Amid struggles, a paradoxical ethic emerged: a fierce devotion to culture and country in the very face of what could destroy them. As Blair Ruble observes, even amid full-scale invasion, “Ukrainians in every genre have kept creating, no matter what the Russians have thrown at them”. The lives of creators illustrate this ethic of loving what can be taken away, whether in exile, prison, censorship, or war.
One of them is Mykola Khvylovy (1893 - 1933), a polemicist who believed Ukrainian culture could become modern and self-reliant. His famous slogan “Away from Moscow!” was not only geopolitical, but also cultural. Khvylovy described Ukraine as an unfinished intellectual project.
He believed love meant demanding more: better literature, sharper thought, freedom from colonial imitation. When Stalinist terror destroyed the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s (the Executed Renaissance), Khvylovy watched friends arrested, silenced, and erased.
In 1933, after witnessing the Holodomor and the collapse of cultural autonomy, he shot himself. His suicide was a final refusal to participate in a totalitarian regime, and Khvylovy embodies a painful example: loving culture sometimes means refusing survival under repression.
Another artist who combined love and pain in her works is Alla Horska (1929 - 1970), a monumental artist and human rights activist, worked in Soviet Ukraine during the Thaw. She created mosaics and stained glass filled with Ukrainian symbolism and resisted Russification openly.
She also investigated mass graves of Stalinist executions and supported political prisoners. In 1970, she was murdered under suspicious circumstances; the case was never investigated. Her life shows that during Soviet times, to love truth often means becoming visible, and therefore vulnerable.
Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722 - 1794), on the other side, finds the motif of love in labor. His philosophy was built on the concept of congenial labor - the idea that happiness is only possible when you do what your soul loves. For Skovoroda, love was not an emotion but an epistemological tool. He taught that "love is the beginning, middle, and end of the universe."
To love something was to truly know its essence. His "love" was a cosmic harmony (philanthropia), a way to bridge the gap between the visible world and the invisible divine. Pain, in Skovoroda’s view, was the restlessness of a soul doing uncongenial work.
He saw the pain of the world as a result of people chasing shadows, such as wealth, rank, and external beauty, rather than the inner person. His life was an exercise in avoiding the pain of social entrapment. His famous epitaph says it all: "The world hunted me, but it did not catch me."
Ivan Bahrianyi (1906 - 1963) stands out as a writer who directly confronted violence and survival in both his personal life and creative work. Born in northeastern Ukraine during the upheavals of World War I and civil war, he witnessed the murder of close relatives during the early Soviet period.
This early trauma informed both his political consciousness and literary voice. Bahrianyi’s works, including the acclaimed novel The Garden of Gethsemane, depict the impact of state terror on individual dignity. His prose does not romanticize suffering but treats it as a condition that must be observed and testified to, asserting the emotional and moral interior of the individual in conditions engineered to diminish it.
Throughout his life, Bahrianyi was arrested, sent into exile, and forced into emigration. He continued to write from abroad about the internal resilience of individuals imprisoned by ideology, asserting that love of freedom, justice, and personal integrity can persist through systemic brutality. Here love becomes an act of resistance, embodied in characters who cling to conscience even when the system demands compliance.
Vasyl Stus (1938 - 1985) spent over two decades in Soviet prisons and labor camps for his unwavering principles. In January 1972 he was arrested for his dissident activities; he then endured a five-year Gulag sentence and, after release, was rearrested and imprisoned until his death. But Stus refused to yield.
As his biographer notes, even in solitary confinement he composed a vast collection called Time of Creativity, communicating the choice he had made: to keep creating against all odds. In a cell he wrote, with defiant hope, that “the debris of torment / might give birth to flowers”.
He even coined the word “self-fulfilment” (samo soboyu napovnennia) to describe his inner strategy: by concentrating on art and love, he transcended his cell. His lines from that period became famous: “You shall finally comprehend: you are free, free. Because only when we love do we become free,” he wrote as a prisoner.
In other words, Stus asserted that inner love and art granted him freedom no prison could strip away. Stus died in a Perm labor camp in 1985, but by then he had already become a legend of Ukraine’s spirit. When his body was finally returned in 1989, 30,000 Ukrainians turned out for his funeral procession, a homage to a man who bore pain without surrender.
Ukrainian thinkers have shown a striking commonality: they faced persecution not by abandoning love, but by amplifying it. Khvylovy’s suicide was itself a final act of love for Ukraine, Stus’s inner freedom sprang from love in extremis. For Ukraine the ethic of love and pain is a cultural inheritance.
Thus, to love what is imperiled and to create out of suffering is an act of resistance. In this sense, their lives offer a key to understanding Ukraine now: standing for what you love and believe in is the thing most worth defending and most easily destroyed.
