Kharkiv’s Voices Cannot Be Silenced
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 13 October 2026
Matthew Parish interviews Miliena Liashenko of the Kharkiv Literary Museum
There are cities whose literary history is an embellishment to their political history, and there are cities in which literature became part of the political struggle over what the city itself was to be. Kharkiv belongs firmly in the latter category.
During the 1920s, when Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine, writers, poets, playwrights and artists converged upon the city. Newspapers and publishing houses proliferated. Ukrainisation created opportunities for a modern national culture. A generation of extraordinarily inventive writers began asking what Ukrainian literature might become if it looked towards Europe and developed on its own terms.
Then came the executions.
The cultural generation subsequently known as the Executed Renaissance was decimated by Stalinist repression. Writers disappeared into prisons and execution grounds; their works were prohibited; and eventually even the memory of the extraordinary cultural world they had created was partially suppressed.
The Kharkiv Literary Museum exists in considerable measure to reverse that process. The idea of establishing such a museum dates to 1932, but the mass repression of Ukrainian writers made its existence politically unwelcome. The project was repeatedly revived after the Second World War, but the present museum was not finally established until 1988. One of its earliest major exhibitions, Ukrainian Golgotha, opened in 1991 and confronted the history of persecuted Ukrainian artists just as Ukraine was achieving independence.
The museum has now survived another Russian assault upon Kharkiv. Its collection was evacuated following the full-scale invasion in 2022. The museum building was damaged by a Russian drone strike in March 2025 and underwent more than a year of repairs before reopening in April 2026 with a new exhibition space.
I interviewed Miliena Liashenko of the Kharkiv Literary Museum about the Executed Renaissance, Kharkiv’s complicated linguistic identity, the survival of culture during wartime and why preserving literature can itself become an act of resistance.
Matthew Parish: Why was it particularly important that Kharkiv should have a museum devoted to Ukrainian literature?
Miliena Liashenko: The Kharkiv Literary Museum did not emerge from nowhere. The idea of establishing it first arose as early as 1932, when Kharkiv was one of the centres of Ukrainian cultural life. But the mass repression of Ukrainian writers made the museum’s existence undesirable.
After the Second World War, writers repeatedly raised the question of creating a literary museum in Kharkiv. There was another initiative in the 1970s, supported by writers including Oles Honchar, but the premises that had been allocated in the Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny House of Writers were ultimately given to the Radio Astronomy Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
It was only at the end of the 1980s that this longstanding ambition was finally realised. The museum was founded in 1988. Iryna Hryhorenko, its first director, played a major role, and writers including Anatolii Pererva, Radii Polonskyi and Viktor Boiko were among those who supported and promoted the idea.
From the beginning, the museum concentrated upon the history of what we call “our twenties”: the generation of writers whose works were banned and many of whose authors were destroyed. In 1991 the museum opened Ukrainian Golgotha, an exhibition commemorating persecuted artists. It helped return this history to public consciousness at precisely the moment when Ukraine was fighting for independence.
For Kharkiv this was not merely about restoring the memory of individual writers. The museum helped the city understand itself as part of Ukrainian cultural history: a history that is complex, modern and closely connected with Europe.
At the beginning of the 1990s the museum also became a meeting place for a free Ukrainian culture. Artists, writers, students and civic activists gathered here. So the museum was not merely telling people about the past. It was helping Kharkiv residents create a new cultural environment and understand themselves as a community.
Matthew Parish: Why did Kharkiv become such an extraordinary centre of Ukrainian literature during the 1920s?
Miliena Liashenko: The reason was in one sense quite straightforward: Kharkiv had become the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The principal newspapers, magazines and publishing houses were established here, and therefore this was where writers could find work. Some came because they wanted to build careers and earn a living; others, more idealistically, wanted to play their part in creating a new Ukrainian art. And we should acknowledge that there were many such idealists.
The young writer Dokiia Humenna later recalled that she had to move from Kyiv to Kharkiv because all the opportunities were now here. People said of the new capital: “Better a live dog than a dead lion.” Many other artists found themselves in the same position.
But Kharkiv also possessed its own atmosphere, which undoubtedly influenced writers and their work. There was the wave of national enthusiasm that had affected so many people during the Ukrainian struggle for national liberation, and then there was the policy of Ukrainisation. Together these circumstances created an exceptional cultural environment.
Matthew Parish: When visitors encounter the Executed Renaissance through museum objects rather than history books, what changes?
Miliena Liashenko: Different kinds of objects allow us to approach the period in different ways. Physical objects give us a sense of authenticity. Books and drafts enable us to trace how a text changed over time, what influenced those changes and how it eventually reached us. Documents help us understand the context. Letters and memoirs transform figures from textbooks into living people: we discover how they communicated and what concerned them.
Every figure is important in a different way. Even somebody who was not outstanding, or who has a poor reputation, can help us understand a period and its literary processes as a whole.
One particularly valuable figure for the museum has been the relatively little-known writer Ivan Dniprovskyi. He belonged to the VAPLITE circle and lived in the Slovo House, and the museum acquired his extensive archive. Through these artefacts we can learn about his friends, who included major literary figures, and about the period more generally.
There is even a sofa from his apartment that accumulated legends during its years at the museum and became known as “Tychyna’s sofa”. The famous poet Pavlo Tychyna never actually owned it; he was simply a frequent visitor to the Dniprovskyis’ home.
And of course we are fortunate to possess artefacts connected with many of the brightest stars of the 1920s, including Mykola Khvylovy, the acknowledged leader of literary life at the time. He continues to influence people today, including members of the museum’s own staff.
Matthew Parish: Is there a danger that remembering the Executed Renaissance exclusively through its destruction can obscure what these people actually created?
Miliena Liashenko: Yes. This is one of the problems we encounter.
One of the Literary Museum’s earliest exhibitions was Ukrainian Golgotha, devoted specifically to the Executed Renaissance. At that time very little was being said about these writers and the exhibition was almost provocative. Today the popularity of the period has increased enormously, and we hope that our many years of work have contributed to that change.
But in restoring the memory of the Executed Renaissance we encounter two almost opposite problems. On one side there is denial and resistance from anti-Ukrainian forces. On the other, within patriotic communities, there can be a tendency to present the period exclusively through a “victim complex”.
Most visitors, however, are very open to discovering new facts and stories. We have repeatedly heard expressions of gratitude from people who realise how much was concealed from them and who now want to fill those gaps in their knowledge.
Matthew Parish: Is the collection still producing discoveries?
Miliena Liashenko: Constantly. The collection continues to acquire both artefacts that will preserve the memory of our own time and this war, and objects from the past. In recent years, for example, we have received stamps and books from the 1920s and 1930s, often thanks to benefactors.
An important event was the acquisition of the seal of VAPLITE. Later, an unsigned manuscript from the 1920s was identified as a text by Khvylovy, his theses Revolution and Art, and was published in 2013.
And, of course, every researcher of the 1920s has one utopian dream: finding the lost second part of Khvylovy’s novel The Woodcocks. We continue to believe that one day it might happen.
Matthew Parish: Has the war changed the way Kharkiv residents understand the city’s Ukrainian cultural inheritance?
Miliena Liashenko: The recovery of the memory of the Executed Renaissance in independent Ukraine happened gradually, not least through education in schools. Russia’s war against Ukraine accelerated this process. As people turned away from the Russian cultural tradition, they increasingly wanted to rediscover their own tradition and reconstruct their identity, and they came to the museum for that purpose.
This was happening in the mid-2010s, but it was nowhere near as pronounced as it became after the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Interest in the Slovo House, that unique Kharkiv landmark, has also risen dramatically as the subject has entered popular culture. When we organised tours around the writers’ building in 2015 and 2016, even the people who lived there often knew little about its history. Today its popularity is impossible to ignore, and places on one of these tours can be filled within a couple of hours.
Matthew Parish: Kharkiv has historically been multilingual. How can a museum recover the Ukrainian voice without simplifying that complicated history into a contest between Ukrainian and Russian?
Miliena Liashenko: We do not present Kharkiv’s linguistic history as a simple confrontation between two languages. Kharkiv has always been multilingual, but the languages in its history did not enjoy equal opportunities or status.
Russian was frequently the language of urban prestige, education and career advancement, while the Ukrainian voice was marginalised or rendered less visible. So when the museum concentrated upon Ukrainian-language literature of the 1920s, this was an attempt to return that voice to the city’s cultural space.
We show how Ukrainian writers operated within this environment: debating the future of their literature, searching for their own cultural foundations and simultaneously experiencing pressure from the imperial centre.
But the museum does not reduce history to a choice between a “correct” and an “incorrect” language, nor do we judge writers solely according to the language in which they wrote. Russian-language Ukrainian literature also belongs to Kharkiv’s history. We need to recognise both the multilingual nature of the city and the inequality and political pressure that shaped people’s linguistic choices.
For us, therefore, this is not simply a question of the language in which texts were written. It is about whose voice could be heard, whose books were published and preserved, and whose were prohibited or forgotten.
The museum helps people see this complicated history without simplifying it, as part of the question of what Kharkiv has been and what it aspires to become.
Matthew Parish: The museum also became part of Kharkiv’s contemporary literary history. How did that happen?
Miliena Liashenko: The museum became somewhere young Kharkiv writers could find one another and realise that they were not alone.
At the beginning of the 1990s, an environment developed here around the poetry group Chervona Fira, including Serhiy Zhadan, Rostyslav Melnykov and Ihor Pylypchuk. The artist Valer Bondar worked at the museum and young artists gathered around him. The Arabesky theatre studio also originated here, and literary and artistic events took place in the museum.
Just as importantly, the museum introduced young writers to the Ukrainian literature of the 1920s: modern, experimental and European, but silenced for so long. This gave them more than knowledge of the past. It gave them a sense of literary continuity. They could argue with the canon, search for a new language and create contemporary Ukrainian culture in Kharkiv.
The museum therefore had both a practical role, as a physical place for meetings and events, and a symbolic one. It helped a younger generation imagine itself as part of a much larger Ukrainian literary history.
Matthew Parish: What happened to you and the museum on 24 February 2022?
Miliena Liashenko: We had been preparing for a possible evacuation since the middle of February. We had lists of the most valuable objects, had begun packing the collection and had prepared the basement as a shelter.
On 24 February, those members of staff who could reach the museum dismantled the exhibition. The most valuable objects had already been packed, so they could be moved more quickly.
But the evacuation took place under extreme conditions. We had neither an established mechanism nor adequate equipment for an evacuation on this scale. The collection was moved in stages with assistance from colleagues and the Territorial Defence Forces. Eventually it reached a relatively safe location.
The museum briefly stopped its public activities, but it did not fall silent. On 21 March 2022 we held an online reading of poetry about the war. Hybrid events followed, as did exhibitions in other cities and, as soon as it became possible, a return to meetings in Kharkiv.
When the originals had to be hidden away for their own protection, we also began talking about the absence of the collection itself: what happens to cultural memory when its physical evidence once again has to be removed from sight?
The war changed the form of our work, but it sharpened our understanding of its purpose. Preserving manuscripts, books, letters and documents meant preserving evidence of the existence of Ukrainian culture, the very culture that Russia attempts to deny and destroy.
Our work therefore became simultaneously museological and civic: preserving this inheritance and continuing to speak about it even when it could no longer be displayed in the customary museum galleries.
Matthew Parish: Do you see parallels between the destruction of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s and Russia’s war against Ukraine today?
Miliena Liashenko: We can find many parallels between how Russia destroyed our culture in the 1920s and how it destroys it now. That is why knowing our history is so important: so that we do not permit it to repeat itself.
The repression of the 1930s demonstrates vividly what we might face again if we surrendered or lost our independence. The methods of destruction differ, but the physical destruction of artists and prohibition of texts, albeit in somewhat different forms, happened then and happen now.
Even more threatening, however, is psychological influence: assimilation, the merging of one’s own culture with Russian culture in people’s minds, and the idea that Ukrainian culture is somehow inferior when set against supposedly “great” Russian culture.
This has become embedded so deeply that even bombs, unfortunately, are not necessarily sufficient to change the consciousness of the masses.
Matthew Parish: Can preserving literature itself be an act of resistance?
Miliena Liashenko: This war is directed not only against territory and people but against memory, language and the right to possess one’s own history.
Preserving books, manuscripts and cultural memory can therefore be a form of resistance, particularly when the enemy is attempting to deny the very existence of Ukrainian culture and erase its traces.
For a museum, saving a manuscript or book means preserving more than an object. It means preserving a human voice, testimony to an era and a connection between generations.
But preservation does not mean simply hiding an object somewhere safe. We must research it, return it to cultural circulation and pass it onwards. Then memory does more than survive the war. It helps us understand who we are and what we are defending.
Matthew Parish: Is a new literature of this war already emerging in Kharkiv?
Miliena Liashenko: It is already being born. Perhaps its first responsibility is to be honest: to record fear and loss, anger and love, the disintegration of ordinary life and people’s attempts to hold that life together.
Future generations will not understand this war through a single great work but through many different voices. Literature will allow them to feel how the war was experienced by individual human beings and to see not only what was destroyed, but what people tried to preserve and defend.
The war tore apart the established connections of Kharkiv’s literary life. Some writers and cultural workers left. Events had to stop or move online, and the museum evacuated its collection. But literary life did not disappear. It changed its location and its form.
By March 2022 the museum had returned to online readings, and in September we held the Fifth Kharkiv festival in the city. Later there were book clubs and meetings despite bombardments and electricity cuts.
The conversations have changed as well. Literature has moved closer to the everyday experience of war: losing one’s home, danger, volunteering, military service, forced departure and the decision to remain.
Increasingly, Kharkiv’s literary events also ask questions about the city’s future. What does it mean to remain here? What will Kharkiv be after the war? How does it see itself within Ukraine and Europe?
Readings and meetings have become a way of being together in a city where ordinary life is constantly interrupted by air-raid sirens. Literature does not abolish war, but it gives people a language, a common space and the possibility of imagining a future.
Matthew Parish: What would you like the Kharkiv Literary Museum to become in the future?
Miliena Liashenko: I see its future as an open literary centre for Kharkiv, somewhere that does not merely preserve books and documents but helps people meet, read, conduct research and talk about the city and its culture.
Following the repairs, the museum reopened and established a public reading room. We would like to develop this so that people return not only for exhibitions but for collaborative work, study and conversation.
With sufficient resources, we would like to make the collection as accessible as possible: to digitise it, create an open catalogue and enable researchers and everyone interested to work with the manuscripts, correspondence, books and archives.
We dream of a permanent exhibition telling the history of the literature of Kharkiv and Slobozhanshchyna in all its complexity, together with travelling exhibitions and cooperation with schools, libraries and museums throughout the region.
Another important priority is supporting writers’ residencies, including the Slovo Residency, and creating conditions for new writing and research. The Slovo Residency and Yurii Shevelov’s apartment are already operating, so we are not starting from nothing. We can expand and strengthen them.
There is also the question of restoring Hnat Khotkevych’s estate in Vysokyi and establishing a proper memorial museum there. But this should not merely be somewhere that commemorates a writer, musician and public figure. We imagine the estate as an open place for education, creative activities, meetings and communication, somewhere that preserves local history, transmits traditions and brings together people of different generations.
We would like it to become a place of strength for the Vysokyi community: somewhere that helps people understand their roots, maintain their connections and create their future together.
Matthew Parish: Finally, if a foreign visitor remembered only one thing after leaving the Kharkiv Literary Museum, what would you want it to be?
Miliena Liashenko: I would want that visitor to understand that Kharkiv is not on the periphery of Ukrainian culture. It is one of its important and distinctive cities. Its literary history is part of the history of Ukraine, not a footnote to the history of Russia or the Soviet Union.
And I would like a foreign visitor to remember that literature here does not mean only books on shelves or names in textbooks. These are people’s voices: their freedom to imagine and to speak, their memory and their right to tell their own history.
The Kharkiv Literary Museum preserves these voices and helps them speak again.
And Ukrainian culture is not merely something that survived the past. It is a living culture being created now, and it has a future.
