Carry the house. Ukraine: speak again, write again, sing again / 02
- Jean-Marc Adolphe
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Illustration by Danylo Movchan for the poems of Victoria Amelina published by the humanities on April 9, 2025 ( HERE ).
From Kramatorsk to the temporarily occupied territories, from the poetry of Victoria Amelina to the music of Anton Kistrin and SVIT, Ukrainian culture grapples with the question of lost or displaced home. Poems, songs, and stories become instruments of resistance, narrative therapy, and the transmission of an emotional legacy of war, where "home" is recomposed within the narratives.
In "The Story of Return," one of her last poems, written a year before her death—she was killed in a Russian airstrike in Kramatorsk in June 2023—Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina evokes four children forced to flee the war. As they leave their homes, each carries a fragment of the world they left behind. Mira takes a pearl from a box. Tim picks up a pebble from the street. Yarka keeps an apricot pit. Vira, however, "took nothing with her / saying she'll be back soon."
The gesture is minimal, almost insignificant. But it speaks volumes about the violence of the wrenching separation. And above all, it says something else: home is not just a place. “When you run away from home ,” says Vira, “the house becomes smaller, [it] fits in your pocket,” but “the house will grow little by little / remember, never / will you be without your home.” Through these lines, Victoria Amelina expresses a crucial insight: exile does not destroy home, it transforms it. It displaces it, internalizes it, fragments it—but does not abolish it.
The grave of Viktoria Amelina in the Lychakiv cemetery. Photo photo-lviv.
This idea permeates a significant portion of Ukrainian cultural production today, particularly among artists from the occupied territories. It can also be found, in a different form, in the work of the musician Anton Kistrin.
Originally from Dniprorudne, in the Zaporizhzhia region—now under Russian occupation—Kistrin has created a body of work deeply marked by loss, but also by the projection of a possible return. His songs blend personal memories, fragments of landscapes, and intimate narratives, in a musical language that oscillates between melancholy and resistance.
In an interview with the weekly newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnia , he discusses the need to rethink Ukrainian culture in the temporarily occupied territories as "a long-term gamble." It's not just about cultural survival, but about maintaining symbolic continuity and preserving narratives capable of transcending occupation.
His latest solo project, "MANTU," falls within this perspective. In it, he performs two "messages to Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories" in a video broadcast on the YouTube channel Тотальний: Наживо ("Total: Live"). This platform brings together Ukrainian artists around filmed musical performances, explicitly conceived as acts of support for populations under occupation and the resistance movement.
An active force against erasure
Beyond their artistic dimension, these performances are part of a cultural strategy. They affirm that Ukrainian culture is not merely a heritage, but an active force, a form of presence where territorial control seeks to impose erasure. Each song, each text thus becomes a vehicle for continuity: a way of saying that Ukrainian symbolic space does not coincide with the front lines.
This interplay between memory, loss, and persistence is also found in the contemporary music scene, notably in the work of the artist SVIT. In her song dedicated to the feeling of home, she states: "For me, this song is about the fact that true home lives within us. We can neither take it, nor lose it, nor abandon it permanently. It remains in the memories, the people, and the sensations that shape us."
This statement extends, almost word for word, the intuition formulated by Victoria Amelina. But it offers a more explicitly introspective version. Where the poem works through images — the pearl, the pebble, the kernel — SVIT directly names the constituent elements of this “inner hearth”: memory, relationships, emotions.
Emerging from the new Ukrainian scene, SVIT belongs to a generation of artists for whom war is both a trauma and a framework for creation. Her music, marked by melodic sensitivity and intimate writing, explores the links between territory, identity, and personal experience. She thus contributes to a reconfiguration of Ukrainian artistic discourse, where the personal becomes a political space.
The role of narratives in war situations
This shift in perspective—from territory to interiority—is not merely aesthetic. It points to a broader reflection on the role of narratives in situations of war. This is precisely what the writer Kateryna Yehorushkina and the psychoanalyst, translator, and literary critic Yurko Prokhasko explore in a conversation published by the Ukrainian weekly The Ukrainian Week (Tyzhden) .
Writer Kateryna Yehorushkina. Photo Iryna Dmytrenko-Terefera
Kateryna Yehorushkina, known for her children's books and her work in art therapy, presents a non-fiction work for adults: "And Then Our House Became a Ship: Stories About the Emotional Legacy of War." The title itself effects a metaphorical transformation: the house, fixed and anchored, becomes a ship—mobile, exposed, forced to navigate uncertainty.
The book brings together hybrid narratives—essays, journal fragments, “artistic reports”—that attempt to capture what war leaves behind in subjectivities. Not just visible destruction, but an emotional legacy, often diffuse, that is transmitted and reconfigured.
Translator and literary critic Yurko Prokhasko. Photo Sensormedia
In their exchange, Kateryna Yehorushkina and Yurko Prokhasko examine the function of narration in this context. They evoke the "durability of tenderness," a notion that may seem paradoxical in times of war, but which precisely designates this capacity of narratives to preserve forms of connection, care, and attention—despite the violence.
Metaphor plays a central role here. It allows us to say what would otherwise remain unspeakable. Transforming a house into a ship, reducing a home to a pocket-sized object, fitting a country into a song: these are all symbolic gestures that are not about escapism, but about actively working with reality.
This work, in a certain way, aligns with the approaches of narrative therapy and psychoanalysis. It's not simply about recounting to bear witness, but about recounting to reconfigure experience, to give it a form that allows one to continue living with it. Within this framework, stories are not mere embellishments. They become structures of meaning, tools for survival, sometimes even forms of resistance. They contribute to building a shared reality, to maintaining continuity where everything seems fragmented.
From Victoria Amelina's poem to the songs of Anton Kistrin and SVIT, and on to the reflections of Yehorushkina and Prokhasko, a single thread emerges: a shift in focus, from physical space to narrative space. The destroyed, occupied, or inaccessible house does not disappear; it is recomposed in words, images, and sounds. As long as these stories circulate, transform, and are transmitted, the house—even reduced to a pearl, a pebble, or a memory—continues to exist.
Jean-Marc Adolphe
Comments