«War Strikes at Our Souls...» Full-Scale Invasion in the Eyewitnesses' Reflections

«War Strikes at Our Souls...» Full-Scale Invasion in the Eyewitnesses' Reflections

Abstract

The tragic experience of Ukrainians in surviving in the conditions of modern war is recorded in the testimonies of eyewitnesses, in the martyrologies those continue every day. The submitted corpus of documents is an important historical source, a form of preservation of the collective memory of the people, an evidence base about the crimes of enemies for future trials against them. This year M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology (IASFE) has published the book “Everyday Culture during the Russian-Ukrainian War”*. It contains about 400 interviews with the witnesses of the events of the full-scale war in Ukraine. We are publishing a part of the materials those haven’t been included in the edition in this issue of the annual. These are autoethnographic stories and diary entries of of the scientists of Ukrainian Folklore and Ethnographic Centre of the IASFE, the representatives of Kyiv intelligentsia recorded in 2022–2023.

Over time, separate details of the events we experienced are lost and forgotten. First of all, this concerns tragic realities those are pushed out of memory because of their traumatic nature, the natural desire of a person to maintain psycho-emotional balance. The special value of the presented records consists just in the fixation of the completeness of the events of the first hours, days, and months of the full-scale invasion of the Russian troops into the territory of Ukraine. Reflections of the scientists about the war, in the vortex of which they have found themselves, become for them a means of preserving their own professional qualifications, a manifestation of a patriotic position. “There was a stupor, and then a burning need to act, to do something, to be useful”, – this is a desire inherent in everyone at that time, and everyone realized it in full, depending on the circumstances in which they were. And scientists – also through cultural and anthropological studies of the war.

Keywords

autoethnography, Russian-Ukrainian war, collective memory, survival strategies, forced migration.