Bohdana Neborak is a journalist and cultural manager. Here, she speaks on reading during wartime, self-support and returning to the key cities of her life.
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First days of the war - thoughts, experiences, actions
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On February 24, after the first air raid alarm went off in Kyiv, Bohdana Neborak went down to Kontraktova Ploshcha metro station. It was the first time that she had used Kyiv metro as a bomb shelter and had seen that many people without medical masks on their faces since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but she tried not to think about that.
“My attitude was just like that of Scarlett O’Hara, the protagonist of Gone with the Wind,” Bohdana recalls. “I kept telling myself that I would worry about that another day.”
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she went to Lviv, the city of her childhood.
For a long time, Bohdana could not look in the mirror without fear of noticing some irreversible changes in herself. She did her first wartime makeup in April, getting ready to attend a performance at one of her favorite places, the Les Kurbas Theater. The well-drawn lines on her eyelids and lips symbolized Bohdana reclaiming her personality.
She was hardly able to take any photos in the first months of the invasion, since neither the statues nor the stained-glass windows hidden behind protective sandbags were things she wanted to remember. It hurt her very much to see her favorite sculptures at the front façade of Lviv’s Opera House, the story of whose creation she had heard from her father since her childhood; yet at the same time, Bohdana felt ashamed to be worrying about the windows as people were dying every day.
At first Bohdana couldn’t read at all. But then, gaining access to her parents’ home library renewed her ability to read books. After much hesitation, she took a collection of short stories by Mykola Khvyliovyi and Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta to recover her regular reading practice. It was Khvyliovyi’s book that Bohdana opened first.
“The experiences Khvyliovyi wrote of seemed to me to be almost identical to our own,” says she. “I discovered a completely different author in him than I used to see before.”
While reading Hemingway, she spent much time reflecting upon the concept of the lost generation.
“There were many discussions in Ukraine then on whether we would have such a generation too, to which I always responded that I didn’t know,” Bohdana recalls. “Yet I think very cautiously about the young people who are about to graduate from schools and enter universities these days. It’s twice as difficult to understand yourself in wartime. What should young people who’d never had the time and ability to distinguish intellectual tastes at a university do to know themselves better?”
Bohdana considers herself better protected in this sense because she already has her higher education, work experience and some understanding of herself; in this way she has obtained a toolkit for working with what’s important for her, which includes implementing cultural projects and writing threads on genocide at the same time.
The reach of Bohdana’s Twitter page where she writes on decolonization and promotes Ukrainian culture has grown five times in a year. Initially, she saw no importance in her Ukrainian-written reflections, so she started to document her observations of current events in English. That was her way of compartmentalizing her own emotions. When she felt particularly exasperated, Bohdana wrote about Peter the Great, who ‘cut through the windows to Europe’, about Russians in classic novels, who related rather to French culture than their own one, and the futility of admiring Dostoyevsky.
“Those tweets were intellectually emotional,” says she. “Such information is often very positively perceived by English-speaking audiences, and becomes an absolute insight for them.”
Bohdana had quite an interest in reaching new audiences and discovering something new for herself along the way. She was amused to have been called ‘a student of Goebbels’ by Russian propagandists. Bohdana wrote mostly out of anger, and this sincerity of hers, along with the fact that she had thoroughly researched what she was writing about, was very clear. She was glad to know that after reading her tweets, some foreigners had for instance purchased books by Serhii Zhadan.
“There is a great difference between just reading current news from a foreign country and realizing that it has a centuries-old culture capable of speaking up for itself,” Bohdana explains.
“Culture is much more powerful than journalism in this regard. Meanwhile, the interest of the Ukrainian audience is prompted by existential questions, as people feel the threat of genocide being committed against them, and they wish to know why somebody may want to exterminate them. Culture is the best answer for this. Ukrainian culture can offer stories to suite any taste. People have begun to feel it and make use of it.”
Bohdana considers this as an extension of the Ukrainian people’s movement toward self-discovery which began during the Revolution of Dignity. She remembers what Solomiia Pavlychko, a renowned Ukrainian literary scholar, once said: if Ukrainians don’t have their own popular culture it will come from other countries, namely from Russia. The extraordinary circumstances of the war boosted the emergence of Ukrainian-speaking popular culture. Selections of quotations from Viacheslav Chornovil in Vogue, Ukrainian-language videos by Oleksii Durniev and Misha Katsurin, and Nadia Dorofieieva’s statements about her transition to using the Ukrainian language instantly became popular. Once, it was Russian popular culture that predominated in this sector, yet now people who work with different audiences are making Ukrainian products into a new fashionable trend.
However, questions like ‘What’s wrong with Bulgakov?’ are still very audible. This annoys Bohdana a lot, yet she has chosen not to convince those who don’t want to be convinced. She considers it more important to influence schoolchildren, not adults who just complain instead of taking a genuine interest in the subject.
“It sounds like, ‘Wow, look who’s talking’,” says Bohdana. “But I don’t need an opportunity to talk for the umpteenth time about why it’s crucial to speak Ukrainian or why Bulgakov is a Ukrainophobe. If someone is genuinely curious, I can suggest some short texts by Vira Aheieva or Oksana Zabuzhko. If they are not, I would like to apply my energy in many other ways rather than convincing anybody. My inner resources are finite, and must only be used for things I believe in.”
Bohdana would have done the same and been guided by the same principles even if the war had never started. She has managed to hold onto her job and all the projects she is involved in, no matter how much of a miracle it may have seemed. In fact, this is the outcome of all her previous years of work, studies, and personal experiences.
“My choice during wartime is to work primarily for the maintenance of my own intellectual and emotional integrity, to cherish love and kindness,” says Bohdana. “It has nothing to do with positive thinking. Today, as we face so much violence and horrible news from every side, it is of the utmost importance to cherish something that could unite us and give us a space for creation.
And here we cannot do without love and kindness. In my opinion, we should work more to form an appropriate environment for thoughtful and tolerant discussions, for debating the most serious and challenging questions and expressing different points of view without fear of quarrelling with each other for the rest of our lives. It’s far more difficult in the context of war than it had been before, but as for me personally, I value it very much. So, my choice is to work on developing this particular media field.”
Another choice Bohdana made was to stay in Ukraine. At first she was afraid even to go on a business trip abroad. She did so for the first time in December 2022, attending a media conference in Oslo. Fortunately, this trip did not change her, and Bohdana was glad to return to Kyiv. She has not thought even once about moving abroad for good.
“I work with Ukrainian language and culture,” explains Bohdana. “Without them, I am nothing. I will not be able to do good journalism or cultural projects without knowing the local contexts and experiencing everything that’s going on in Ukraine together with my society. Someone probably can do otherwise, but I can’t. I need to come to libraries, overhear people’s conversations in cafes, figure out how much Russian language there still is in the city, what issues people discuss, what books they buy, what audience attends theater premieres, and so on. In the end, I need to endure all these ordeals of ours, like shelling or power cuts. It influences my work, so I care about staying here. Otherwise, I would have not felt that I was professionally competent.”
So Bohdana spends her time listening to random people talking about translators from Sanskrit into Ukrainian, contemplating dogs and their owners, noticing how more and more Ukrainian is being spoken in Kyiv, and being inspired by her friends and colleagues who are doing the important job of working for victory, while not forgetting to live their own quality life.
A good routine gives Bohdana her strength. When she feels exhausted, she goes to the Zhytnii market to buy groceries and flowers, then returns home, turns on music or a movie, cooks and enjoys time with herself. A baked pie guarantees quick results and better spirits, just as much as writing an article or spending a morning reading a book in bed. Bohdana has a very responsible attitude to self-care, which allows her to work more efficiently later.
She is well aware that, despite the new experience of war, it has not changed the fundamental principles of her life, and this strengthens her too. Today, Bohdana feels better than she did a year ago. “When are you going to live, after all?” she asked herself on the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion. Although therapists do not recommend compacting your emotions inside yourself, Bohdana chooses to act in the way which is least traumatic for herself. She cries when she wants to, and she allows herself to stay in a stupor if possible. She never tries to rebuke herself for her emotional reactions because it’s important to go on and keep working, not to get stuck like a fly in amber. Bohdana simply has no time to fall down and weep.
“I am a living being with many bizarre things within myself,” says Bohdana. “That’s why, as soon as I have the time and space to resolve everything calmly, I always try to do so without too much pressure. I think that the inner Bohdana should praise Bohdana as an overall image. We never know if we will ever get the time to reflect upon some of the incredibly shocking things in our lives. Maybe it will strike us someday, maybe not. So we mustn’t put ourselves into limited states. Life goes on, and we should maintain harmony for the sake of our future selves. I try to hold on for the sake and comfort of the future Bohdana.”
The ‘future Bohdana’ would like to go to the slow-paced and civilian Kharkiv, one of the pivotal cities of Ukrainian culture, which makes an indelible impression when you stroll around the places where the Ukrainian modernists lived and worked. One of Bohdana’s personal beacons is Serhii Zhadan, who finishes his daily post on social media with the words, “Tomorrow we will wake up a day closer to our victory.” She never tires of marveling at the Kharkiv Literary Museum, the publisher Oleksandr Savchuk or books marked ‘Kharkiv, 2023’. These represent a stronghold of normal life and the continuity of Kharkiv’s history, along with the emotional and spiritual health of the many people who look up to them.
The ‘future Bohdana’ dreams of visiting Kherson, a city she’s never been to, and of Donetsk and Luhansk, which the friends she has made since 2014 are going to show her.
Yet she still wants to be associated with Kyiv. For many years, Bohdana was reluctant in admitting her Galician identity, though now she loves it as an element which formed her personality. Still, it was Kyiv that made her franker and more open to meeting people from different parts of the country and getting acquainted with their contexts, stories, individual and collective memories.
“I love Kyiv for being such a great and eclectic city,” says Bohdana. “Here there are a lot of monuments from the Cossack Baroque which I missed in Lviv a great deal. In spring 2022, I looked at the beloved streets of my childhood and thought about the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, and my strolls to the Zaborovsky Gate where Mykola Zerov and Heorhii Narbut also walked a century ago. After returning to Kyiv, I came to fully understand the meaning of the phrase ‘kiss the ground’.”
Bohdana often comes to the Kyiv Mohyla Academy library. On her way, she buys a cup of coffee and tries to drink at least half of it: no beverages are allowed in the reading hall. She enters the university area, says hi to the security guard, and sometimes even meets the president of the Academy and they greet each other. In the courtyard, Bohdana stops by a cool mural by AEC Interesni Kazki, and contemplates the flowers and chestnut trees. Each time she thinks how lucky she was to have studied there and takes a selfie at the entrance to the library when she is in a good mood. Then she walks through the big green library door, goes up the stairs, throws the empty cup into a waste bin, enters the reading hall, takes the books she has ordered, and finds herself a nice table to sit at.
“The library can balance my emotions just like a trip to the market,” Bohdana explains. “Sometimes it’s not about work but an opportunity to enjoy a pleasurable experience once again which I always try to indulge in.”