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When the Ukrainian army hit a crisis of recruitment earlier this year amid rising losses on the battlefield, one of the most popular cultural personalities in the country stepped up and enlisted.
“At some point it became uncomfortable not to join up,” said Serhiy Zhadan, in an interview at a military base in July.
A beloved poet, novelist, lyricist and rock star in Ukraine, Mr. Zhadan, 50, joined a local National Guard brigade in his home city of Kharkiv in May and started a two-month stint in boot camp. By summer he was serving in an engineering unit on the second line of defense.
Many of his friends were already fighting, he said of his decision to enlist. “This feeling that someone is fighting for you, instead of you, while you are also able to join, was also important.”
Although he said he did not intend to set an example, Mr. Zhadan’s decision to join the army resonated with many, across generations and with lovers of both his words and music.
He can fill a sports hall or a Kyiv theater for poetry readings, as he did on occasions this summer, and his rock band was acclaimed for delivering the best set at the Atlas music festival, Ukraine’s largest, in July. Proceeds of his performances go toward buying medical supplies and other equipment for the soldiers.
His commanders and friends in the Khartia National Guard Brigade were happy for the morale boost and publicity his presence has brought. He has long been a supporter and fund-raiser for the brigade, and even gave it its name, which means Charter, when volunteers from Kharkiv formed it in 2022.
But his commanders are also conscious of the responsibility to keep such a national icon safe. A Russian war blogger has announced a $5,000 price on his head. Mr. Zhadan said that he was not getting special treatment, but that in breaks in his training, soldiers and instructors would ask him for selfies.
Poets have held a special place in Soviet society and its aftermath, trusted as dissidents under a brutal totalitarian system, and as moral and cultural guides in the chaotic transition after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In his work, Mr. Zhadan has searched for meaning for what he calls the last Soviet generation, people like himself who grew up in the Soviet Union and came of age as Ukraine gained its independence, participated in years of rallies and democracy protests, and are now fighting a war.
His fans, whether of his poetry, music or both, turn to him for cultural sustenance.
“We all need food for our souls,” said Bohdan Beniuk, director of the Theater on Podil in Kyiv, as he introduced Mr. Zhadan at a poetry reading in July.
His rock concerts with his band Zhadan i Sobaky (Zhadan and the Dogs) have brought him additional popularity, especially with younger people. His songs, a mixture of punk and jazz, which he writes the lyrics for and the band sets to music, are anarchic, full of profanities and odes to drugs, alcohol and rock ‘n’ roll. But they’re also about love and freedom.
His body of written work — poetry and prose spanning more than three decades, chronicling his own evolution and that of his generation — has made him one of the most important contemporary literary figures in the country. Significantly, he is a poet from eastern Ukraine, and he has given voice to the people from the borderland provinces of the Donbas, which are now largely occupied by Russian forces and claimed by President Vladimir V. Putin as part of Russia.
“He’s a great poet,” said Tamara Hundorova, a professor at the Institute of Literature at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard Universities, who last year proposed Mr. Zhadan for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “He’s a true poet but he’s also a citizen, he’s very engaged in this very difficult time.”
Professor Hundorova, among other academics, credits Mr. Zhadan with helping revitalize the Ukrainian language, not least with his use of slang and swear words, and contributing to a cultural renaissance, picking up the mantle of Ukrainian futurist poets of the 1920s, who flourished in Kharkiv but were cut short by the purges under Stalin.
Born in August 1974, the son of a Soviet army officer, Mr. Zhadan grew up in a village southeast of Kharkiv, near the Russian border, and went to high school in the nearby town of Starobilsk. The town, where his father is buried, has been under Russian occupation since 2022.
He studied philology at the H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city and its former capital, and has since made his home there. After graduating, he worked as a researcher at the Kharkiv Literary Museum and joined a collective of young writers.
His mother’s younger sister, Oleksandra Kovalova, a poet and translator, who was prominent in the Ukrainian national liberation movement in Kharkiv, was a formative influence. She took him to political rallies, introduced him to literary and artistic circles in Kharkiv, and helped him publish his first volume of poetry.
He burst on the literary scene at age 17, “baring his soul boldly,” in 1991, the year that Ukraine gained independence, Ms. Hundorova, the professor, said in an interview.
Ahead of the times, he was the first to explore the symbolism of losing the country, the Soviet Union, that he had grown up in, and seeing his parents’ world, and all the certainties of the communist system, collapse — and along with it, the authority of the older generation. His generation, he depicted as homeless and nihilistic, in constant migration.
Later in adulthood, he experienced a homecoming, explored in his 2010 novel “Voroshilovgrad,” rediscovering a deep connection to the “high sky” and “black earth” of the land and a feeling of loyalty and belonging to the neglected, postindustrial regions of the east.
The novel, whose title references a Soviet-era name for the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, was prescient, revealing the deep ties Ukrainians felt for their homeland. His poetry was too. He published poems about war coming to the region a full two years before Russia began its military interference to annex the Crimean Peninsula and its staging of a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine.
The full-scale invasion in 2022, when Russian troops came close to capturing the city of Kharkiv, robbed him of words at first, he said.
“The stress was so enormous, it took your breath away,” he said. But the need to write returned after a few months. He remains prolific, dwelling on pain, death and separation, and the importance of recording it all.
In recent poems translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, he wrote:
He returned to the theme in another poem:
On a morning in July driving with an engineering team near the front line, he expressed great rage against the Russian occupation of the eastern provinces of Ukraine.
He said he had friends living under Russian occupation, who became trapped and unable to leave. Some have been detained, some have been killed and their property seized, and a classmate even ended up fighting and dying on the Russian side, he said.
“In the east, the war cuts through every family,” he said.
Yet he remains confident Ukraine will prevail.
“It will be a long process, but I think at the end of this process we will see a return to our borders,” he said.
For the Russians, he predicted great turmoil. “With this war, they started a very serious and irreversible, internal destruction,” he said. “I think we are witnessing this colossus crumbling.”
Vladyslav Golovin contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
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