats – he also writes “In the nightmare of the dark/ All the dogs of Europe bark, / And the living nations wait, / Each sequestered in its hate”.

Each chapter begins with a Ukrainian phrase and its translation – so the first, for example, has the quote “I am in Kyiv now. I want to see the city and listen to people”, which has the almost anodyne quality of foreign language lessons, and all that “plume de ma tante est sur la table de mon oncle” stuff. By the end we have a poem by Iryna Tsilyk – “My Day” – in both Ukrainian and English, with the banality of “How was your day?” morphing through “we won that round of russian roulette” (the dismissive non-capitalisation is wonderfully powerful), to “I’m fine. / I’m fine. / I’m f***ing fine, thank you.”

The first two chapters draw on Higgins’ classical background; with first “The Pale Cassandras” and then “Sing the Rage”, both patterning Homer onto the conflict. Cassandra famously was the prophetess condemned not be being believed, and it works well as an introduction to the incredulity of war. Higgins quotes the poet Miłosz: “The nonsense was over at last… the long dreaded fulfilment had freed us from self-reassuring lies, illusions, subterfuges: the opaque had become transparent”. In the second chapter we get a kind of acid honesty: “When I had to write anew stories about bombs rather than poetry, something very simple was revealed to me: it is easier to write about bombs than poetry”.

“Everything that was written in books and in films is actually happening to us”, says Kateryna Iakovlenko, which reminded me of The Onion’s take on 9/11 – “American life becomes bad American movie”. There is a certain cold stare quality, as when the playwright Natalya Vorozhbit tells Higgins, “If, before the full scale invasion, you were looking for shades of grey, if you were justifying every character, putting yourself in the villain’s shoes, I don’t want to do that anymore. The world has actually divided into black and white. If “grey” means ambiguity then no: I neither want to look for it, nor do I see it”. In my quiet life in the Scottish Borders that gave me the coldest goose flesh I have had for many a year. Yet there is a kind of empathy in despair. Looking at the aggressor, she says “culture didn’t help them in any way”. Higgins writes exceptionally well about the problematic status of a figure like Pushkin, complicit and weaponised at the same time. What taint is there on, say, a Tchaikovsky opera conducted by Valery Gergiev? As more than one Ukrainian in the book says, we’d rather have drones than you droning on about culture.

Later chapters are almost too heart-rending to summarise, but “Of Mass Graves and Cherry Trees” is especially shattering. Similarly, the work of Halyna Kruk is staggering. “No metaphor works against a man with a machine gun” she writes, and in one “poem” states “The debris of language / resembles poems / but it is not poetry / And neither is this / Poetry is in Kharkiv / Volunteering”.

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Part of what makes this book so beautiful is that Higgins is an arts writer, and even in her new-found persona as a war correspondent, she sees beauty. Too frequently we indulge in disaster porn. But there is always this: “What was it like? Another way of answering this is to say that, in Lviv, I bought flowers every week through the spring of 2025. When I arrived, in a sudden warm spell a week after the last snowfall, there were narcissi in the market, in full flower; a week later tulips. Then, for a week at the end of April the whole town smelled of lilac. Later came lily of the valley, a sweeter perfume yet. In late May, there were irises, in purple and black, amber and yellow; and then dam peonies in crimson, vermilion and pink. If you have a bouquet with you in a restaurant in Ukraine, they’ll bring you a vase so than the blooms don’t go thirsty”. Стійкість!

Ukrainian Lessons, by Charlotte Higgins, Jonathan Cape, £22. Charlotte Higgins is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 22 and 26 August

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