Writers in heavily bombed eastern city are taking inspiration from earlier generations who challenged Moscow
When much of Kharkiv’s city centre was demolished by Russian airstrikes at the start of Moscow’s invasion, the city’s historic House of the Word was among hundreds of buildings hit.
The block of flats, built by the Soviets in the 1920s for Ukrainian writers and poets of Kharkiv’s dynamic literary scene, was later a site for brutal purges in the 1930s, with dozens of intellectuals killed. Now Moscow has hit its residents again.
