Stones, Shrapnel and Larkspur: What Charlotte Higgins's New Book Asks of Wartime Culture

A book built from small things

Charlotte Higgins’s Ukrainian Lessons has arrived to a warm review in the Guardian, which praises it as “a vivid and hopeful study of how culture endures in the midst of extreme violence.” The material the review singles out is granular rather than grand: a man in Kharkiv balancing stones in a stream; a boy’s cartoons cut short by a power cut, the silence filling with the boom of frontline artillery; a young poet’s tattoo of a cityscape interrupted where skin grafted from his leg replaced flesh torn by shrapnel; larkspur “pouring down the hill” in the Donbas, flowering, the review notes, on ground that has been recently disturbed.

These are the kind of details that carry a book like this rather than argument or theory. The review makes clear that Higgins works as an observer rather than a polemicist — gathering fragments that, in her words as quoted, “would have seemed too obvious for a novel.” That is a compliment to her eye, and to the access she evidently had to people living and creating close to the front.

What we actually know

What can be stated with confidence, on the basis of the review alone, is limited but real: Higgins has written a book, titled Ukrainian Lessons, about art and culture in wartime Ukraine, drawing on visits including one to Kharkiv; the Guardian has reviewed it positively; and the book’s method is observational, threading anecdote and image rather than sweeping cultural-policy argument.

What is not stated in the review — publisher, price, length, whether the book grew out of prior journalism, translation arrangements, or who commissioned or funded the reporting trips that presumably underpin it — is worth flagging rather than filling in. Books about culture surviving war are, inevitably, also products of an industry: advances, serial rights, festival appearances, translation deals into Ukrainian and other languages. None of that machinery is visible here, and a reviewer’s job is not to disclose it. But readers interested in the economics of who gets to document a war, and who gets paid for having lived through it, will find this review — like most literary reviews — silent on the point.

The catch, such as it is

None of this undercuts the book’s apparent value. A study that notices larkspur thriving on disturbed ground, or a tattoo interrupted by a skin graft, is doing the work that reportage from war zones too rarely manages: attending to the specific rather than the symbolic. The risk with this genre — art-endures-amid-atrocity writing — is that it can flatten into a comforting thesis, culture as evidence of resilience, evidence that a nation deserves solidarity. Higgins, on this review’s account, resists that flattening by staying close to particulars rather than reaching for uplift.

The proportionate takeaway

There is a genuine book here, reviewed seriously by a major outlet, built on fieldwork inside a war Higgins has evidently witnessed directly. That is worth noting on its own terms. What remains outside the frame of this review — the commercial and institutional scaffolding that gets a book like this written, published and reviewed at all — is the more interesting story for anyone tracking how culture is funded, commissioned and paid for in wartime, and it is a story this piece, fairly, does not attempt to tell.