Marci Shore
It takes a long time to get to Kyiv these days. From across the Atlantic, at least one night in the air, another on a train. And once there, daily life is strenuous. The air raid alarm goes off unpredictably, and lasts for unpredictable lengths of time—perhaps several minutes, perhaps several hours. As of August 14 there had been 1,773 air raid alarms in the capital since the beginning of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. Given the frequency, my Ukrainian friends don’t run to the bomb shelter at every alarm—it’s too disruptive. One has to live. Locals tend to go to the shelter only on select occasions, in response to specific intelligence posted on Telegram channels. That said, no one ever forgets about the war. Everyone lives in a state of perpetual readiness and has made adjustments accordingly: women have abandoned stilettos in favor of running shoes, even with skirts.
This was my fourth visit to Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion. I was there this time for the annual Kyiv Book Arsenal, a large literary festival that I guest-curated this year. I’d known and admired my co-curator—the writer, translator, and editor Oksana Forostyna—since the Maidan, the 2013–2014 Ukrainian revolution on Kyiv’s central square. For a year Oksana and I worked with the Arsenal organizers to develop a program around our chosen theme, “Everything Is Translation.” When I arrived, I was momentarily wonderstruck to see fragments of our curatorial text on huge murals decorating the walls of the Arsenal, once a military factory, since repurposed into an art space.
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