A vivid and hopeful study of how culture endures in the midst of extreme violence<\/p>\n
Towards the end of her subtly piercing book about art in wartime, Charlotte Higgins recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine\u2019s second city, in the north-east of the country, a short drive from the Russian border. In a tranquil park, she sees a man standing in a stream, making stones balance on top of each other in a teetering tower \u2013 \u201ca metaphor of life in that city,\u201d she writes, \u201cthat would have seemed too obvious for a novel\u201d.<\/p>\n
Still, as a good novelist would, Higgins doesn\u2019t seem to beg telling details from a place so much as have them leap to her open eye and ear. The cartoons a boy is watching that fall silent in a power cut, allowing the distant boom of explosions on the frontline to be heard. A cityscape tattooed on a young poet\u2019s arm that cuts off suddenly where skin from his leg was grafted after he was torn up by shrapnel. Cataracts of larkspur, as Higgins describes them, in a field in the frontline Donbas region, \u201cpouring down the hill, pooling at the bottom into a great lake of blooms \u2026 Larkspur thrives on ground where there has been recent disturbance.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/ec8b55372ec834e14dc845d598942adb9dbd49cc\/192_0_3538_2832\/master\/3538.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=7dde2ed1aee1e3d3c40b45b3efbf148b\" "\\"Ukrainian")
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