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Features OPPOSITE: Girls pass between themselves the raw materials for military camouflage in a former library in the centre of Lviv, Ukraine In peacetime, we come to libraries to look for answers. When at war, an empty library with shattered windows asks questions of us. How can we defend our memory, our culture and our language from those who want to eradicate them? Another local library, the Central Library of Sloviansk, was not destroyed but functioned in a new capacity. After Russia’s escalation of the war, it became a humanitarian relief hub for the displaced, who had fled from towns and villages which Russia was steadily wiping off the map: Bakhmut, Maryinka, Severodonetsk, Popasna. The list includes dozens of places which have been razed to the ground by Russian artillery and aviation. As of 4 July 2023, 1,582 objects of Ukrainian cultural infrastructure have been damaged by Russian aggression. Nearly 600 of them are libraries. We saw four of these on our trip to eastern Ukraine, alongside destroyed art schools, culture clubs and museums. Of course, it is not only Ukraine’s material cultural heritage that Russia seeks to eliminate. One of the members of our volunteer team, writer and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina, was killed in a Russian missile strike on the frontline city of Kramatorsk and buried in Lviv on 5 July 2023. When in late April 2023 we visited places around Kharkiv, which the Ukrainian army liberated in autumn 2022, libraries were coming back to life even if the cities they belonged to were still half-empty, motionless and frozen, as if in contemplation of the wreckage the Russian occupation had brought. The trademark plywood did not allow much light into the Central District Library of Izium, but the librarians who managed to save some of their collection under relentless Russian shelling made the murky place glow. In peacetime, we come to libraries to look for answers. At war, an empty library with shattered windows asks questions of us After leafing through a volume which documented a previous attempt at making Ukrainians extinct, the manmade Soviet famine of 1921-23, our group went outside. Upbeat patriotic music was blasting from loudspeakers over a deserted street. With our backs to the damaged library, we were looking at Izium Secondary School No 4. It was built in 1882 and destroyed by Russians 140 years later. A bare carcass, with still recognisable eclectic 19th century brickwork, reminded us of what was no more. “Our dear school where our daughter studied, and we thought that our granddaughter would study here as well” reads a comment on Izium’s city website posted on 27 December 2022. Although the page containing a potted history of the school was edited on 10 April this year, it does not yet tell of the consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The only change made by the editor concerned the switch to the past tense in the opening sentence: “Izium’s Secondary School No 4 was situated in the building of the oldest educational institution in the Kharkiv region.” Some of the students of the school could have been among 54 civilians murdered by the Russian aerial bomb, which was dropped on a five-storey apartment block on Pershotravneva Street. The impact was such that it dissected the building in half and buried residents who were hiding in the basement. The occupying Russian forces did not allow survivors to be pulled from under the ruins. Their death was slow and terrifying. In a room on the fourth floor of the school, which was lacking an external wall, we could still see a desk with a half-closed laptop, a wardrobe painted blue and yellow, and boy’s shirts hanging neatly inside. There was also a sideboard revealing books with unreadable titles. An enigma worthy of the blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges’ queasy imagination. Borges knew something about the utopian idea of the library, an illusion of order imposed upon a chaotic world, and about its predicament. And yet the rescue of a library in a world which has lost its bearings presents a sign of hope, for preservation, for survival, for victory over death and oblivion. To win, we bring boxes of newly printed books to the libraries of Kharkiv and Izium. The books stare at a world with plywood-covered eyes. To win, we leave Ukrainian classics on bookshelves in the scorched town of Sviatohirsk. To win, we read stories to the eerily obedient children of Sloviansk against the sound of air-raid alerts. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, the learned princess who delayed her execution by enchanting her audience with Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, we delay the end by preserving our stories. With each rescued book, we fight against the erasure which was promised us by Russia. The Scottish poet Robert Crawford opens his essay Library in Poetry (2015) by quoting an inscription on a flagstone at the entrance to the Palacký University Library in the town of Olomouc in the Czech Republic: “Ze zbrojnic udĕlejte biblioték” meaning: turn arsenals into libraries. Fighting for Ukraine’s victory has meant turning our libraries into arsenals. Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, researcher and curator 52(04):18/19|DOI:10.1177/03064220231219877 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 19

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