Charlotte Higgins’s Ukrainian Lessons traces how art survives amid war
In a book on creativity under bombardment, Charlotte Higgins follows Ukrainian artists, poets and filmmakers as they adapt to invasion, loss and military service. Her account suggests that wartime culture is not a luxury but part of how Ukraine remembers, resists and endures.
Art under fire Charlotte Higgins’s new book examines a grim subject with unusual steadiness: what happens to art when a country is living through invasion. Drawing on visits to Ukraine during the war, the Guardian’s chief culture writer produces what is described as a vivid and hopeful study of cultural life under extreme violence, one that moves between frontline reality and the stubborn persistence of creative work.
The book’s scenes often arrive through small, startling details. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, Higgins sees a man in a stream stacking stones into a precarious tower, an image she treats as a compressed emblem of life in a city close to the Russian border. Elsewhere, a boy’s cartoons stop abruptly during a power cut, and the silence is filled by the distant sound of explosions. These moments matter because they show how ordinary perception has been remade by war: even art, play and distraction are repeatedly interrupted by electricity outages, shelling and the constant awareness of danger.