On 19 March I attended a performance of Bizet’s Carmen at the Buxton Opera House. The Opera House makes any event special – gilds it, as it were – even when one is sitting at the very edge of the second circle with the hot lights half-obscuring the half-view of the left-hand side of the stage. What made the event even more special was that the production was by the Dnipro Opera from Ukraine, with a large cast and a 30-piece orchestra. Their travels, by large coach in which it is said they spend their nights, took them to various small cities around England where they performed Madama Butterfly and Aida as well as Carmen. Buxton was sold out and full of yellow and blue. At the end it erupted into flags and a resounding rendition of the Ukrainian National Anthem, a tune which is becoming quite familiar in our public spaces. Our rendition was so loud and spirited that perhaps an echo of it reached Kyiv and Odessa.

Neither Carmen herself nor Don Jose seemed to have stinted on the varenyky or holubtsi. Carmen had a rich, blurry voice, but it was impossible not be drawn in to the star-crossed drama. The orchestra was precise, brisk and well conducted. I wondered what it must feel like to be in a touring national opera company when, back home, your nation is being bombed and shredded. How do you spend your days, do you see yourself and your art as somehow in service of a national cause? The soldiers, drinkers and peasants all looked as though they were of military age.

I wondered, too, what was happening to the wider Ukrainian culture back at home. Certainly the publishing news in the United Kingdom and United States has been alive to the damage the war has done to Ukrainian bookselling, book-making and writing. The one publishing dividend of the war has been the enormous growth in international awareness of what Ukrainian culture includes, and in translations from Ukrainian into the other languages of Europe. Rights sales of Ukrainian books rose from 120 in 2021 to 230 in 2022.

Ukrainian publishers, writers and booksellers have been featured at book festivals all over Europe, and in public galleries some works previously described as ‘Russian’ are being re-labelled ‘Ukrainian’, even as the Russian troops cart off the contents of distinguished large and small Ukrainian museums and galleries to Russia as spoils of war. This may seem at present a small matter compared with the number of civilian deaths and injuries and military deaths and injuries on both sides, the millions of exiles created, the appalling reversal of a prosperous and largely peaceful culture. In the longer term the cultural damage will be differently calculated: ‘citizens of a world/shared in shards’, as Oksana Maksymchuk wrote in her poem ‘Stolen Time’ (PNR 268).

On 17 March Publishers Weekly reported on the consequences of the Russian invasion on Ukrainian publishing one year into the war. The immediate occasion was that, at the Bologna Book Fair earlier in March, Old Lion Publishing House (Lviv) had been chosen as European children’s publisher of the year.

In twelve war-torn months, new titles published in Ukraine fell to almost half the level of the previous year, from 17,000 to under 9,000. It is not hard to imagine how the printing sector has fared with the targeted and stray bombings, the damage to infrastructure and the curtailment of imports. In 2021 25.7 million books were printed; only 9.2 million last year. Publisher’s Weekly reports Yulia Orlova, CEO of Vivat Publishing in Kharkiv, the second-largest publisher in the country, as saying, ‘Ukraine would import 60,000 tons of paper in a typical year; however in 2022, the industry only received 20,000 tons.’ PW also reported, ‘In the two years prior to the war, the Translate Ukraine program, run by UBI, offered €300,000 to support the translation of Ukrainian works, resulting in 113 books published in 24 countries. The program was halted when the war started, but UBI announced that it will restart soon, with the aim of supporting the translation of 50 more books.’

Publishing, like the rest of the economy in Ukraine, does somehow – after the trauma of the invasion and a period of adjustment – continue. ‘Vivat […] shut down when the war started, as many of its staff of 100 were forced to relocate and work remotely. After shipping 20 truckloads of books to western Ukraine, it began fulfilling book orders in April. In June, it resumed publishing new titles, releasing 350 last year – a small drop from the nearly 400 published in 2021. In addition, Vivat opened a new bookstore in Kyiv in October.’ Other companies uprooted themselves, or relocated staff abroad. It is hoped that the main book festivals may return to business soon and that the world, so keenly interested in Ukraine now, will not forget it as the war drags on and its consequences are felt with increasing pain in hitherto supportive countries.

An Austrian friend wrote to me on 23 March to say she and her husband had been watching a DVD by a German volunteer soldier in Ukraine but had had to turn it off, the young man’s ‘self-assurance and pride’ had become unbearable. I wondered why. ‘He was pro-Donbass, pro-Putin.’ It had not occurred to me that volunteers might take such a course. ‘On that tableland scored by rivers, / Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever / Are precise and alive.’ It is a division equivalent to the one that split volunteers – including the English – at the time of the Spanish Civil War, which so roused Auden and his contemporaries. Some of the causes of division were analogous. They had to do with religious dogma, the end of empire, an acute nostalgia for a simpler ideological order and a truth dictated, not found. The literature from that Civil War remains instructive and memorable; the literature emerging from the current conflict may prove equally so. Depending on the outcomes.