'Sitting at our desks is an act of defiance'

The war in Ukraine continues and it is difficult to plan anything for longer than a week ahead. I do not even look at the publishing calendar, which was full of events for the whole of the year from January 2022. In general, the state of affairs in book publishing, as well as our lives, depends on the Armed Forces of Ukraine. If there is good news from the front, we feel inspired to plan further. No good news – and we stop.

This "on and off" mode is exhausting, and the war in Ukraine today is aimed at complete exhaustion and depletion. Any manifestation of cultural life, like opening an exhibition or bookstore in Kyiv, conducting a presentation or a stand-up in a bomb shelter, or talking about a book festival, are perceived as emotionally charged events, acts that include a sense of reinvention of a former life.

Despite all this, the publishing community continues to work, because going to work is not just about the book business, but about a clearly defined mission that is consistently performed every day - an act of courage and defiance every time someone from the publishing team sits down at their desk.

With Russia violently “de-Ukrainising” our country for 118 days, destroying libraries, museums and schools, it becomes clear how intertwined the cultural and military fronts are in this war. One recent example is that in eastern Ukraine, in the town of Starobilsk, where the poet Serhiy Zhadan was born, the occupiers destroyed murals made by local youth. One of them was a poem by Zhadan, which was painted over. The poem was not about any political or national topic; it was about fish. The writer, addressing this event in his post online, sarcastically suggested that it may have been painted over because of the traumatic associations Russians have with the Black Sea Fleet, which is sinking in the territorial waters of Ukraine. Despite all this, the publishing community continues to work, because going to work is not just about the book business, but about a clearly defined mission that is consistently performed every day – an act of courage and defiance every time someone from the publishing team sits down at their desk.

One of the major current problems in book publishing is the painful restoration of printing capacity. The largest printing houses were concentrated in Kharkiv, in the east of Ukraine near the Russian border. The city has been heavily shelled and the shelling continues, destroying – in addition to all living things – the infrastructure of publishing. Some printing houses have suffered from physical bombardment, while others have lost money. And those printing houses that are trying to resume production are conducting an inventory of things that survived the missiles hitting the warehouses, and are being faced with the lack of specialists because many employees went to other cities or abroad. Summing up the words of Oleksandr Afonin, director of the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association: the printing centre of eastern Ukraine, particularly in Kharkiv, is not functioning. 

Another problem is paper shortages. The executive director of the Ukrainian Association of Pulp and Paper Industry "UkrPapir", Eduard Litvak, noted that the five largest importers of paper in Ukraine have almost no stock left in warehouses. The amount of paper available is from one to 10 tons. It seems that this difficult situation will gain new significance given the bill passed by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on June 19, 2022, banning the import of books from Russia and Belarus and stopping the sale of previously imported Russian books and books by Russian authors. One of the provisions of the bill prescribes that books in Ukraine have to be published in Ukrainian, the languages ​​of the EU and other languages of the indigenous peoples of Ukraine, including Russian, if it is the original. This norm is intended to prevent the spread of Russian books within the book market in Ukraine. Therefore, world literature in Ukraine will be read either in the original language or in Ukrainian. This supports the trend launched last year when Ukrainian publishers were required to publish at least 50% of all publications in the official language during the year. Therefore, the work of Ukrainian publishing houses should increase, because a significant number of titles have never been translated from Russian, as it was a consumer habit to both read and buy books in Russian. After a full-scale invasion, this percentage of readers who prefer Russian has declined. From now on, publishers face the challenge of ensuring that high-quality Ukrainian translations are published in a state of crisis, when printing houses are struggling, and demand for books is falling.

At the same time, one of the largest Ukrainian book festivals, Book Forum Lviv, contacted me and asked if I thought it was appropriate to hold a book festival. They are currently conducting a poll, having in mind that it would probably be good to do something like this now. This call was pleasant, because, of course, it is an appropriate and necessary thing to do. There are also rumours that a literary event is planned in Kharkiv at the end of the summer. And the XI Book Arsenal in Kyiv, which received the award of the London Book Fair International Excellence Awards 2019 in the nomination "Literary Festival" and was planned from 25th to 29th May in 2022, but was cancelled for obvious reasons, organised a public talk in its majestic space on 28th May. The organisers stated that they want to get together to reflect on a new dimension of the focus theme "Our Great Migration", a theme that was formulated before the start of a full-scale war. Oksana Forostyna, the curator of the main topic of the XI Book Arsenal, says: “The great migration took place not only between cities and countries but also between social strata, between people who would not be on the verge of life and death under normal circumstances. War is a great equalizer and a cruel mediator. War is also a strong accelerator. This is a violent movement not only in space but also in time, it pours us not only into another room but also into another era. This era has already come. "

Yes, from day to day, from one event to another, like a pendulum, we move, those for whom the art of publishing books during the war remains important.

Translated from Ukrainian by Mariia Tolmachova.