Plays between air raids and songs in shelters: How cultural life is thriving in wartime Ukraine

By Svitlana Vlasova, CNN

Kyiv (CNN) — Olha Mesheryakova doesn’t know what the next year will bring for her life in the capital of war-torn Ukraine, for her family or her business. She is confident, however, that in 2025 she will attend a dozen performances in the theaters of Kyiv. The thought gives her a sense of hope.

“This creates a certain expectation, gives a kind of structure, great support at a time when the world around me has gone crazy, and I know exactly what I’m going to do on December 23, for example, because I bought tickets in the summer. Honestly, it gives me hope and faith in the future. It’s some kind of magic,” said Mesheryakova, an entrepreneur.

She is far from alone in her passion for theater. To get tickets to a popular performance, she, along with thousands of other Ukrainians, has to hunt for them months in advance.

On a blacked-out street in the center of Kyiv in mid-December, cars move slowly, as hundreds of people descend on the small, historic building of the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, located just a few hundred meters below the presidential residence.

Since the theater reopened six months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, it has been packed almost every day.

Over that time, the theater itself, its actors and its audience have changed. Its director, Yevhen Nyshchuk, volunteered in the military in 2022, as did many of his colleagues. For example, all three actors who played the main roles in “Three Comrades,” adapted from the post-World War I novel by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, ended up at the front and were able to return to the stage only a year later.

“Remarque sounded completely different. The reality of the war, which has already affected everyone, has changed us. I felt the audience had changed its perception of the theater, had more appetite for it, for this exchange of energy,” Nyshchuk, also an actor, told CNN.

Nyshchuk felt this altered appreciation for Remarque’s writing so keenly in part because he and his colleagues continued to serve in the Armed Forces. To perform the plays, they received permission from their command to take short leaves.

Since the war began, the Ivan Franko Drama Theater has staged more than 1,500 performances attended by more than half a million spectators. Seventeen plays have been premiered. One of them is “The Witch of Konotop,” a mystical play that explores themes of love and power. Tickets were sold out in minutes for the entire run and many Ukrainians have joined a waitlist for any that become available.

Its director, Ivan Uryvskyi, said he was astonished by the play’s success and the influx of new theater-goers.

“Thousands, tens of thousands of spectators wanting to be at the theater. I can’t find an explanation for this,” he told CNN. Full houses and sold-out performances are typical at most of Kyiv’s theaters, according to their websites and e-ticket services.

Uryvskyi says not all come to the theater to escape from the sad reality of war. It is often the opposite.

“Someone needs to plunge into the present day and understand themselves. And he/she doesn’t need to go to a comedy, they don’t need to be distracted. He needs some serious dialogue. Maybe he needs to cry it out in the theater,” said Urivskyi.

Even if people want to escape from the war, they often cannot, as performances are regularly interrupted by air raid sirens. The audience has to leave the theater building and take shelter at the nearest metro station. If the danger passes within an hour, the performance resumes. Otherwise, the show continues on another day.

Both new plays and those that have been in the theater’s repertoire for years get loud applause from the audience.

“When people applaud for 10 to 20 minutes, they give some part of their applause to the artists for the performance, and looking at each other they give another part to themselves, for the fact that, for example, today everyone survived a missile attack of more than 120 missiles and more than 100 drones, and in the evening they came to the performance, which was not canceled,” Nyshchuk said.

A thriving book scene

The number of bookstores in Ukraine has increased from 200 pre-war to almost 500 now. The largest of them, Sens, opened on Kyiv’s main street in the midst of the war. Offering over 57,000 books, it is crowded at any time of the day and says it had more than half a million customers this year. The store’s event plan is scheduled for months in advance.

For its founder, Oleksiy Erinchak, the launch of such a large-scale project in wartime seemed logical. He began the war as the owner of a small bookstore, opened on the eve of the invasion. It became a volunteer hub in the first months of the conflict and grew so popular that Erinchak started thinking about a new, larger space. Meanwhile, the book market and the needs of the audience had changed due to the impact of the war.

“(A) book is the most convenient way to spend time during the war when it is impossible to predict anything. Many people have switched to the Ukrainian language (from Russian). They are trying to understand what it means to be Ukrainian. And books make it much easier to do that,” Erinchak told CNN.

According to the Ukrainian Book Institute, the number of adult Ukrainians reading books every day has doubled during the war to 16%.

“Maybe it’s just war, or stress, and a person just hides under the covers, under the bed, opens a book and travels to other worlds to get away from it all. Or not traveling to other worlds, but delving deeper to understand why did this happen in our lifetime? And books actually have many answers, and you can feel them, understand them, and feel better,” Erinchak explained.

He argues that the current popularity of books should be maintained in the future.

“Local culture always flourishes during wartime… If people are bringing money to the Ukrainian bookstore, it means that we need to invest this money further in Ukrainian books, in Ukrainian culture,” he said, which in turn will help build resilience to future potential Russian disinformation. “We need to build this foundation in our book and cultural sphere as strongly as possible and build a semantic shield around it, a dome so that it would be much more difficult for others to break in and influence the minds of Ukrainians.”

Songs in the shelters

A few songs before the end of an anniversary concert this fall by one of the most popular Ukrainian bands, Okean Elzy, an air raid was announced in Kyiv.

Part of the audience went down to the subway to take shelter, joined by the band. There, on the subway stairs, the performance resumed, with a speaker instead of a professional sound system, with only guitars – and hundreds of voices singing along to every hit.

“Okean Elzy’s 30th-anniversary concerts are a mirror of our history. We have been together for 30 years: at big concerts and in shelters, in stadiums and in dugouts… But it’s not the place that matters, it’s our togetherness,” the band later posted on their Instagram account.

In the almost three years since the full-scale invasion, Okean Elzy’s frontman Svyatoslav Vakarchuk has performed more than 300 concerts for the military, including at positions near the front lines. In some videos posted on the band’s social media pages, what sounds like artillery fire can be heard while Vakarchuk sings for the military. Okean Elzy has donated almost 280 million UAH ($6.7 million) to the Defence Forces of Ukraine, a spokesperson for the band said.

The Ivan Franko Drama Theater also regularly organizes charity performances and says it has already raised more than $1.2 million for the Armed Forces. Additionally, it offers its stage to troupes that have lost their theaters to Russian occupation or can no longer perform in them due to adverse security conditions.

The vibrant cultural life in cities to the rear contrasts with the situation in the frontline areas of Ukraine, where Russia keeps seizing territory.

Yegor Firsov, a chief sergeant who has been fighting against the Russians since 2022, says he is generally sympathetic to an active cultural life, even if some of those on the front lines may be fighting in “real hell.”

“When it comes to women and children, I and my brothers-in-arms, and everyone, supports it,” he told CNN. “Because people are distracted from stress and in such difficult times they want to experience something genuine, and bookshops and theaters are about the real thing, about life.”

And on those rare days when Firsov manages to come to Kyiv from the front, he too goes to concerts.

“Culture is a part of our lives, it is both about war and partly about leisure, because even we, military men, need mental healing, need to be distracted, to be resilient.”

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