# Ukrainian Literature After the War: Fiction Falls Silent

*Culture, Art & Literature · Sofia Bellini · 2026-09-27*

## TL;DR

Since 2024, several prominent Ukrainian writers have set aside fiction for essays, journalism and memoir shaped by Russia's full-scale invasion. Authors including Andriy Kurkov and Serhiy Zhadan describe a turn toward direct testimony, while destroyed printing capacity and language shifts push the country's literature toward a documentary, liberation-minded mode with growing international reach.

## Key facts

- Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, has continued to reshape the country's literary life into 2024 and beyond.
- Andriy Kurkov, one of Ukraine's best-known novelists, has publicly described fellow writers turning away from fiction toward essays and journalism.
- Serhiy Zhadan, a leading poet and novelist from Kharkiv, has published wartime essays that reportedly follow him driving vehicles toward the front lines.
- Russian strikes have damaged or destroyed printing presses and publishing infrastructure in Kharkiv, a historic centre of Ukrainian book production.
- The wartime poetry collection "A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails" by Halyna Kruk drew serious international attention, and its prize recognition has been reported but not confirmed.

## When the Bombs Hit the Printing Presses

In 2024, Russian strikes hit Kharkiv's largest printing houses and destroyed paper stocks, and that single fact explains more about **Ukrainian literature after the war** than any manifesto ever could. Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine roughly thirty miles from the Russian border, had long been the country's industrial backbone for books. The Factor Druk facility was among the sites struck, and the damage reached both the machines and the raw paper waiting to become novels.

Think about what that means for a writer. You finish a manuscript, and there is no press to print it, no paper to feed the press, no warehouse to hold the finished copies. Literature stops being an abstract pursuit and becomes a supply chain problem. Readers in Kyiv and Lviv weren't just losing access to new titles. They were watching the physical memory of their own culture go up in smoke.

That is the ground floor of this story, and it is the part nobody disputes. What gets murkier is everything built on top of it. Andriy Kurkov, one of Ukraine's best-known novelists, reportedly told an audience at Columbia's Harriman Institute that nearly all Ukrainian writers have stopped writing fiction and turned instead to essays and journalism, with most still unable to finish a novel. That claim is striking, but it is not something I can hand you as settled fact. Ukrainian fiction is still being written and still being published, even if the volume and the mood have shifted.

What is documented is narrower and, honestly, more interesting. Artem Chapeye published a collection titled *The Ukraine* with Seven Stories Press in 2024, and a short story of his ran in The New Yorker back in 2022. Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a writer born in Donetsk, made a deliberate switch away from Russian and now writes in Ukrainian. Those are concrete moves by concrete people, and they say something a generalization never could.

The presses are gone, the paper is ash, but the writers are still typing on whatever still works.

## What Andriy Kurkov Said at the Harriman Institute

According to the account that circulated afterward, Andriy Kurkov told an audience at Columbia University's Harriman Institute that nearly all Ukrainian writers had stopped writing fiction and turned instead to essays and journalism, and that most of them still could not write novels. That claim is the contested centerpiece of the whole discussion about Ukrainian literature after the war, and it needs a careful frame: Kurkov has spoken publicly about the wartime turn toward nonfiction, but the exact wording could not be confirmed.

So treat it as reported, not settled. The sweeping claim that "almost all" writers abandoned fiction is unverified as well. Ukrainian fiction continues to be published, even if the balance has shifted hard toward essays, reportage and journalism since the full-scale invasion.

What makes the remark land isn't only psychology. It is also paper. Kharkiv's printing infrastructure, including the Factor Druk facility, was struck in 2024, damaging equipment and destroying paper stocks. When the largest printing houses in a country's literary supply chain are bombed, the pipeline that turns a manuscript into a bound book narrows at the source. Fewer presses, less paper, longer odds for a debut novel.

The framing matters here: the Harriman Institute claim is presented in the original account as Kurkov's own diagnosis, not as a statistic anyone has verified. Fiction has not stopped. It has been squeezed.

Read against the broader reporting, the claim reads less like a verdict and more like a symptom. Writers who once had years of quiet for a novel now have fragments of time between sirens, volunteer shifts and funerals. The novel, that slowest of forms, is the first casualty of a schedule that no longer exists.

## Zhadan, Chapeye, and the Turn to Essays

If you want a single name that carries Ukrainian literature after the war into the essay form, it is Serhiy Zhadan. He is widely described as Ukraine's most important contemporary writer, and according to the original account he turned to a book of essays that reportedly follows him driving vehicles toward the front lines. That book's exact title could not be confirmed, so treat the framing as reported rather than settled.

What the reported essays do, at least in the version that circulated, is turn the camera inward. Zhadan writes about the tragicomic logistics of moving cars and supplies, and then he questions the prejudices buried deep in his own Ukrainian identity. Religion is the example the account keeps returning to: how his thinking on faith shifted once the war rearranged everything around him. That kind of internal reckoning, the account argues, was largely absent from Ukrainian writing before 2024.

Artem Chapeye makes the shift concrete. Seven Stories Press published his collection *The Ukraine* in 2024, and a story of his had already appeared in *The New Yorker* in 2022, so his name traveled west before the book did. The title itself is the argument. Saying "The Ukraine" is the old Western habit, the one that frames the country as a borderland of Russia, a region rather than a nation. Chapeye takes the phrase back and refuses it, and the collection reads like an anatomy of a transition period rather than a settled portrait.

Put the two together and you can see the mechanism. One writer carries the essay into the war's daily logistics; the other carries a deliberately provocative book into English-language publishing. Between them, the turn to nonfiction stops looking like a retreat from fiction and starts looking like a different instrument being picked up because the old one no longer fits the room.

## Readers Turn Back to the Executed Renaissance

Something shifted on the reader's side of the desk too. According to the original account, Ukrainian readers who once lined up for translations of Western bestsellers are now hunting down the writers Stalin's regime killed in the 1920s and 1930s, the generation known as the Executed Renaissance. The revival of interest in those murdered poets and novelists is real and well documented. The tidy before-and-after framing, where a nation swaps commercial fiction for its own martyred classics overnight, is the part that deserves a raised eyebrow. Treat it as a story people tell about the war rather than a measured trend.

Testimony from writers in The Paris Review is just as slippery. One voice reportedly says there is no time left for long forms, that life now arrives in fragments. Another says the books burned with the bombs, so an iPad full of e-books is all that remains of a library. These lines circulate widely, and they may well be real, but they could not be confirmed as exact quotations. What they capture is a mood: reading itself became a casualty.

### Zabuzhko as the Precursor

Oksana Zabuzhko's novel *The Museum of Abandoned Secrets* often gets pulled into this conversation as a kind of prophecy, a book that saw the shape of things before they arrived. That reading is interpretive, not settled fact. The novel does circle Ukrainian history and Soviet repression, which is why the comparison keeps surfacing. Whether it truly foreshadowed this period is a claim readers make, not a verdict anyone has proven.

What is harder to argue with is the language turn. Volodymyr Rafeyenko, born in Donetsk and long a Russian-language writer, deliberately switched to writing in Ukrainian. That is not a rumor. He has described the choice himself, and it stands as one of the clearest markers of how Ukrainian literature after the war rebuilt itself from the ground up, in a new tongue, for a new readership.

## From Russian to Ukrainian: The Language Shift

Volodymyr Rafeyenko was born in Donetsk, a city whose streets raised him in Russian, and for most of his writing life that was the language he reached for. Then he stopped. Rafeyenko is the clearest confirmed case of a writer from a Russian-occupied region abandoning Russian and rebuilding his prose in Ukrainian, a decision he has discussed publicly and at length. What makes his case worth pausing on is the direction of the move: not a translation, not a gesture toward the market, but a second literary birth in a tongue he had to learn as an adult. The original account frames this less as a political choice than as an ontological transformation, and that framing is worth holding loosely. It is the source's interpretation, not a fact you can verify at a desk.

Still, the pattern he represents is real, and it is one of the sharpest fault lines running through **Ukrainian literature after the war**. Language in Ukraine was never a neutral tool. It carried class, region, empire, and the long memory of who was allowed to publish and in what. When writers from the east cross that line, they are not just switching alphabets. They are choosing which readers will hear them and which version of themselves survives.

Then there is the prize question, and here the story gets slippery. Halyna Kruk's poetry collection *Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails* exists, and it drew serious international attention. As the original account has it, the book was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, a claim that could not be reliably confirmed. Treat the nomination as reported, not settled. The book's existence and its reach are solid ground. The trophy line is not.

What both threads share is a refusal to stay inside the old borders. A Donetsk novelist writing in Ukrainian and a poet whose work travels under an English title are doing the same thing in different registers: forcing the outside world to meet Ukrainian writing on Ukrainian terms. The cost of that arrival is the part no prize announcement ever prints.

## A Literature of Liberation, or a Contested Narrative?

Here is the honest problem with the tidy story of Ukrainian literature after the war: the most dramatic version of it rests on claims nobody can verify. The framing that Ukrainian writing has shifted from inward, individual texts toward collective memory and national resistance is an interpretive thesis, not a documented fact. Treat it as an argument worth weighing, not a settled record.

The same caution applies to the supporting apparatus. The original account cites the Ukrainian Writers' Association's "latest reports" as confirmation of these sweeping observations, but no such reports could be located or verified. It is a citation that sounds authoritative and dissolves on contact.

What does hold up is the reporting underneath it. Elif Batuman published a piece in The New Yorker in 2022 about rereading Russian classics in the shadow of the Ukraine war, and that essay is real, dated, and worth your time. It is also the kind of source that complicates the clean narrative rather than confirming it.

Provenance matters here, so let's be plain about it. The essay this discussion draws on appeared on Ekşi Şeyler on 2 July 2025, written by a user posting as "soulflyer," and it leans on The New Yorker along with other outlets for its material. That is a blog post synthesizing journalism, not a scholarly survey or an institutional report. Reading it as the latter is how unverified claims harden into common knowledge.

So the useful posture is neither dismissal nor belief. The concrete losses, the named writers, the language switches, those are checkable and largely check out. The grand arc, the epistemological rupture, the association reports, those are the author's reading of events. Hold the first tightly. Hold the second loosely.


## Frequently asked questions

**What did Andriy Kurkov say about Ukrainian writers at the Harriman Institute?**

According to the original account, Kurkov told an audience at Columbia University's Harriman Institute that nearly all Ukrainian writers had stopped writing fiction and turned to essays and journalism, and that most still could not write novels. That specific wording has not been confirmed, so treat it as the story's version rather than a verified quotation.

**Why have Ukrainian writers stopped writing fiction since 2024?**

That sweeping claim is contested. Ukrainian fiction continues to be published, even as many writers have shifted toward essays and journalism. The wartime turn is real, but "almost everyone stopped" overstates it, and no verified report confirms a blanket halt to fiction after 2024.

**How did the bombing of Kharkiv's printing presses change Ukrainian literature?**

Kharkiv's printing infrastructure was struck in 2024, including the Factor Druk facility. The attack damaged equipment and destroyed paper stocks, and because Kharkiv handled a large share of Ukraine's book production, the strike disrupted the physical pipeline that puts books into readers' hands.

**Who are the Ukrainian writers leading the shift to essays and journalism?**

Serhiy Zhadan is widely regarded as a leading contemporary Ukrainian writer. Artem Chapeye published the collection The Ukraine with Seven Stories Press in 2024, and a story of his appeared in The New Yorker in 2022. Oksana Zabuzhko, author of The Museum of Abandoned Secrets , rounds out the group.

**Why are Ukrainian readers rediscovering writers killed in the Stalin era?**

As the story goes, readers who once reached for translated Western bestsellers are now turning to Ukrainian authors killed in the 1920s and 1930s. A revival of interest in the Executed Renaissance is documented, but the broad before-and-after framing of reading habits remains unverified.

**Was Halyna Kruk's poetry book nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize?**

Halyna Kruk's Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails exists and drew international attention, but a Griffin Poetry Prize nomination could not be reliably confirmed. The book's prominence is real. The prize nod is not something we can state as fact.

**How are writers from occupied regions switching from Russian to Ukrainian?**

Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a Donetsk-born writer who once worked in Russian, deliberately switched to writing in Ukrainian, a change he has discussed publicly. Rafeyenko is the confirmed example of this shift, which he has described as more than a political choice. Editorial note: Details that remain unconfirmed are presented here as such, and no claim is made beyond what has been publicly reported.

Canonical: https://curio.madeda.com/ukrainian-literature-after-the-war-fiction-falls-silent/