Life at the Edge
Translated by Tetiana Savchynska
And there is no edge—only a border and a goal,
elusively close and clear,
high and simple.
—Kateryna Kalytko
Because this Love
that is like blunt knives,
this bitter Love
that is becoming yours,
endures in those
who are at the edge
and those
who are beyond it.
—Artur Dron
The front line is eight hours from Kyiv by car. That’s if we travel east or south. Heading north, it’s just three hours to the border of Russia or Belarus.
Tanks are slower than cars, so it can feel as though there's a great distance from actual danger. In reality, enemy missiles and drones are far faster than cars and any neighborhood may emerge at the epicenter of this war at any moment.
All over Ukraine, in Lviv and Kyiv, Kremenchuk and Drohobych, Rivne and Khmelnytsky, people have experienced the front line running right through their streets. Through their maternity ward in Dnipro. Their shopping center in Kremenchuk. Their kindergarten in Brovary.
Nothing brings you back to reality quite like a car trip to the front line. For the first couple of hundred kilometers, nothing seems particularly unusual, apart from leaving Kyiv’s traffic jams behind. But when you’re just fifty kilometers from the front line, civilian cars thin out. At thirty kilometers, military vehicles dominate.
Here, more and more of the buildings bear the telltale marks of artillery strikes. The buildings are wounded and blind—as you continue on, there are fewer and fewer intact windows. Instead of looking out into the world, the buildings seem to be gazing inwards.
Streetlights, colors, and faces become rare. So do children and young people. As we approach the edge, the civilian population noticeably ages. Eventually, the only people remaining are those who cannot be transplanted, who have grown deep roots into their land like hundred-year-old trees. They are extensions of their own homes, hostages of their own geography and history.
As we approach the edge, reality thins out and there is less of everything: fewer people, less movement, less life. A person on the street is a noteworthy sight. An open café is the center of cultural life. A military car speeding by is a major event. The familiar urban hubbub is replaced by the sounds of explosions in the distance. The closer we get to the edge, the faster we move: we know that death always approaches faster than we can move. The air itself is dangerous.
Who are the people who remain at the edge? Who are the people who come here?
They are the ones who simply can’t do otherwise. How can you leave Izium when you have buried your three grandchildren and their parents here in a shared coffin cobbled together out of boards and carpets?
How can you leave Kherson where you’re caring for your ninety-nine-year-old bedridden grandmother living in an apartment with boarded-up windows, just a few kilometers from the enemy positions? You cling to the faith that your grandmother will live to a hundred and that the enemy will eventually withdraw.
In Kherson, the people have survived occupation and the flooding caused when the Russians destroyed the Kakhovka Dam. They’ve moved underground. From there, they organize exhibits and read books, defying the death that falls from the sky rather than rain. When the Russians destroyed the libraries, Khersonites created their new ones in the bomb shelters that were once just basements.
In Kamianka near Izium, people live in the ruins of their homes, which have been turned inside out by the war. They clear their yards of landmines and carry out repairs bit by bit. Volunteers bring in materials. Soldiers give them this or that. They wrench life from death, slowly and patiently, even though they know that a single lifetime won’t be enough to rebuild it all.
In Velyka Novosilka, people survived the 2022 invasion together. The town was once called “Velyka Yanysolia,” which reminds us of the Greeks who were deported here from Crimea by Catherine II. The 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive started here, too. Today, just ten kilometers from the front line, people tend their livestock, work the land, and make jam that they force on guests. Everything grows in this chornozem, black soil as fertile as the primordial energy of life.
In Izium, the residents come to mourn their dead, fifty-two people crushed under the rubble of a high-rise building on First of May Street, destroyed by a single five-hundred-kilogram Russian bomb. They come to remember the slow death of their third-floor neighbor, as she lay trapped under the rubble. They come to remember the boy who refused to come out from under debris, his face was destroyed in the explosion and he could no longer eat or talk.
In Kharkiv, people write poems on the walls of their buildings.
In Posad-Pokrovske, the residents collect books for a library that no longer exists.
In Polohy, people living under occupation dictate their poems by phone to those on the other side of the front line.
And they all remain at the edge.
The edge is maintained by soldiers. People in fatigues, torn from their own homes, who’ve given up their personal lives for months at a time. Now they risk their lives, follow orders, and sleep in trenches, dugouts, and the homes of strangers.
They build a new community from scratch, one with its own rules and regulations, its own ties that bind, its own sense of humor, its own brotherhood and sisterhood, its own daily losses. They speak their own language, which becomes increasingly incomprehensible to civilians. At every point along this line, a new Sich is being born, one moment at a time.
Some of these people in fatigues exhibit a uniquely exceptional inner strength. They’re the ones looking beyond the edge—toward their homes on the other side.
For them, fighting at the edge, fighting on the front line, means fighting for what lies beyond. Fighting for the garden they played in as children, now under occupation. Fighting for the schoolyard poplars that bore witness to their first love. For the woods near Mariupol or the newly renovated house in Starobilsk, now occupied by enemy soldiers. For the collection of traditional vyshyvanky left behind in the closet in Polohy. The neighbors report that the enemy soldiers shot the vyshyvanky—they even hate Ukrainian clothing.
So much still lies beyond that edge. So much that is ours, that we must try to recover. As poet Kateryna Kalytko writes, “And there is no edge—only a border and a goal, elusively close and clear, high and simple.”
This edge runs right through the country. Two years ago, it came very close for many of us. The ruins in Irpin, Borodianka, and Moshchun serve as ever-present reminders. Now the edge, the line is a bit further away. Now it’s eight hours away by car.
Wherever it runs, the edge is no longer a metaphor. Neither are death, abandonment, or loss. These words have regained their literal meanings. They leave cuts and burns.
The boundary gains definition at the point where life meets death. It becomes far easier to sense that edge beyond which lies non-being, beyond which the silence of oblivion takes over.
Life at the edge is the edge of life itself, the point at which life fights desperately for itself, defending every square millimeter. Life at the edge is the vulnerability of our bodies, the fragility of our homes, and our relentless care for each other.
The edge—what happens here changes everything. The edge is not the periphery of a center, it is the center. There is no opposition between center and edge, because the edge is the center. Its rhythm is the rhythm of the heart. It pumps the blood that keeps the organism alive.
The edge is where everything begins, not where it ends.
Our world isn’t disappearing at this edge. It is being born.
This edge, in air thinned by danger, gives birth to the calm and safety that allows millions of people to set wake-up alarms, plan workdays, schedule appointments for next month.
This edge, in the stillness of the sniper silently watching for the enemy and in the focus of soldiers digging in and holding their positions, gives birth to the freedom of movement that allows millions of people outside Ukraine’s borders to buy tickets to Paris or Toronto, to fly across the globe.
These ruined villages are where the human need for stewardship is born, the very same concern that spurs European governments to reduce CO2 emissions or to introduce new environmental protection programs. Here is Nina, an eighty-five-year-old grandmother in the village of Korobochkyne, who miraculously survived the shelling of her home. Now she lives in her summer kitchen, refusing to leave the ruins of her home because her dogs are here and they are her family.
This edge, where a medical evacuation team risks their lives transporting a wounded soldier to a stabilization point, gives birth to the love that animates our gestures as we take a newborn in our arms hoping that this new life will be a long and happy one, that the infant will endure through life’s trials and will carry on.
There, at the edge, people passionately do what they believe in. At the edge, people muster the courage to actually be what others only believe. They are the ones who actually embody our convictions and turn to face the evil, sheltering the rest of the world behind their backs. Our shared world.
If you want to understand Ukraine, you need to spend time at the front line, travel to the front line, help the people on the front line. If you want to understand Europe, you need to understand Ukraine. What the front means for Ukraine, Ukraine means for the free world. This is the edge that is the center. And this center is bleeding.
Let us listen closely to this edge. It is not the end of life. It is the beginning.
Today, it might seem that the edge is eight hours away by car. But in reality, the edge runs within each of us. It always runs within us.
Reality
Translated by Dominique Hoffman
We’re heading out of Bobryk near Kyiv when we see a crushed car. The once quite average vehicle has been transformed into a jumbled heap of metal. A crushed iron bug.
A Russian tank drove over it. At the time, the starosta of the neighboring village was still in it. He managed to jump free a few seconds before impact.
It’s a common sight in this war: cars crushed by Russian tanks. Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel—each little town has its own “car cemetery” filled with these heaps of crushed metal. Many of them have also been shot at or shelled. Some of them had people in them at the time.
Why were Russian tank drivers so determined to crush them? It was not enough just to shoot them or kill those trying to flee, why this need to crush the cars? Maybe they felt so weak that they needed to convince themselves of their own strength. Maybe they saw the Ukrainians as parasites to be ground into the dirt, taking pleasure in hearing the crunch of their thin shells. Perhaps it all just felt like a virtual reality game with no meaningful limits. Maybe they were envious of Ukrainian villagers’ cars and paved streets.
We can accept any one of these explanations or even all of them together. In any case, they all point to a single symptom: the Russians are fighting a war against reality. They hate reality too much to endure. A Ukrainian villager’s car embodies a reality that is unbearable, unpleasant, unacceptable. It is not enough to kill it. It must be crushed like a bug. With the power of a boot. With the power of an apparatus that is incapable of creation. With the power of their hatred of existence.
*
War changes your understanding of what is possible and what is not, of the very nature of reality. Things you would never have imagined possible become real. A missile strike on a shopping center filled with hundreds of people (Kremenchuk); the shelling of a train station where dozens of people were waiting for their train (Kramatorsk); brutal torture and murders in basements (Bucha); people held in the basement of a school for weeks as if in freight cars (Yahidne); the total destruction of cities and mass graves filled with thousands of people (Mariupol).
Just a few years ago these things seemed impossible. We thought a repeat of the Holocaust or Holodomor was impossible. Now it is all happening. Now it is excruciatingly real and it contradicts all of our previous beliefs about what is possible.
The residents of Chernihiv describe life during the period of the heaviest shelling. Money lost all meaning. People switched to bartering, the most basic exchange in which the most unexpected things proved to be currency: cigarettes, for example. And food: war doesn’t offer choices. At some point, you could find yourself in a situation in which the only available food is chicken brought in by volunteers. Or some shrimp, which was all that remained in the shops. There’s nothing other than shrimp. The only available reality is shrimp.
War shuts off reality and deprives it of color. The most ordinary things are no longer available. When Mariupol was left without water, people turned snow into water, the snow that was still on the ground in early March. The cold made the nights unbearable but also offered the promise of salvation: you could turn snow into water—no less a miracle than turning water into wine.
In wartime, reality becomes very narrow. You see only the sliver that is illuminated by the spotlight of your wounded consciousness. Your mind seizes on this fragment in isolation from everything surrounding it, like a ray of light in a baroque painting. You can see only what this celestial ray illuminates. The breadth of reality you had come to expect during peacetime is gone. The expanse of countries, seas, and continents is replaced by a reality of very specific coordinates. Yes, reality becomes impoverished—but also sharper. So sharp you could cut yourself on it. It wounds.
This reality stabs, slices, shoots, pierces. And the only way out leads to heaven or hell.
*
During peacetime, you live in a multiplicity of possible worlds. You can escape from one to another. From the daytime world of routine to an evening world of relaxation. From the work environment of concrete cities to a restful environment on the beach. From the world of the here-and-now to a world of there-and-then, spending your evenings watching shows about the Borgias and Medici.
In wartime, this multiplicity disappears. Suddenly you can’t just run off somewhere. You can’t get on an airplane to fly away. You can’t just open up a book to read something. You can’t watch a movie in the evening. Your mind doesn’t have the space for movies. Your mental geography no longer has the space for dreams of warm, happy places.
Even if someone suggests going somewhere, you just shrug your shoulders: what for? You’ve suddenly come to perceive your country as an infant you can’t leave under any circumstances. You feel as though everything will fall apart if you cross the border. The planets will stop in their orbits.
The idea of possible worlds could only have emerged during peacetime. Leibniz himself, who came up with the idea, became possible only after Europe’s religious wars had ended. He was only possible in a Europe that could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Shakespeare, for instance, never would have come up with the idea. There are no possible worlds in Shakespeare’s drama, or the dramas of Sophocles, Racine, or Lesia Ukrainka. There is only the pitiless reality that can’t be escaped. Sooner or later it will kill you. And crush your dreams. There is only the reality you hate for its cruelty.
But you also love it. It’s all you have. Today, tomorrow, and the day after—only this reality.
*
War is actually like verse drama. Drama may be the most honest literary genre. There is nothing superfluous. No descriptions, no landscapes, no inner world or other worlds. There is only action. And every action, every second of it, changes everything.
Change is possible in drama, but only along a vertical axis, not the horizontal. Drama overturns the world, standing the pyramid on its tip. The bottom rises to the top, throwing the top down. In a drama, you can be simultaneously from the top and bottom: you can’t be somewhere in between.
This is exactly what is happening to us. Our reality is as narrow as a mountain pass. But the heavens turn upside down here. Those who were at the bottom are catapulted to the top. The ones at the top are tossed to the bottom. This is the reality of an earthquake, the reality of an artillery strike.
In the Saltivka district of Kharkiv, a wounded neighborhood that has suffered severely in the fighting, we saw a car that had been thrown several meters in the air by the blast wave. The car landed on the roof of a garage and there it remained.
When you watch video of the attack on Kremenchuk, you see iron and concrete suddenly raining down on people the size of insects. Russian “hail” from the skies.
We are living in this blast-wave reality. We’ve been thrown into the air like tiny, helpless kittens. And we don’t know if we’ll catch hold on the heights or crash to the bottom.
*
War quickly turns you into a witness, someone who has crossed through the rift of history. When you’re a witness, there are many things you can tell. But most often you lose the gift of speech. There may be no occasion for telling your story. Or you can’t find the necessary words. Or the right words just don’t exist.
We try to tell each other our stories. We listen to them, we trade them. The exchange of stories has become more important than the exchange of things. Words are more important than money now.
In this instant, you understand what history is. History is what happens to you at the very moment you may cease to exist. History is a perilous walk at the edge of non-being.
And after all, this is a story of life and death. About the ones who could have died, but leaped across the abyss. And those who leapt into the abyss—who died for others.
People never just die in a war. They always die for someone else. Death is no longer simply a private matter. And grieving isn’t enough—every death carries obligations. It is always a beginning and not just an end.
In the war, you understand that you are alive today because someone else died. Someone gave their life to protect yours. And so, each death is a connection. Each death multiplies us. Each death gives us more names. We are overgrown with them, the names of our people.
We want these names to put down roots. Roots to the heavens.
*
It’s a paradox really. Reality narrows during war—but it also expands.
Your reality becomes one small slice illuminated by a spotlight. And yet, you know so much more than you did before. You know a lot more names. The names of towns and villages. Types of military equipment. Rules of survival. People write you from all over the world. People you will never meet thank your countrymen.
In wartime, everyone becomes a signalman. Your life only has meaning through its connections to others. “Self-expression” is no longer a value, because you’ve stopped expressing your self. You find strength only when you continue a process rather than initiating a new one; you don’t finish something, you pass it onward. You need to be part of a chain. You work on things you didn’t start and that you won’t be the one to finish.
This is how your microcosm becomes a macrocosm. This is how you lose yourself in order to gain yourself.
*
The Russians aren’t waging war against Ukraine. Not even against Europe. They’re waging war against reality.
Disinformation and lies have become their only means of thinking, the air they breathe. When a Muscovite was asked by a journalist what she expected in the near future, she answered: “joy.” 500-kilogram bombs dropped from Russian planes on Ukrainian cities and towns; apartment buildings collapsed like houses of cards burying their residents inside; civilians shot in the back of the head in basements—it turns out that all of this is an occasion for joy. Another Russian said that he’d cut off communication with his Ukrainian relatives because they “read the wrong Telegram channels.” We cry out in the language of the dead and the destroyed cities that we see with our own eyes, realities that haunt our waking dreams and torment us at night. They tell us: “you’re reading the wrong Telegram channels.”
It is absurd and brutal, but it is the truth. And it’s the Russian “reality” that is desperately waging war against reality. A war against facts, against truth, against reality itself.
What can oppose it? Life. A return to life. Touching the hard surface of existence. Its material simplicity. Its simple undeniability. You simply need to see everything with your own eyes. You have to feel everything and touch everything. You can’t allow yourself to formulate your “worldview” from Telegram channels and entertainment shows. You must dive into the river of simple, raw reality. Drop down into it as if entering a mine.
Reality is right here, beside us, below us, above us. Often cruel, sometimes banal, but undeniable. The reality of war reminds us that some people can revert to beasts. And that any of us could die at any moment. Including our children.
Despite all this, Ukrainians cling to reality. The reality of our land, the reality of our own villages, the reality of our gardens. We have never wanted to leave this place. Our metaphysics is material, our philosophy is woven into literature, our abstract painting grew from the soil of folk art.
“Buried knee-deep in the earth, the dark multitude fell and rose up . . .” wrote Vasyl Stefanyk more than a hundred years ago. “The earth groaned under the beating of their hearts.”
“Knee-deep in the earth.” In the embrace of the earth that groans “under the beating of their hearts.” Ukrainians have merged with reality and put down roots in it.
Maybe that’s why they are so hard to defeat.
Culture
Translated by Lyubov Kovalchuk
The floor is strewn with books. They lie there like fallen leaves.
The windows have been shattered, so the books rustle with every draft. White lace curtains, shredded by shrapnel, twist in the wind like the souls of the departed.
We touch the books: they are covered in dust and grime. They are like dead bodies sprinkled with earth. They will not live again, they will not be read, they will not be restored.
This is the village of Posad-Pokrovske south of Kherson. Half of the homes here were completely destroyed and the remainder are seriously damaged. After the capture of Kherson, the Russians moved towards Mykolaiv. The Ukrainians stopped them here. The price of defense was damage to every house.
Once there was a giant House of Culture here that included a theater for 600 people, a community library, and a children’s library. Now there is a huge hole in the wall of the theater, large enough for five people to walk abreast. There are smaller holes as well. Rays of light shine through shrapnel holes in the roof. The sound engineer’s console lies on the floor filthy and riddled with shrapnel. Music has yielded to silence and the crunch of broken glass underfoot.
The books in the library are still moving. Their pages turn in the draft that rushes in through the shattered windows. They seem alive—like birds about to take flight.
*
In the village of Zarichne, near Zaporizhzhia and not far from the front line, there’s a library. It was hit by a Russian missile. Now there is no library—but there are still books.
The books are buried under the stone and brick of the destroyed walls and ceiling. It is all mixed together and when you reach down to the floor, you do not know what you’ll touch: the thin pages of a book or the hard, rough texture of stone.
In Verbivka, not far from Balakliya, the Russians destroyed a school. When they were forced to flee the Kharkiv region, they started firing on everything within striking distance. One day after the village was liberated, they shelled Verbivka, destroying the school and the library.
It’s been a year now that the school has stood there in that state—a state of abandoned ruin. The classrooms are filled with jumbled desks and chairs. The floor is scattered with artificial pink flowers, a soccer ball, and a glass bottle that somehow didn’t break.
We walk through this space as if exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization.
Books are mixed with rubble. Here, too, should you reach out for a book to read, your hand is just as likely to encounter the hard surface of concrete which once formed a wall.
Nearby, in the village of Zalyman, there is no library at all. Only a few burnt pages remain, their charred and tattered remains now resting on a fallen roof shingle. The walls are bare, the roof burned long since, and there hasn’t been a floor for a long while either. We pick our way through rubble, concrete blocks, piles of shattered brick, and the rusted remains of metal structures. Metal fire-blackened shelves now hold stones rather than books. Silent stones have replaced the fragile, incorporeal power of words and language. A missile strike caused a fire that destroyed everything. Including the adjacent school. Today the library is just burned walls, ruins without a roof, and the sky you see above. Here, the sky is your ceiling.
In Sviatohirsk, a lovely town on the banks of the Siverskyi Donets that has been completely destroyed by Russia’s war, we find ourselves in the building that served as the Russian headquarters. We see boxes filled with Ukrainian books, new books, clearly seized by the Russian Army and prepared for destruction.
It is not only living people who are suffering in this war—all they have created suffers as well. The words and feelings they expressed in texts or on stone suffer. The children who won’t go to school suffer. The children who will touch their native soil only through the screen of a monitor.
The ancients carved words into stone and wove them firmly into memory to preserve them. Stone tablets hewn with text and ars memoriae were strategies to conquer oblivion. To outwit time.
Today these books mingled with stone signify something else entirely: forgetting has the power to devour all that we have created. The drive toward death and destruction is not an invention of psychoanalysts, but a direct threat.
Can we stop it?
