To Break a Window: The Phenomenology of a Wartime Gesture
Each year, while teaching Ukrainian literature from WWII, I used to entertain my students with the following anecdote:
1943, Lviv. A wartime curfew is in force — no one’s allowed on the street after a certain hour. But the celebrated young writer Yurii Kosach, a hard-drinking bohemian from a storied literary clan, is nevertheless staggering down an empty street. Suddenly he pauses, turns, and shatters the picture window of a children's clothing store. Then he reaches in and steals some childrens’ garments. While stuffing his pockets with pint-sized pants, dresses, socks, and bodysuits, Kosach is arrested by the Nazi Germany police. After spending a night in detention, he’s released, thanks to the efforts of his writer-friends from the Literary Artistic Club.
“Why did he do that?” ask my students. It’s a natural question. In its long periods of statelessness, under the thumb of its more powerful neighboring states and empires, Ukrainian poets and writers have rarely been allowed to simply be “artists.” They’ve been expected to serve as “the voices of the oppressed” — whether they wanted the part or not. Taras Shevchenko created a paradigm: poet, prophet, kobzar, guardian of values, and protector of the nation.
Leaping to the present, with the ongoing full-scale Russia-Ukraine war, we see that many, if not all, contemporary Ukrainian writers have stepped out of their studies in order to join the battle, — some by enlisting in the army, others by fundraising, volunteering while dodging missiles and drone attacks, or advocating at home and abroad in order to secure more weapons for our country.
Returning to the students’ question, I told them a little about Kosach’s artistic extravagant nature, something for which he was often severely chastised. And yet, I asked, playing devil’s advocate, “If we forgive Rimbaud his brawling with Verlaine, never mind his later gun-running in Ethiopia, why fuss so much about Kosach’s breaking a window and making off with a few items of childrens’ clothing?”
In 2022 it dawned on me that intuitively I’d chosen the right anecdote, but had only partly grasped its implications — until now.
June 2022, Vienna. While war ravages my native land, I find myself wandering crowded downtown streets on a pleasant, warm day in early summer in a city which I did not plan to visit. After the interminable lockdowns enforced on the world due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people are thirsty for communication, travel, connection: the streets echo with laughter and singing, spilling out from overcrowded cafes and pubs. There are lines outside restaurants. People clink glasses, celebrate each other, close their eyes as they listen to music, and exhale smoke from furious cigarettes.
I feel I’m staring at a surreal vision: Is it possible for life to be this easy, for the world to look so....normal? Standing inside this dreamscape rising around me on a broad Viennese boulevard (oh my life was once like this too, I remember), I think about my homeland. The thousands of dead, tortured and raped, missed and wounded, landscapes of mass graves, occupied territories, shelling, daily photos of dead soldiers and funeral processions, smashed cities, the constant threat of new attacks from Russia. While Ukrainians are dying en masse each day, Western partners hesitate whether to give Ukraine arms and weapons. They worry about provoking Putin.
And suddenly I’ve fallen into an abyss of powerlessness, existential emptiness, and alienation. What should I do with this normal world I was once a part of?
Suddenly I stop and smile to myself: “Maybe breaking a shop window at night was not as crazy as it seems to people, as it once seemed to me? In the context of the deep madness of war, of missiles razing buildings and leveling entire cities, would one broken shop window matter? The gesture suddenly seems like a brazen yet healthy assertion of an individual’s power to do… something… anything… to break the paralysis.”
***
I try to imagine Kosach’s futile gesture in a war-torn Lviv during the Nazi occupation. He strikes the glass with something heavy — a brick, a boot — and the surface of the glass shatters. Kosach watches the pieces of glass scatter and imagines they represent his old life, ineluctably altered once more, broken by war. He stares at the dark hole opening onto the store — as dark and uncertain as his future. “Your image of broken glass and darkness are banal, trite metaphors,” Kosach might reply. And as a literary critic I would agree with him, of course. We witnesses to war would like to agree that war makes metaphors seem beside the point, superfluous.
I ask myself whether Kosach’s gesture was born of hope or of despair. I believe it was both (and maybe something more). His blow aimed at the past, the present, and the future as he asserted himself, his living presence, amid the ruins.
Olha Poliukhovych, PhD, literary critic & scholar, writer, is an associate professor at the Department of Literature of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2017–2018 she was a Fulbright Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. In 2020, with Mariia Shuvalova Dr Poliukhovych became a co-founder of NGO New Ukrainian Academic Community (Kyiv). NGO's latest projects include promotion of Volodymyr Dibrova’s book Taras Shevchenko: New Perspectives; organization of the international conference “Female Artist as an Icon of National Modernization,” dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Lesia Ukrainka’s birth; and literary introductions to the Contemporary Ukrainian Émigré and Diaspora Literature webinar series (Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation KUMF Gallery in Toronto). Since a full-scale Russia-Ukraine war, she has been featured on LitHub podcasts (in a conversation with Askold Melnyczuk and Mitchell Kaplan) and has published essays in Los Angeles Review of Books, Agni, Consequence forum, and Prospect Magazine. Currently, she is writing a book of Yurii Kosach’s intellectual biography.