Beginning on Thursday, August 27, all days blur into one long, endless air raid alarm.
13 air alarms a day, lasting 872 minutes.
The next day—12 alarms, lasting 634 minutes.
The next—10 alarms, lasting 644 minutes.
And so it goes every day.
Russia sends drone after drone, forging an unbroken chain of threats. Explosions sound around-the-clock, becoming a constant of everyday life.
It is as if bursts of life are trying to break through that constant blackness with their light.
And in a single night the losses exceed a year’s worth of sales.
The city is paralyzed.
During air raid alarms state institutions close. Shopping malls, grocery stores, all closed.
No documents can be obtained from state institutions. No doctor’s appointments at public hospitals.
Children don’t make it in time to class after the all-clear before the new alarm sounds, and they rush back to the shelter.
Meanwhile, in broad deadly daylight, a Russian drone attacks a university in the heart of Kyiv. 160 students make it in time to the sheltered safety, and casualties are avoided.
The scale of this paralyzing tragedy is unfathomable.
Russia is burning down warehouses around Kyiv.
Food is targeted. Construction materials. Electronics. Children’s toys. Shoes. Humanitarian aid.
One loss I heard of just today: works by a contemporary Ukrainian artist that were bound for Paris for his first solo exhibition. The reports say that when a post office facility was struck, about a third of the entire exhibition was destroyed.
Throughout August, warehouses storing books belonging to Ukrainian publishers also came under Russian attack.
The Russians destroy more than 12 million Ukrainian books.
For comparison, Ukraine publishes an estimated 26-30 million copies of books a year.
But the worst part is that the full consequences of these attacks will only become apparent with time.
A good friend of mine sold his debut novel to a publisher. The first book in a fantasy trilogy that was due to come out in the next two or three months.
Everything was going as it should: the writer grumbling about the editor’s revisions, ordering the lettering for the cover, and planning book launches.
And then a Russian missile strikes, destroying 400 thousand books belonging to his future publisher.
And in a single night the losses exceed a year’s worth of sales.
The next morning, my friend says he understands—to survive, publishers will have to print the books they know are guaranteed to sell. It is hard to bet on an unknown debut author.
At some point, the body grows tired of feeling constantly under threat.
A few days later, my friend receives an email. The publisher apologizes and says that his book will probably have to be moved to next spring.
My friend asks: what else can he do? He says he has to write the second book and believe that it will reach its readers.
The destroyed logistics centers held books from dozens of publishers—large, small, and niche.
Some publishers lost about 80 percent of all the books they had in stock.
Or take, for example, a publisher of translated comics. Expensive, niche, and difficult to produce. I never got around to ordering the few volumes I had been eyeing for months. Now 300 thousand copies have been destroyed—simply everything they had managed to produce over several years.
Obviously, when survival becomes the main problem, everything goes back to the basics.
What can be sold. What is easy and straightforward.
Fewer debuts by little-known authors. Fewer experiments. Less translated niche literature.
Another consequence of the destruction of books is Ukrainian writers being left without their work. For example, a successful Ukrainian author whose print runs for five of her books were destroyed in a Russian attack.
All five books had been printed by the same publisher. Destroyed in a single night.
If we stop thinking of books as acts of divine inspiration and start thinking of them as products from which an author receives royalties, then in a situation like this, a writer simply finds themselves without a source of income.
And if the royalties you were counting on are no longer there, you have to earn that money somewhere else. Instead of working on your next book.
And this is yet another break in the logistics chain. Perhaps not as noticeable as a missing bottle of laundry detergent from the shelves or a desperately needed medicine. But the chain is fragile, and it breaks so easily.
Our hearing grows sharper. As if there were a constantly focused, maximally tense point at the back of the head responsible for listening. These days, I feel as if we have become characters in a horror film, and according to the rules of this world, our survival depends on how acute our hearing is.
We listen intently to the day. We watch the flashes in the night sky.
And when we distinguish the explosions of air defense, we thank those defending our skies.
A friend tells me that he finally went to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey with his wife.
I ask, “And how was it?” meaning, of course, whether he liked the film.
But my friend says—three air raid alarms during the screening, and after each all-clear, the story was rewound ten minutes.
For the viewer, The Odyssey between air raid sirens feels like a long journey in itself.
At some point, the body grows tired of feeling constantly under threat. Night. Outside the window, the familiar explosions of Shahed drones are joined by the rumble of missiles.
Books unwritten. Lives unwritten.
Explosion after explosion. Explosion after explosion.
But it turns out that sleep deprivation and exhaustion are stronger than the instinct for self-preservation.
Once again, normality itself changes.
Now, being in a state of alert becomes normal, rather than being free from it.
This is how Kharkiv lives.
This is how Kherson lives.
This is how Zaporizhzhia lives.
This is how Chernihiv lives.
This is how Sumy lives.
And when Western colleagues ask yet again—what does literature and writing mean in times of war?—I answer:
Writers, translators, and publishers killed by the Russians.
Writers, translators, and publishers serving in the military.
Millions of books burned by the Russians. Dozens of publishing houses destroyed.
Books unwritten. Lives unwritten.
And 33 letters of the Ukrainian alphabet, which each time I pull from the ashes, shake off the ash and bits of concrete, clean them of glass and missile fragments, and arrange them in a new order.
A black cloud of smog rises over the city. A dry cough tears at my throat. Time to find shelter.
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“Writing in Times of War,” by Oleksandr Mykhed. Translated by Yulia Tomchuk. Mykhed’s event is available to watch at hayfestival.com/anytime
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