The intrepid volunteers who risk all to preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage
From our UK edition
‘The nonsense was over at last,’ wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of the second world war. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of ‘local’ warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.
