Is Ukraine’s Culture Worth Fighting For? With Charlotte Higgins

**Mia Sorenti** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorenti. When a country is fighting for its survival, why does culture matter? On what makes people risk their lives to protect poems, paintings and stories in the midst of war. On today's episode, Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer at The Guardian, joins Hannah Lucinda Smith to discuss her book, Ukrainian Lessons, a Journey into the Art and Life of a Country at War, and what Ukraine's artists, writers and cultural institutions reveal about the role of art in documenting war, resisting erasure and preserving a sense of national identity.
Let's join our host, Hannah Lucinda Smith now with more.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (0:41)
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 heralded a war in which not only people and places but also language, history and culture are under attack. When the journalist Charlotte Higgins, who reports on Culture for the Guardian, traveled to the country soon after the war began, it was to take part in the Lviv Book Forum, an event held in defiance of the attempted desecration of Ukrainian culture. Since then, she's traveled back to the country repeatedly to report on the impact of the conflict on Ukraine's art and cultural community.
She's also been learning the Ukrainian language, and she documents all of this in her new book, Ukrainian Lessons, Charlotte, welcome to Intelligence Squared.

**Charlotte Higgins** (1:24)
Well, thank you so much. And what an honor and a pleasure to be talking to you. So thank you very much indeed, Hannah.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (1:32)
It's lovely to have you.
So you are, obviously, your background is you're a culture correspondent. What first took you to Ukraine, into the war zone, and what were your first thoughts when you entered the country and saw what was going on there?

**Charlotte Higgins** (1:48)
Yes, I'm not a proper foreign correspondent, that's for sure.
I suppose in my work writing about culture for many, many years, I had increasingly become interested by those areas where culture and politics kind of touch each other. I guess I felt that writing about culture, just simply to say, wow, this is an interesting play or this is a superb actor, wasn't quite enough. I realized that the most I could get out of the work that I've been doing for a long time really, is to think of culture as a way of looking at the world. Not a thing just to look at, but actually a lens through which to try to understand the world.
Those were the thoughts that were in my mind very, very broadly. And it's early 2020, 2021, I suppose, I was forming those thoughts. And I have to say, I didn't know anything about Ukraine before the full scale invasion. But a friend of mine who was reporting, a colleague from The Guardian at a certain point said to me, I think you should think about going to Ukraine. We should be doing more culture. I think he said that to loads of people in different parts of The Guardian doing different things. And I was the only person who said, yes, you're absolutely right. I must rush off and do this immediately. So no, I had a kind of conviction. I had a sense, based on experience of what happened in the First World War, actually, that artists would be documenting this war, perhaps more interestingly than any other form of documentation. Probably they would be doing a different kind of job from journalists and historians, but maybe setting down and creating memories of the war that would be quite profound and long lasting. They would look at war in a different way. I was very curious to see that in action. That was the impulse that sent me there. Of course, in a sense, I was extremely naive. At the point that I went to Ukraine for the first time, everything had been very quiet except at the front. So the day that I arrived in Kiev was actually a very significant cruise missile attack, and it was the first attack for many months since the Russians had withdrawn from their attempted encirclement of Kiev. So yes, it was a pretty rude awakening.
It wasn't, oh, you're just going to this country that happens to have a war on its fringes. In fact, that was the day that the war came back to the capital, and then subsequently has to many, you know, many places where civilians live. And that's how it's gone since then.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (4:44)
Can you talk a little bit about the ways in which you saw culture in all its forms coming under attack in Ukraine?

**Charlotte Higgins** (4:52)
Well, there was, the most obvious way was just the sort of literal attack on cultural sites, cultural heritage, museums being destroyed, culture coming under occupation.