Serhiy Zhadan: Ukrainian writer, activist, soldier

Serhiy Zhadan is a Ukrainian writer-activist who stayed in his hometown of Kharkiv after the 2022 Russian invasion, helping to evacuate children and the elderly and to coordinate medical and food deliveries.

In June last year Zhadan posted on Facebook that he had joined the National Guard of Ukraine, signalling his involvement in active combat.

The Ukrainian town of Kharkiv after Russian bombardment (Source: CNN)

Zhadan’s eyewitness accounts are collated in Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front. Before this, Zhadan had written the novel The Orphanage, which describes the journey of Pasha, a thirty-five year old school master — the same age, incidentally, as the protagonist in Dante’s Inferno — as he descends into hellish circles of nearby conflict in order to cross the frontline and rescue his young nephew.

In The Orphanage the surprising turn is that the child becomes the voice of clarity and wisdom, in amongst the confusion of the adult world.

Towards the end of the journey home, adult Pasha crumbles mentally as he senses the shadow of death passing through a hospital filled with wounded and dying soldiers. Pasha’s mind falls into the whiteness of snowy fields, and he tries to evade a pack of dogs waiting to “sink their teeth into his neck”. He runs and runs until light floods everything, and “it’s as if life consists solely of light, there’s no place for death”. The surprise twist in this novel is that the intensity of this life-or-death chase lifts as the focalisation shifts to the easy-going voice of the child, Pasha’s nephew, who calmly and matter-of-factly narrates their homecoming:

Just disembarked. The soldiers are focused and calm. Nobody’s yelling. Nobody’s berating anyone. Everyone’s preparing for the war that’s still going on. Everyone’s planning to survive, thinking about returning. I like returning to the Station, too, I like counting the buildings, seeing our neighbours at the bus stop, waiting for our house — looks like a half-loaf of black bread — to appear around the corner. On the trees around the bus stop, groups of birds. Drowsy, wet, motionless. It’s as if they’re waiting for a ride. They may’ve flown here from the city, come back to their flock. They feel safer here.

The comforts of home are evoked — the black bread, and later, the smell of fresh sheets. There is contentment, but the sense of hope for the future is muted. Sadness for the reader creeps in at the childish acceptance of adult reality: war continues; there will be other “returns”; even the birds are caught up in continuing cycles of war and displacement. Pasha has outrun death, at least for the moment, and seen the light of life, but his nephew’s narration takes the reader back into the everyday situation in which a person must make plans just to survive. We are left waiting for hope: for mundane reality to reveal something new to us that will break the old cycles.

Christians believe that Jesus liberates his followers from the old deadly cycles, but at a great cost: he offers his life. The shock is that this won’t involve a one-to-one swap, or a fraught negotiation over the right “exchange rate”, but that Jesus’s offers his death in crucifixion generously, willingly, as a ransom for “the many” people who worship him as king. The confounding, wonderful, troubling truth for Christians is that Jesus is crowned by God and given “the name above every name” because he came out of the wilderness determined to confront death head-on, on our behalf, by offering his own life for us all.

A blanket of darkness and grief has settled over our world. The Christian hope is that Jesus the Servant King has destroyed “the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations” — that he has swallowed up death forever. Jesus will wipe away the tears from all faces and remove humanity’s disgrace from the earth (Isaiah 26:9).

This is an edited extract from an article previously published in ABC Religion & Ethics