Life on the exhale

They are united by a common fate, a Ukrainian sisterhood awakened by the Maidan and maturing resistance to the Russkiy mir. Its mystery is captured by Vika in a poem written a month before her death. Even then, on the train to Kyiv, they had all the air in their lungs, aware that all that remained was to exhale: “…testify on the exhale… go on the exhale to our own”.  

Still in early April, Vika enrols in a training programme for war crimes documentation and soon joins the Truth Hounds team – a Ukrainian civic organization tracking down the truth about violations of international law. She becomes a field documentarian, right on the front line, right after the crimes are committed. She lives life at full exhale.  

Justice 

This is how I met Victoria Amelina. In wartime, all it takes is one meeting, just a few days of acquaintance or a conversation stretching long into the night, for a cordial bond to form, to see the other in all its brightness. Vika had a clarity and the kind of subtlety that on the surface seems to indicate fragility, but is in fact a symptom of indomitable strength and courage. There was a shadow of tragic stigma on her plunging face. She was one of those who knows.  

Her stay at the Kharkiv Writers House Slovo (Word) was no ordinary literary residence for her. In the 1930s, the Stalinist regime martyred more than 80 per cent of its residents. For Vika, it was not just history, but the realization that her generation was joining another link in the chain of poets of the “Executed Renaissance”.  

“Stay in Krasnogruda!” I proposed, encouraging her to join us at our cultural centre. But my incantations were weak. We both knew that I was throwing them to the wind. She was sleepless, tireless in action, hospitable to the wronged, sharply angry in the face of evil, boundless in friendship, and created for work in the garden of the soul. Vika learned the various names of love, but the war called her to the service of love bearing that one name she often uttered in conversation: justice. Important to her was the tradition of expanding the understanding and enforcement of justice in the face of modern forms of violence. This was initiated by the Lviv-educated thinkers Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who introduced the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity into international law. 

There is a photo of Vika – in the background you can see the flag and symbols of Ukraine, she is standing on the border of the Donetsk region, upright, wearing a blue coat, with bright yellow hair, flowing freely over her shoulders and breasts. In my imagination, I put a scale and a sword in her hands. I see her as a priestess of the goddess Nemesis, preserving the oldest affinity with Aphrodite, dating back to the origins of Greek spirituality, erased over time by a culture seeking expressions of revenge and envy. Giving people exactly what was due to them, she remained amorous and watched over, ready to reach for the sword at any moment, the just balance of good and happiness. 

Vika took in “full lungs of air / full sails of blood / full stretchers of love…” She believed that the air would be renewed, that there would still come a time when it would be possible to “carefully take a breath of life”. She was not destined to live to see that moment. She lived on the exhale, until the end. 

“carry 

shoot 

speak” 

Future 

Tuesday, June 27th. Bad news from Ukraine – a Russian rocket hit a restaurant in Krematorsk, full of people. Subsequent reports say 13 people have died, including four children. Among the many injured is Victoria Amelina.  

Vika should have been in France by now, on a year-long writing residency, where she intended to finish her book War and Justice. At the Arsenal of Books festival in Kyiv, she meets writers and journalists from Colombia. Moved by their solidarity action “Aguanta Ucrania!” (Hold on, Ukraine!), targeting the lies of Russian propaganda spread in Latin America, she decides to show them more of the reality of war than the festival can offer. On Monday at dawn they leave for Krematorsk, located 40 kilometres from the front line in Donbas. On the way, they pull up to a house from which the Russians took and then tortured and shot Volodymyr Vakulenko, a writer, children’s book author and father of a disabled son. Vika miraculously found the diary he had buried in the garden, which, along with the poems and her introduction, became one of the most harrowing testimonies of the war. They also visit a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Kharkiv. 

Her earlier Facebook posts came from the Kherson region, already affected by a hydroelectric power plant dam destroyed by bombing. She reached Kherson to write down the testimony of the wife of the murdered conductor Yuri Kyrpatenko. In early June, she posted a Truth Hounds report on Russian war crimes in Kachovka on social media. Since the beginning, I did not give credence to the randomness of the tragedy in Krematorsk. The missile whose shrapnel hit Vika was a high-precision-directed Iskander ballistic missile, thermonuclear, with a range of more than a thousand kilometres, and an accuracy radius of ten to 30 metres.  

Waiting always carries a seed of hope, but the incoming news from friends in the following days clearly tried to prepare us for the worst. A miracle did not happen, and the operation in the hospital in Dnipro did not bring Vika back. It is July 1st 2023. Half the life of the one born on January 1st. On the same day, two years earlier, a bill by Ukrainian parliamentarians restored the town in Donbas to its former name of New York. In a few months, Vika was to board a bus with a Lviv-New York sign to bring guests to a literary festival she is organizing. If she had survived, if she had been given the chance to live to see peremoha (victory), it is not out of the question that she would have tied the second part of her life to this other New York, which, more than an overseas megalopolis, embodied the future for her. 

The Colombian writer Hector Abad Faciolince described the last moment of Vika’s life when she was conscious: “I was sitting on the terrace of the restaurant across from her. Since alcohol was prohibited there, Victoria ordered a non-alcoholic beer. Sergio Jaramillo filled my glass with ice and something that resembled apple juice. “It looks like whiskey,” she said and smiled. At that moment the Iskander fell on us, hell fell from the sky. Victoria now has a home in heaven. Not in the Christian or Muslim sense. In that immaterial heaven, the heaven of the mind, the very human heaven we call memory.”  

Vika was convinced that the future was hostage to justice. Meanwhile, the regimes and tragedies that followed kept Ukrainians from dealing with finding out the truth about guilt and implementing it for too long. In Krasnogruda, she told me that the first words of Czesław Miłosz that registered in her memory came from his Nobel speech: “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” She believed that in a room teeming with the ghosts of the past, the light must be turned on. And that means confronting the covering up of history, naming and punishing the guilty, restoring dignity to the victims, working on a culture of remembering, wisely, in the spirit of Nemesis – a goddess implacably immune to self-love. Smiling slightly, she recalled an advertisement she had seen in Kharkiv’s Freedom Square: “Live in the centre of the future.” The developer’s slogan, in Vika’s imagination, evoked the shifting new centre of her struggle – the future – from the despair of past wrongs. She saw the real peremoha of Ukraine not only in the protection of territory, but also, and perhaps most importantly, in the de-occupation of the future.  

For the exhale of living, the question about maybutnie (future) became essential: “…I started to see a little / “tomorrow”, then – nothing, dark,” she noted in her poem “Word in the Dictionary [Future]” dated April 14th 2022. She asks about the future, do you see it? And she answers “I see it,” but in order not to seem as gullible as “Ukrainian Suspilne Radio” to the friend with whom she walks in Kyiv, and to top it all off, she adds:  

“I’m not sure if the russians  

won’t hit us with iskanders now right away.” 

Home 

I have before my eyes a 15-year-old girl invited to a TV studio in Moscow. She is the winner of a Russian literature contest for young people from the former Soviet republics. She feels like a star, until a journalist throws her a question about how the Russian-speaking residents of Lviv are persecuted. She then realizes why she was really invited to the studio, and why this investment had been made by the crumbling empire in her Russian-language school and the Russian TV seen in her home, in internationalist youth rallies, in an amateur theatre named after Pushkin, in trips to Moscow.  

“They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered did not need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to the Red Square.” This is what she wrote in an essay prepared for a seminar in Krasnogruda. And she immediately added: “Hopefully I will have turned out to be one of the Russian Federation’s worst investments.”  

This was one of the turning points in Victoria Amelina’s life. Its centre would begin to shift from Moscow to Kyiv. Instead of Russia’s fabricated lie, an awakened awareness of who one is and a new sense of belonging started to appear. The choice of truth becomes a choice of identity. She must have realized early on that boundlessness is a virtue of imagination and sincere interpersonal relationships, but appropriated by the empire, it becomes a tool of conquest and enslavement. Soon she will realize how difficult it is for residents of western nation-states, advocating for a world of open borders, to understand the emancipating Ukrainian woman, for whom the border with Russia becomes a need for survival. The words of the Scorpions song “Wind of Change” were sung at the time of the demolition of the Berlin Wall: “The world is closing in / and did you ever think / that we could be so close, like brothers.” These words that she knew by heart have taken on a completely different meaning since the annexation of Crimea. Now she is much closer to Hannah Arendt, who writes in The Human Condition that what made the Greeks defend the inviolability of borders was not “respect for private property as we understand it, but the conviction that without owning a home, man could not participate in the affairs of the world, because he did not really have his own place in it”.  

Vika came from a family with the trauma of the Holodomor and a Russification complex, as a result of which she did not inherit the Ukrainian language from her grandparents. She had to do great inner work to free herself from the feeling of “being out of place” in her own country. For a person thrown out of the nest of the Russkiy mir, for an expatriate and writer in various languages, for the Ukrainian patriot and nomadic lifestyle activist, the question of home became fundamental. 

Vika is from the generation of those who had to reclaim their home for themselves in Ukraine. Even more so, they had to take up the struggle to save it, with their lives at stake. She also felt at home wherever, as a Ukrainian, she was shown help and understanding. In Prague, where she found herself just after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as Poland, wider Europe, and the United States. But solidarity with Ukraine alone was still not enough for her. Immediately, after expressing gratitude, she inquired about what was happening on the Polish-Belarusian or US-Mexican borders, feeling a community of fate with migrants from every part of the world.  

Home for Vika was the “homework” to be done, i.e. to start repairing the world starting with oneself. This could be done by reviving a space of trust in one’s own country, and by building a civil society that can claim justice, but also takes responsibility for the fate of the weakest, for the rights of minorities, for fighting exclusion. The social activism and critical patriotism of the generation of Ukrainians of which Vika became one of the leaders, was combined with pronouncing out loud the truth. Living on the exhale brought with it the need to shout one’s own name, to enforce the right to be oneself and to be at home, which had been suppressed for many years: “…silence creates cracks so deep that it is hardly possible to feel at home.” 

The December 2013 Maidan was a turning point for Vika to find a home in Ukraine. “To go to the streets of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other.” She will express the most important lesson learned from the Revolution of Dignity in words that echo the universal form of establishing community: “Home is not a magical, perfect place, but a place where, if you are being beaten, you can be sure that your neighbours will show up to take a stand for you.” The experience of civic solidarity in Vika’s homeland is followed by graffiti with the word “HOME”, with the inside of the letter “O” filled with a map of Ukraine. “I’m impressed by it,” she confides in an interview with Natalia Kornienko.  

New York 

On November 7th 2021, two New York City marathons were held for the first time in the world: first, the traditional one, for the 50th time, through the streets and bridges of the American metropolis; the other almost at the very front line in a small town in Donbas, where there was a war the world did not want to hear about. The first marathon was done without pacemakers, which meant that the competitors were more on their own, thus providing more excitement for observers. For the second, there was a lack of peacemakers, which the world, cowering like a hare, chose not to bring into the zone of the growing threat of armed conflict. It was accompanied by the slogan “The marathon that no one wants to run”, and participation consisted of running any distance anywhere on Earth in the spirit of protest against Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and against the war turning into a marathon itself. More than 35,000 people joined the run in the Ukrainian city of New York, more than in the city overseas, in addition to a small handful of participants on the spot. This is how Ukrainians tried to draw the world’s attention to the crimes of Moscow’s regime, to which the West was still selling arms at the time. For Victoria, something else mattered in the whole affair: the town itself and its inhabitants. Just a month earlier, she had organized the first New York Literary Festival there.  

Vika was convinced that the literary festival was the leaven of a long-term programme, that it should be followed by year-round action, organic work with the local community. She was keen to recruit Russian-speaking residents, a large number of whom had not yet found a home in Ukraine. She knew that not only Russian propaganda but also the Ukrainian state’s omissions were to blame for this. She attached great importance to working with the youngest generation, with teachers, with leaders of civil society. This is evident in the very way she organized the festival – literary and artistic events were preceded by a Teacher’s Day for educators from the Donetsk region, during which guests, including Olena Stiazhkina and Serhiy Zhadan, gave lectures on history or discussions around poetry. Children also had their own creative space where they could take part in workshops and read books. There was even an essay contest announced for young people.  

From Vika’s stories and photographs, including those she posted on Facebook, I try to imagine the town of New York. The central axis runs along Garden Street. Along it, there are red brick houses with reddish tile roofs and blue shutters. Not coincidentally, these two colours will become the visual symbol of the New York Literary Festival. The brick factory was built by Germans, settling here in the late 19th century. Before that, the settlement was homesteaded by Cossacks and merchants from the Balkans, seeking refuge after the fall of the Zaporozhian Sich. Where on the borderlands of the Ukrainian steppe the name of Novy York came from remains a mystery to historians, as it was marked on the map as early as 1846, long before the arrival of settlers from Germany. A local legend tells of a dignitary in love who, bringing his beloved from the West, wanted to build for her here a city with a bright future. 

While preparing the festival programme, Vika asked Serhiy Zhadan to read his translations from German of Bertold Brecht’s poems to the people of New York, accompanied by the famous jazz double bassist Mark Tokar, soon to be an officer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Everything she did resonated strongly with the ethos of borderland people close to me, with the revival of “connective tissue” and the creation of a culture of memory in communities experiencing the tearing down of bridges. She had an excellent feel for the borderland, not only as a hotbed of conflict, but also as a space for communing with the “Other”, a connection which can help to revive the world.  

New York is a strategically important place on the Donbas front line, the site of a defensive fortification on Ukraine’s own “Mannerheim Line”. There is constant fighting here, as a result of which its material form is inexorably disappearing from the face of the earth. Russian bombs have annihilated its economic potential. Many people died, and whoever could left here. Earlier, after the historical turmoil of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Second World War, the town came back to life again and again. There is no doubt that it will also recover from these wounds, the deepest in its history to date, although it will certainly be a long and difficult process.  

Through Victoria, New York has become a symbol of the de-occupation of the future. It is not military or economic issues that will prove decisive for its real realization, although their importance neither Vika nor her allies have ever questioned. But instead of the hard factors of geopolitics, with no regard for life, the environment and the needs of the people must become part of the civilizational ecosystem of the small centres of the world. They are the ones that will have the power to change reality, caring for the spiritual and physical health of their residents, for good neighbourliness with other people and nature, countering the monopolistic power of the big centre with the solidarity of many smaller but equal, bringing out universal values. The New York of the future, to which Vika gave her life, will be reborn with the power of David leaving a defeated Goliath on the battlefield.  

Return 

Life on the exhale is like knocking on a door, it carries an echo, and wakes up the dormant. People to whom it is written, like Victoria Amelina, transcend what we usually can, and what in Ukrainian is expressed by the word mohty. In truth, Vika, seeking justice, a home and a future, bore witness to the path to victory, in Ukraine’s destiny fulfilling itself through pere-mohty, doing more than our strength and imaginings would allow. On the exhale, the song turns into a scream. I can still hear it. It keeps coming back and shouting out the world, turning the dead words “never again” in its mouth. It keeps trying to shout out the conformism of new forms of appeasement that are as old as the world’s ways of bending the knee to tyranny. 

“Into the spring blue field 

out comes a woman in a black dress 

to scream the names of the sisters 

like a bird into an empty sky” 

A woman screaming the names of her sisters, sowing the field with pain, she finds her name in poesis, in doing with words. As a poet, Victoria was born during this great war. Before that she wrote novels, children’s books. In a conversation with Natalia Kornienko, she will leave a trace of her own understanding of being a poet in a liminal situation: “Poems began to appear when I wanted to say something, but was unable to write a prose text or even a banal Facebook post. I have long been convinced that writing fiction is not so much a special ability as a special incapacity, an inability to express myself directly as other people do. When I lost the ability to express myself in prose, it was time for poetry.” She elaborates the rest in the poem  

“No poetry: 

bits of tongue 

resemble poetry 

but it’s not her 

and it’s not her either 

she is in Kharkiv 

as a volunteer” 

In our house in Krasnogruda there is a custom that whoever visits the house for the first time rings a bell suspended under a frog carved in metal at the entrance. We believe that this sound carries a promise to return. Vika rang the bell. And the next evening in Sejny’s Old Yeshiva, during the Café Europa meeting, she read “The Story of Return”, ending the poem with the words:   

“And what did you take with you?  

I just took this story  

on the return  

I have now brought to light  

She is growing” 

Krzysztof Czyżewski is a Polish public intellectual and essayist. He is the founder and director of the Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations Centre in Sejny (Poland). 

literature, poetry, Ukraine, War