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The Hidden Canon: Discover Ukrainian literary classics

A Kyiv Independent project backed by the Ukrainian Institute

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'Hemingway Knows Nothing': Ukraine's writers are redefining literature of war
Culture

'Hemingway Knows Nothing': Ukraine's writers are redefining literature of war

by Kate Tsurkan

When war, loss, and unimaginable suffering become routine, a book can offer a kind of lifeline — especially one by a writer who has lived through such an ordeal and tried to make sense of it. At the start of Russia’s full-scale war, some Ukrainians speculated if they’d see the rise of their own Ernest Hemingway: a writer whose books would not only capture the experience of a generation but come to define it. Yet it soon became clear that the old paradigms of war literature no longer spoke to t

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Russia's 160-year war on Ukrainian books

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history", said the historian Milan Hubl in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. To destroy a man, first destroy his culture: this idea is neither new nor particularly singular. It was this very idea that prompted the creation of the Hague Convention in 1954, to protect cultural heritage during armed conflicts, after the Nazi regime burned and destroyed innumerable works of art in

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Our reporting on literature, films, art, and traditions from Ukraine and the latest news on culture in Eastern Europe.

Ukrainian culture
Ukrainian culture has survived centuries of Russian attempts to appropriate Ukrainian art, silence Ukrainian artists, and erase the Ukrainian language. Modern Ukrainian writers, filmmakers, and musicians — some of whom are serving on the front lines — continue to develop Ukrainian culture and fight for Ukraine’s future.
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