(Republished with permission from Timothy Snyder’s “Thinking About” series on Substack)
Words make their way through the world with us, changing their senses as we change our lives. Think for example of the word “launch.”
On Monday 16 September I “launched” my book On Freedom, in the sense of the word all of my publishing friends like to use. They want the book to “launch,” to soar, to do well. In this spirit I talked to Tom Sutcliffe on BBC Radio 4 in London about the book and to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC later on the same day. And no doubt throughout the day, which began in Europe and ended in the United States, I said “launch” several times myself.
I have just returned from Ukraine. My first true conversation about On Freedom this month was a week ago in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border and to the front. The Literary Museum there had invited me for a presentation at an underground site. It was a lovely place, with a bar that made me the coffee that I needed after a long trip, and a crowd of people invited to talk about freedom (we could not announce the event for safety reasons, which I regret). In a sense, this Kharkiv discussion was the real launch of the book.
Not the literary launch but the literal launch of missiles
We were underground, though, because of another kind of launch, the unmetaphorical kind, not the literary launch but the literal launch — of Russian missiles.
The Russians seemed close to taking Kharkiv at the beginning of the war. There was intense combat in Saltivka, a district of the city that is home to about 600,000 people. Major buildings in the city centre of Kharkiv are still in ruins. The Ukrainians held the Russians back, but Russia itself remains close. A missile fired from Russia can reach Kharkiv before people have a chance to get underground. That, in Kharkiv, is what a “launch” too often means.
The difference in the sense of a word can help us to catch the difference in reality. In Kharkiv, the drones and the bombs and the missiles are a normal part of the day. People want to talk about books, they want to go to restaurants and movies, they want to live their lives, and they do, despite it all.
The word “launch” retains a kind of innocence
Those of us beyond war zones catch all of this, if at all, indirectly, through the media. We do not hear the sirens, and we do not have to go underground. We do not have to check social media to see if friends and family are alive. The word “launch” retains a kind of innocence.
This is not about countries being different, but about situations being difference. Kharkiv in normal times is a major literary city. In the 2020s, before the Russian full-scale invasion, Kharkiv was a centre of Ukrainian book production. Before February 2022 there were plenty of launches, in the literary sense, in Kharkiv. And there are still some now!
Genocide is not only about killing people, but about eliminating a culture, making it untenable by destroying the institutions that transmit it. Thus Russia burns books, steals museum artifacts, and bombs archives, libraries, and publishing houses. Russia deliberately destroyed the publishing houses in Kharkiv, including where one of my own books was being printed. One sort of launch would seem to obliterate the other. But, to the Ukrainians’ credit, only for a time. The book publishing industry, like a number of others, picked up in other places. The public book culture in Ukraine, expressed in new stores and cafes, is defiant.
I was thinking of “launches” in Kyiv, a couple of days after the Kharkiv visit, as I pre-taped an interview about the book. For me it was the end of a long day, spent beginning (“launching”) a big history project. The first conference had gone well, and we had a press conference complete with a Viking sword, a Byzantine cross, and Scythian and Trypillian vessels kindly loaned by the national museum. Ukrainian colleagues on the stage had spoken of the importance of cooperation and listening, in our grand cooperative project. I was in a good mood when I went to a side room to tape the interview.
At around the time the interview began, a missile was launched from Russia, aimed at Kyiv. The air raid sirens began outside the window. An air raid siren can mean different forms of attack, some more rapid and some less so. Drones can cause terrible damage and kill large numbers of people, but they are not very fast. If a missile is in the air, on the other hand, you have to move right away. Since there was in fact a missile bearing down on Kyiv, I explained this to the interviewer and hastened to the stairs. I learned that Ukrainian air defence had destroyed the missile as I reached the staircase.
This was all completely normal. The Russians launched a number of very large strikes last week with missiles and drones. Ukrainian air defence is excellent — when the Ukrainians are given the tools, they protect their people extremely well, and Kyiv is where their limited equipment is concentrated. We picked up the interview as soon as I could re-establish the connection.
One day there will be Ukrainian war poetry
One sort of “launch” had been briefly interrupted by another, my literary book launch by a literal missile launch. This was an infinitesimally tiny taste of the interruption tens of millions of Ukrainians face all the time from Russia’s senseless war, which changes the shapes of lives even when it does not end them. Russia launches these attacks on civilians all the time, almost every day. The point is not only to kill people and destroy civilian architecture but to instil a certain view of life. Nothing good ever happens. Be afraid at all times. Undertake nothing new yourselves. Give up.
But people do start new projects in Ukraine. Ukrainian writers have been productive during this war, including writers serving in the armed forces. Serhiy Zhadan, an extraordinary Kharkiv poet and novelist, has just published a book. I was able to have three discussions with him in two cities. One day there will be a collection of Ukrainian war poetry in translation, and it will be astounding. Ukrainians launch cultural projects one after the other, even if the word seems odd just now. I took part in two such launches in just one week: the big history project in Kyiv, called Ukrainian History Global Initiative; and a new cultural institution in Lviv, INDEX, which is based around recording war experience from multiple methods and multiple perspectives.
When we can meet, we can gather the senses of words from the settings. I am grateful to all my friends and colleagues and hosts in Ukraine. Without the time in Ukraine On Freedom would be a different and poorer book. And so it seems right that there was something like a launch in Kharkiv first.
When we cannot meet, we still have the words. We can follow the senses of the word “launch,” from the rougher to the gentler and back, along an arc that perhaps leads to some understanding.
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