September 2 is the first day of school this year. In Ukraine, we have a fixed day, September 1, otherwise it is the first Monday of September. On Friday, I thought I would tell you about school life in Ukraine. Bomb shelters and even underground schools in the regions close to the front line. But I can’t. By the weekend it is clear to me that my story this week is much sadder.
A very young woman is looking at me, in the photo published by my friend from Kharkiv. This young woman’s name is Nika, she is 18 years old. Her name was Nika, she was 18 years old. She was killed by a Russian strike on August 30 in Kharkiv.
The toll of this attack is frightening – 7 dead, a hundred injured, 22 of whom are children.
Yes, you often hear about Kharkiv in the news. But what does this reality represent from the intimacy of a city dweller? My friend from Kharkiv talks about the experience of living under daily explosions. She tells me about her feeling of being lost after the deaths of young people – she calls them “children”. She tells me about the strikes that hit neighborhoods that were previously considered “calm” and “quiet”. She tells me about her presence in these neighborhoods that have become dangerous. There are always civilians dying in this kind of “red zone” after Russian attacks that target civilian neighborhoods, such as the one in downtown Kharkiv.
One of these dead is Nika. She was a young artist – painter and poet.
A sad irony: Nika was passionate about the legacy of Ukrainian poets of the 1920s and 1930s. A beautiful avant-garde generation. Almost all of these artists lived very short lives. They died very young under the hammer of Stalin’s repressions. Almost all of them were shot in 1937. This generation is called “the shot Renaissance”. It is linked to Kharkiv as a city and as a modern space of the early 20th century.
By the way, the memory and name of this generation are built in the Polish and French contexts. In 1959 an Anthology of the texts of this generation was published in Paris. In this book the phenomenon of the renaissance shot is described. This anthology is created by Jurij Lawrynenko, the book is made on the initiative of Jerzy Giedroyc, editor-in-chief of the magazine culture.
The artist Nika Kojouchko loved and illustrated the texts of the Renaissance shot. Nika’s story is a story of the future that we will not have. We will never know what painter she would have become. We will never see her exhibitions. We will not read books with her illustrations. Her work represents the cultural heritage that we will not have.
