When Words Become Witnesses: Matthew Parish Interviews Halyna Kruk
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 15 November 2026
he Ukrainian poet, literary scholar and cultural intellectual on literature, war, national identity and the moral responsibility of words
There are moments in the history of nations when literature ceases to be principally an aesthetic pursuit and becomes something approaching a moral necessity. Ukraine, in the fifth year of Russia's full-scale invasion and the thirteenth year of the broader war, has found itself living through precisely such a moment. Its writers have been required to confront questions that most European intellectuals had imagined belonged to another century: the relationship between language and national survival, the responsibility of the artist towards the dead and the possibility of beauty in a society experiencing systematic destruction.
Few contemporary Ukrainian poets embody these intellectual challenges more compellingly than Halyna Kruk, the Lviv-born poet, prose writer, translator and literary scholar whose work has attracted international recognition. An associate professor in the Department of Ukrainian Literature at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Kruk has combined the scholarly examination of Ukrainian literary traditions with an increasingly urgent engagement with the contemporary experience of war.
Her literary achievements are substantial. Her collections include An Adult Woman, Co(an)existence, BookWar and the English-language volumes A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails and Lost in Living. The former was shortlisted for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize in 2024. Her literary work has been translated into numerous languages, introducing international audiences to a Ukrainian poetic tradition that has too often been subordinated to the cultural prestige of Russia.
Kruk is also a member and former vice-president of Ukrainian PEN, the Ukrainian centre of the international association of writers committed to freedom of expression, intellectual independence and cultural exchange. The organisation's work has acquired extraordinary significance during the war, when the defence of Ukrainian literature is inseparable from the defence of the people who write, publish, teach and preserve it.
Matthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief of The Lviv Herald, invited Halyna Kruk to discuss the moral obligations of writers in wartime, the continuing importance of Ukrainian universities, the relationship between literature and political freedom and the extraordinary burden placed upon the written word when an entire nation is fighting for its existence.
Matthew Parish: Ukraine has endured years of war, destruction and bereavement. What can poetry achieve in circumstances in which the ordinary vocabulary of human experience seems inadequate?
Halyna Kruk: The first distinction to make is between explaining an experience and communicating its human significance. Journalism can tell us how many people were killed when a missile struck an apartment building. Historical scholarship can identify the causes of the war, while political analysis can explain the strategic objectives of the aggressor. Yet none of these disciplines necessarily captures what happens to the interior life of an individual confronted with the death of somebody they love.
Poetry approaches the same reality through a different intellectual method. It concentrates meaning rather than expanding explanation. An apparently insignificant detail — a child's abandoned shoe, an unanswered telephone, the familiar arrangement of objects in a kitchen whose inhabitants have disappeared — can communicate something that escapes statistical description.
This is not because poetry is superior to journalism or history. It is because the different disciplines address different dimensions of reality. Poetry offers an account of emotional experience that can preserve the individuality of those who might otherwise disappear into the anonymous arithmetic of war.
I think that is particularly important in Ukraine today. We are surrounded by information about destruction, but there is a difference between knowing that destruction has occurred and understanding what it means to those who experience it. Poetry cannot reverse death, restore destroyed houses or bring back the missing. What it can do is resist the transformation of individual human lives into mere statistics.
Matthew Parish: Does that imply that a poet living in wartime has a moral obligation to write about the war? Or should artistic freedom remain absolute, even when society is confronting an existential threat?
Halyna Kruk: There is a fundamental distinction between moral responsibility and artistic compulsion. A society at war may understandably expect its intellectuals to recognise the seriousness of its circumstances. Nevertheless, the moment we begin prescribing what poets must write, we risk reproducing the authoritarian habits against which Ukraine is fighting.
An artist's responsibility is not necessarily to write about the war, but to write with integrity. A love poem composed during an invasion may be just as authentic an expression of resistance as a poem about an artillery bombardment. Indeed, the preservation of ordinary human feeling is itself a rejection of the proposition that war must consume every aspect of human existence.
There is another danger in demanding that every artistic work serve an immediate political objective. Literature then becomes subordinate to the requirements of public messaging. A poem might be patriotic and aesthetically successful, but patriotism alone cannot guarantee its literary merit.
The paradox is that a nation defending freedom must protect the freedom of its writers to refuse the roles assigned to them. Artistic independence is not a luxury postponed until victory. It is one of the things that makes victory worth achieving.
We should remember that Ukrainian culture has already experienced the consequences of political authorities determining what literature ought to say. The Soviet experience taught us that the instrumentalisation of literature ultimately impoverishes both artistic expression and political life. There is no reason to repeat that experience, even under circumstances of exceptional national emergency.
Matthew Parish: You are both a creative writer and a scholar of Ukrainian literary history, particularly the Baroque tradition. Does historical scholarship offer a distinctive understanding of Ukraine's present cultural struggle?
Halyna Kruk: Historical knowledge places contemporary suffering within a much longer account of cultural survival. Ukrainian literature did not suddenly appear with independence in 1991, nor did it begin with the national revival of the nineteenth century. It possesses a complex intellectual inheritance extending through medieval religious writing, the Baroque, early modern scholarship and the political and literary movements of subsequent centuries.
The Ukrainian Baroque is especially revealing because it emerged within a world of competing religious, political and linguistic influences. Literature was not simply an ornament of a settled society. It was a means by which communities understood their institutions, formulated collective identities and negotiated their relationships with external powers.
The study of this tradition challenges the imperial narrative according to which Ukrainian culture is merely a provincial variation of Russian civilisation. Ukrainian intellectual history developed through its own encounters with European thought, including theological debate, rhetorical experimentation and philosophical scholarship.
Understanding that history matters today because an attack upon a nation's sovereignty is frequently accompanied by an attack upon its cultural legitimacy. A people whose history can be dismissed as derivative becomes easier to represent as having no independent political destiny.
The scholar therefore contributes to national resilience not by inventing a glorious past, but by recovering an authentic and complicated one.
We must be careful not to replace one mythology with another. Ukrainian history contains contradictions, foreign influences and periods of profound internal disagreement. These complexities do not diminish the legitimacy of Ukrainian national culture. On the contrary, they demonstrate that we possess a genuine historical civilisation, rather than an artificial identity manufactured for contemporary political purposes.
Matthew Parish: How can a poet describe the suffering of others without appropriating experiences that are not their own?
Halyna Kruk: This may be one of the most difficult ethical problems confronting wartime literature. The poet is drawn towards the suffering of others by sympathy, but sympathy is not the same thing as knowledge. To imagine the grief of a bereaved mother is not to have undergone that grief. To describe the experience of a soldier in a trench is not necessarily to understand what that experience means from within.
There is a temptation, particularly in periods of collective catastrophe, to treat the intensity of one's moral concern as sufficient authority to speak on behalf of others. Yet good intentions do not abolish the difference between witnessing and invention.
A responsible literary approach begins with recognising the limits of one's perspective. The poet can describe the consequences of another person's suffering, the circumstances in which it becomes visible and the response it provokes in the observer. What must be approached with greater caution is the claim to possess another person's inner life.
This does not mean that imaginative literature becomes impossible. The novel has always depended upon the capacity to imagine experiences beyond those of its author. But documentary poetry, particularly when it presents itself as testimony to actual events, carries a special obligation of accuracy.
The moral authority of such writing depends upon the reader's confidence that the poet has not transformed somebody else's tragedy into an occasion for literary self-display.
There is a profound difference between giving voice to suffering and claiming ownership of it. The distinction requires humility on the part of the writer, particularly when dealing with the experiences of those who are no longer alive to correct our interpretations of their lives.
Matthew Parish: Ukrainian literature is increasingly being translated and read internationally. What are the intellectual dangers of presenting Ukraine to foreign audiences principally through the experience of war?
Halyna Kruk: The international interest in Ukrainian literature is welcome, but it contains an ambiguity. Foreign audiences naturally want to understand the war. They seek testimony from those who experience events that are otherwise accessible to them only through newspapers and television screens. Poetry can provide precisely this form of human connection.
Nevertheless, Ukraine must not become interesting to the world solely because Ukrainians are suffering. A civilisation cannot be adequately represented by the injuries inflicted upon it.
There is a rich contemporary Ukrainian literature of childhood, sexuality, absurdity, domestic comedy, philosophical speculation and everyday life. There are writers whose principal concerns are neither political nor military. If international publishers select Ukrainian books only for their capacity to illustrate the war, they risk creating a distorted literary canon.
Translation must therefore serve two purposes. It should communicate the extraordinary circumstances through which Ukraine is passing, but it should also establish Ukrainian literature as a permanent participant in international intellectual life.
The ultimate achievement will come when a Ukrainian writer can be translated into English, German or French without the publisher feeling obliged to explain the entire history of Russian aggression before the reader opens the book.
There is also an intellectual responsibility upon foreign readers. They should approach Ukrainian literature not merely as a source of information about political events, but as literature in its own right, deserving of aesthetic judgment, philosophical engagement and critical attention.
Ukrainian writers do not need to be treated as representatives of an exotic tragedy. They deserve to be read as serious participants in the international republic of letters.
Matthew Parish: You have been closely involved with Ukrainian PEN, an organisation whose importance has grown considerably during the war. What role should Ukrainian PEN play in defending cultural freedom, and how does that responsibility relate to the wider international literary community?
Halyna Kruk: The importance of an organisation such as Ukrainian PEN lies partly in its insistence that literature belongs to civil society rather than to the state. Writers require institutions capable of defending their independence, protecting endangered colleagues and drawing international attention to attacks upon cultural life.
In Ukraine, these responsibilities have acquired exceptional urgency. Libraries have been destroyed or damaged, cultural institutions have been threatened and writers have been killed through military violence. The preservation of literary culture is therefore not simply a question of publishing new books. It also concerns the physical survival of the institutions and individuals upon which future cultural life depends.
There is an international dimension that should not be underestimated. Literary organisations possess networks that can connect Ukrainian intellectuals with audiences and institutions far beyond the country's borders. These networks can support translations, preserve the visibility of persecuted writers and prevent the disappearance of Ukrainian cultural questions from public attention.
Yet solidarity should not mean that Western intellectuals speak on Ukraine's behalf. The objective must be to ensure that Ukrainian voices are heard directly and on their own terms.
A successful international literary relationship is not one in which Ukraine remains permanently the grateful recipient of foreign sympathy. It is one in which Ukrainian writers participate as intellectual equals in the cultural life of Europe and the wider world.
Ukrainian PEN also has an important responsibility towards those whose voices might otherwise disappear from public consciousness. The destruction of cultural life is not always spectacular. Sometimes it consists of the gradual loss of libraries, the interruption of educational careers, the displacement of writers or the disappearance of small literary communities whose work has never attracted international attention.
The defence of cultural freedom therefore requires patience and institutional continuity. It is not a task that can be accomplished through declarations of solidarity alone.
Matthew Parish: Russian literature has occupied an exceptionally prominent position in the Western understanding of Eastern Europe. Has this contributed to the historical marginalisation of Ukrainian culture?
Halyna Kruk: There is a distinction between the literary achievements of Russian writers and the political purposes to which their international reputation has sometimes been put. The existence of great Russian novels does not establish the legitimacy of Russian imperialism. Nor does admiration for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky require acceptance of the proposition that Russia possesses a superior right to interpret the history of neighbouring peoples.
The more serious issue concerns the structure of cultural attention. For generations, much of the Western academic world approached Eastern Europe through Russian language, Russian institutions and Russian literary history. Other national traditions were frequently treated as secondary subjects, significant principally in relation to the dominant imperial culture.
This intellectual arrangement has political consequences. When a country's language and history are poorly understood, its claims to independent statehood can appear less substantial to foreign audiences than they actually are.
The solution is not necessarily to replace one cultural orthodoxy with another. It is to undertake the patient scholarly work of correcting historical imbalances: translating neglected texts, establishing independent academic programmes and studying Ukrainian literature without assuming that Russian culture provides its natural framework.
A genuinely European literary education ought to have room for both Russian and Ukrainian traditions, while recognising that the relationship between them has been shaped by power as well as artistic exchange.
There is a broader lesson here about the relationship between culture and empire. Political domination can survive in the intellectual imagination long after formal imperial institutions have disappeared. The categories through which foreign scholars organise their understanding of a region may continue to reproduce assumptions inherited from the period of imperial rule.
Decolonising intellectual life therefore requires more than changing political vocabulary. It requires a serious reconsideration of which traditions have been neglected, which voices have been excluded and whose interpretation of history has been allowed to become authoritative.
Matthew Parish: Can poetry help people recover psychologically from war, or is the idea of literature as therapy too optimistic?
Halyna Kruk: There is good reason to be cautious about presenting poetry as a form of treatment. Psychological trauma can be profound and persistent, and artistic expression should not be confused with clinical care. Nor should readers or writers be placed under an obligation to transform their suffering into something productive.
Nevertheless, literature can make an important contribution to the process through which painful experiences become intelligible. One of the most distressing features of trauma is the difficulty of organising experience into a coherent narrative. Language allows people to distinguish one emotion from another, to recognise that others have undergone comparable experiences and to recover a measure of intellectual control over events that once appeared overwhelming.
Poetry is particularly well suited to expressing experiences that resist orderly narration. Its capacity for fragmentation, silence, repetition and ambiguity permits forms of expression that conventional prose may find difficult.
There is also an important distinction between the needs of the writer and those of the reader. A poem that allows its author to articulate a painful memory might be distressing to somebody who encounters the same memory from a different position.
Literature does not necessarily heal. Sometimes its contribution is more modest and perhaps more important: it prevents suffering from becoming entirely incommunicable.
I would also be reluctant to suggest that every traumatic experience must eventually be transformed into a meaningful narrative. Some experiences remain resistant to interpretation. Some losses cannot be reconciled with any satisfactory account of justice or human progress.
Poetry should be permitted to acknowledge that reality. Its task is not always to offer consolation. Sometimes it must simply preserve the truth that something terrible has happened and that no arrangement of words can make it right.
Matthew Parish: What is the responsibility of universities such as Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in preserving Ukraine's intellectual life during the war?
Halyna Kruk: A university represents a commitment to the continuity of knowledge across generations. Its purpose extends beyond the delivery of qualifications or the preparation of students for employment. It preserves intellectual traditions, cultivates habits of critical examination and provides a setting in which inherited assumptions can be challenged.
These functions become particularly significant during wartime. Political circumstances naturally encourage urgent thinking and immediate solutions. A university must respond to those circumstances while preserving the capacity for long-term intellectual work.
The teaching of literature is important in this regard because it resists the assumption that the present moment exhausts the meaning of national existence. Students studying Ukrainian poetry of the seventeenth century encounter a civilisation that existed before the present conflict and will continue beyond it.
There is also a democratic responsibility. Universities ought to teach students how to distinguish evidence from assertion, argument from propaganda and intellectual disagreement from hostility.
Ukraine will eventually face difficult debates concerning reconstruction, identity, historical memory and relations with other societies. The quality of those debates will depend partly upon whether its universities have preserved an independent culture of inquiry.
A nation needs soldiers to defend its territory. It also needs teachers, scholars and writers to ensure that it retains an intellectual future.
We must also think about the younger generation whose education has been interrupted or transformed by war. Some students have lost their homes, others have been displaced and many have experienced circumstances that no university curriculum could reasonably have anticipated.
The obligation of the university is not merely to keep teaching under difficult circumstances. It is to preserve the belief that intellectual life remains possible and worthwhile, even when the surrounding world seems determined to demonstrate otherwise.
Matthew Parish: Finally, what should Ukrainian literature aspire to become after the war? Is there a danger that the cultural experience of the present conflict will overshadow everything that follows?
Halyna Kruk: The literature of this war will remain part of Ukrainian cultural memory for generations. It would be neither possible nor desirable to remove it from national consciousness. The experiences of occupation, resistance, displacement and bereavement will demand continuing examination long after the fighting ends.
But literature must also preserve the freedom to move beyond the subjects that history has imposed upon it.
There is a risk that international audiences will continue to expect Ukrainian writers to perform the role of witnesses to suffering. Such expectations can become restrictive, even when motivated by admiration and sympathy. A poet who has written about bombardment must remain free to write about love, ageing, philosophical uncertainty or the absurdities of ordinary life.
The intellectual ambition of Ukrainian literature should be larger than the war itself. It ought to participate in the universal questions of human existence, drawing upon the particular historical experience of Ukraine without becoming confined by it.
A future Ukrainian literary culture will necessarily contain the voices of those who survived this catastrophe. But it must also make room for those who were born afterwards and whose imaginative concerns will be different.
Perhaps that will be one of the most meaningful signs of peace: the emergence of a generation of Ukrainian writers who no longer feel that history requires them to justify their nation's existence before they can begin to write.
We must hope that Ukraine's future writers will have the freedom to be frivolous, experimental, ironic, difficult and even indifferent to the great political questions of their age. Such freedom may seem a strange aspiration during a period of national emergency, but it is precisely what a free society ought to offer its artists.
\The highest ambition of Ukrainian literature cannot simply be to survive the war. It must be to flourish in circumstances in which the war no longer determines the boundaries of the possible.
A concluding reflection: the survival of the intellectual life
Halyna Kruk belongs to a generation of Ukrainian intellectuals who have experienced a profound transformation in the relationship between literary culture and political reality. The ordinary distinctions between scholarship, artistic production and civic responsibility have become difficult to maintain in a country whose cultural institutions are themselves caught up in the struggle for national survival.
Her academic work at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and her involvement with Ukrainian PEN illustrate two complementary dimensions of that struggle. The university safeguards intellectual continuity, preserving traditions of learning and critical inquiry. Ukrainian PEN defends the conditions of freedom upon which literary and intellectual creativity depend. Both institutions serve a public purpose that extends beyond the immediate interests of writers and scholars.
Ukrainian PEN deserves particular recognition for its contribution to the survival of an independent literary culture in circumstances that might easily have overwhelmed a less resilient society. The international networks of PEN provide a means through which Ukrainian writers can participate in conversations extending far beyond their national borders, while remaining anchored in their own language and intellectual traditions. The organisation's defence of freedom of expression has a significance that is both cultural and constitutional, because independent intellectual activity is among the foundations upon which any genuinely democratic society must rest.
What makes Ukraine's contemporary literary experience particularly remarkable is not simply the volume of poetry being written about the war. It is the seriousness with which writers are being compelled to reconsider the foundations of their profession. Questions concerning the ethics of testimony, the limits of imaginative sympathy and the relationship between national commitment and artistic independence are no longer exercises in literary theory. They arise from the daily circumstances of life.
Lviv is an appropriate setting in which to contemplate these questions. The city has long been a meeting place of languages, intellectual traditions and competing accounts of history. Its literary inheritance cannot be reduced to a single period or political identity. Through repeated transformations of sovereignty and society, the city has retained a distinctive commitment to education and cultural life.
There is something deeply significant about the continued existence of serious intellectual debate in a country enduring the stresses of prolonged warfare. The ability to contemplate literature, philosophy and history while the future of the state remains uncertain is not evidence of indifference to the national struggle. It is evidence that Ukrainian civilisation possesses purposes extending beyond immediate military necessity.
The intellectual contribution represented by writers such as Kruk reminds us that the survival of a nation involves more than the continued existence of its political institutions. It also requires the preservation of its capacity to remember, interpret and describe the world in its own language.
For those of us who live and work in Ukraine, there is a particular responsibility to ensure that its intellectual figures are understood abroad not merely as representatives of a country at war, but as independent thinkers whose contributions deserve serious engagement. Ukrainian poets are not interesting solely because Russian missiles fall upon their cities. They are interesting because they have important things to say about the human condition, about memory, language, moral responsibility and the possibilities of civilisation.
Military victory may determine where borders are drawn. It cannot, by itself, determine the quality of the civilisation that survives within them.
For that, Ukraine will continue to need her poets.
