'Ukrainian Lessons' Review: Art and War in Ukraine
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- Charlotte Higgins's book "Ukrainian Lessons" draws parallels between Greek myth (Homer, Aeschylus, Ovid) and the wartime experiences of Ukrainian artists, poets, and filmmakers, with the author arguing their work "will shape the war's memory."
- Anna Zvyagintseva designed a "Sustainable Costume for an Invader" — a bodysuit impregnated with seeds echoing the viral image of a Ukrainian woman handing sunflower seeds to a Russian soldier so flowers would grow from his body.
- Marharyta Polovinko, killed in action in 2025 while serving as a drone operator, made macabre pencil drawings about the war, latterly using her own blood as a medium, including images of dogs eating a dead Russian soldier.
- Yaroslav Pilunskiy, a cinematographer from the Kyiv-based film collective Babylon 13, transformed into a drone soldier for the army after Russia's invasion; Higgins notes he could no longer remember the film he had been editing in Rome on the eve of war.
- Diana Berg, a cultural manager twice forced to flee eastern Ukrainian cities, told Higgins: "Until the war is over, the best conceptual artists in Ukraine are the army."
- Sasha Dovzhyk, a writer and editor, wrote in an essay quoted by Higgins: "Russian is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat," reflecting the fierce backlash against Russian culture in free Ukraine.
Why it matters: The book documents cultural memory in real time — Higgins's central claim is that this wartime art "will shape the war's memory," a thesis tested by the fact that one profiled artist (Polovinko) was killed in 2025 and another (Pilunskiy) abandoned filmmaking for drone warfare. For readers and historians, the volume functions as both an artistic survey and a record carved while its subjects are still dying.
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