The books are ash, but these librarians refuse to give up

While eight European leaders were flying east to Washington, DC, on the night of 17 August to attend a meeting between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald J Trump, two days after Trump’s Alaska meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian radar picked up 140 blips coming from the east: the harbinger of a Russian Shahed drone attack.

Near 8.30 pm, for a short time, radar operators saw four other blips moving much more quickly than those signalling drones, which fly at about 180 kilometres per hour. These faster blips were tracking ballistic missiles, which fly at 7,200 kph, almost six times the speed of sound, and trace a parabolic course reaching almost the edge of space (80 km high), before homing in on their targets.

Three of the missiles got through: one exploded in the city of Sumy in northeast Ukraine, badly damaging an educational institution, and killing what remains an undisclosed number of people; one hit a multistorey building in Kharkiv, injuring two people; and one was fired at the city of Pavlohrad in southeastern Ukraine.

A university comes under fire

At 3.06 am on 18 August, about the time the last of the European leaders arrived in Washington, the warhead in the first of three drones that would over the ensuing seven minutes hit Sumy State University in northwest Ukraine, a scant 30 km from the Russian border, exploded.

The detonation of the 90 kg warhead, containing a mixture of TNT and RDX (hexogen), which magnifies the force of the explosive reaction, caused a blast wave powerful enough to collapse walls and shred vehicles up to 50 metres away and drive metal fragments embedded in the warhead and other incendiary elements up to another 100 metres away at hundreds of kilometres per hour.

These metals burn at up to 3,500°C, a thousand degrees above the melting point of steel and more than 10 times the temperature that paper – like the millions of pages in the thousands of books in Sumy State University’s library – spontaneously ignites at 233 Celsius or Fahrenheit 451.

Famously, the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury used this temperature as the title of his book about a world where, to maintain power, a fascist government burns books other than those it produces.

Two days later, Sumy’s head librarian, Olga Krytska, told Liubav Petriv, a reporter with the Ukrainian government-run news platform United 24 Media, that “Everything [in the central part of the main library] has been destroyed; not a single book could be saved. Only ashes remain.”

Krytska’s words were almost a twice-told tale. One hundred and sixteen days earlier, at 10.15 local time on Palm Sunday morning, two Russian ballistic missiles, detonated in Sumy. One, apparently with cluster munitions in the warhead, tore through the downtown area, killing 34 people and wounding 117, among whom were 15 children.

The other missile all but destroyed the Sumy State University’s “N” Building, a former conference centre, which, in addition to housing classrooms, offices, a gym and co-working spaces, housed a major part of the university’s library that was displaced in 2022 by the first missile attack on Sumy.

According to Iryna Kovalenko, one of Sumy State University’s deputy librarians, when, a few days later, the library staff was able to access the burnt building, “We didn’t believe what we saw. We all cried. It was too hard to see the damage.”

As many as 45,000 books were destroyed, including collections of English, Spanish and Ukrainian books, these last including sub-collections of literature, management, law and economics. “In that room, we also had a collection of old Polish literature that was burnt,” Yana Fandikova, the university’s other deputy librarian, told University World News in an interview that included Kovalenko.

Housed in a different part of the building, the rare book collection survived. Saved from the rubble was a facsimile of the Peresopnytsia Gospel, an extraordinarily important illuminated 16th-century translation of the four gospels into what linguists sometimes refer to as the Ruthenian language, an old East Slavic language. Ukrainian presidents take their oath of office on the original Peresopnytsia Gospel.

Targeted attack

These attacks on Sumy are no more collateral damage than was the attack on VN Karazin Kharkiv National University in the early days of the war that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 or the attacks on seven other Ukrainian universities (including the previous one on Sumy).

Rather, as is the case with the bombing of the theatre in Mariupol on 15 March 2022, which killed more than 600 of the more than 1,000 people sheltering there, or the attacks that have damaged or destroyed 1,163 schools, these most recent attacks on Ukraine’s universities and their libraries are deliberate.

In the words of Volodymyr Sadivnychyi, chair of Sumy’s journalism department, the Russian attacks were “intentional terrorism against my country”.

Unlike the thousands of V1s and V2s that Nazi Germany rained down on Britain aimed at areas and not buildings (which killed more than 8,600 people), ballistic missiles and Shahed drones are aimed at precise coordinates.

Though expressed in terms such as 50.8919° N Latitude/34.8441° E Longitude and directed by advanced GPS systems, Russia’s ballistic missiles and drones are but a 21st-century version of Tsar Peter the Great’s 1720 decree against the use of the Ukrainian language (denigrated by the term Malorussian or ‘little Russian’) in both theological literature and publishing.

A clear thread runs from the drones and ballistic missiles back, also, to Stalin’s killing of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, even before the Holodomor, the famine his orders caused between 1932 and 1933 that killed more than four million Ukrainians.

“As Putin’s ‘essay’, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, published eight months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shows, for Russians, Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991 stands as an insult,” said Professor Vitaly Chernetsky, who was born in Odessa and lived there through high school and now teaches in the Department of Slavic, German and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas (Lawrence).

“For centuries Russia (and Poland from 1772 to 1918, and Austria-Hungary, from 1772 to 1918) dominated Ukraine. In 1920, the three-year-old Soviet state waged war against the nascent Ukrainian republic, which upon being defeated became one of the four original ‘republics’ of the Soviet Union.

There was a short time in the late 1920s when the Soviets allowed a flowering of Ukrainian culture, but this was stmped out, and thousands of intellectuals and cultural leaders were killed on Stalin’s orders starting in 1939,” Chernetsky told University World News.

Censorship of Ukrainian under the Tsars meant that the works of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, who can be thought of as a Ukrainian cognate to Scotland’s Robbie Burns, were banned from 1847 to 1857 (when he was in prison) and then partially banned in 1863, two years after his death. They were fully banned again in 1876.

Though Shevchenko’s works were published under the Soviets, their censors suppressed Shevchenko’s criticisms of Russia. The videos of Russian soldiers shipping washing machines home and the desecration of graveyards make one of Taras Shevchenko’s poems sound as if the poet, who had been born a serf, foresaw today’s news reports:

Cruel Russians rob and pillage
What their eyes can notice;
There are even opened graveyards
In the search for money.

For Sadivnychyi the destruction of physical objects, books, was almost a secondary point. The fires were but another example of Russia’s history of repressing – better, denying – that Ukraine even existed.

“What it looks like, really,” he said, “is to destroy our language, our country.”

‘Words are not truth’

When the Kovalenkos and Fandikovas went to sleep on the night of 17 August, like most Ukrainians, they knew that their president and the European leaders were on their way to meet with Trump. Remembering the dressing down Zelenskyy had received in February in the Oval Office, when US Vice-President JD Vance berated him for not thanking the United States enough (he had, including during an address to a Joint Session of Congress in December 2022) and Trump bombastically said: “You don’t have any cards,” both families felt trepidation.

“After three years of war,” Kovalenko said, “I didn’t believe and I didn’t expect anything good would come out of the meeting. It may be terrible words, but it’s our reality,” she said about the war and the widespread disappointment around its continuation.

“During these three years, we saw that words aren’t truth. And every time [there is peace talk], it [the war] becomes worse and worse. The enemy attacks more and more every night. We hope that it will be quiet and everything will be good. But for this meeting, I didn’t hope much.”

The sound of the explosions near 3 am dashed any small hopes Kovalenko did allow herself: that with the leaders on the way to Washington, the air raid sirens might not wail and they wouldn’t hear the low throb of drone engines.

In their apartment, the Fandikovas followed civil defence instructions, now second nature, by running into a corridor, the Rule of Two Walls, which is meant to provide protection from secondary effects of a nearby explosion: shards of glass and pieces of window frames that would essentially form high-speed shrapnel.

Along with her husband, Kovalenko went on to their balcony and saw that, for the second time this year, the university was under attack. “I live very near the library, and I heard the drones and saw the explosions. I saw the fires. And, I understood from the horror of these first minutes that the library was burning.”

Not until the next afternoon were the two librarians afforded access to the blasted building. The main reading room had been completely destroyed. The furniture had been completely burnt; the metal shelves melted.

The thousands of litres of water used to fight the fire had long since mixed with the ashes of some 15,000 books, which formed a gelatinous pulp, approaching the consistency of mud, on the floor.

Uncountable flecks of that ash came from six thousand books donated to the library by the University of Liverpool to replace books destroyed in the Palm Sunday attack. Some 3,000 books were salvaged from other parts of the building, while 900,000 books in vaults also survived.

We lost collections in psychology, literature, technical fields, economics, media studies and fiction, Kovalenko explained. Also destroyed was a large collection of self-help books, which, Fandikova said, have become very popular with students during the war.

Both Kovalenko and Fandikova have worked in the library for 15 years and choked up when describing the destruction.

“The development of the collection, of the reading rooms, the service to users, the creation of a comfortable space – all of this was the daily activity of our librarians. The library was our life,” said Fandikova.

For her part, Kovalenko said, “When you see how our enemy destroyed the library, destroyed my work, all my life’s work, it’s too hard to live with . . . I don’t know how to describe these feelings.”

Oksana Gladchenko, a professor of English at Sumy who lives further away from Sumy’s campus, did not learn that three of the explosions that kept her up that night were the drones hitting Sumy.

“When I read the next morning that it was my university that had been hit, I had goosebumps. It felt like I was killed.” When, later, she went to the campus, she saw “broken glass [more than 1,200 panes] everywhere, windows with wood instead of glass, water everywhere.”

“I felt scared to see the totally burnt building,” Gladchenko continued. “I taught there. I worked there. I cannot describe my feelings.

“It is so unfair.”

For Sadivnychyi, the wreckage of the library and the burnt books erased almost a century of history as “pictures of when the Nazi fascists burnt books” (in 1933) competed with the miserable sight before him.

A different kind of library

On 1 September, as this article was being written in Ottawa, Ontario, 7,700 km to the east, Kovalenko and Fandikova gave Sumy’s first-year students their library orientation lecture. Instead of taking them on a tour of the library about which they are so proud, however, the lecture focused on Sumy’s digital library.

Konstantyn Krychenko, who before becoming vice rector for international cooperation at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) a year ago taught at and was an administrator at Sumy for two decades, told University World News that while the destruction of the library is heart wrenching, in Ukraine libraries are more than important book collections. The war often forces students online, which, in turn, has prompted libraries to digitalise large parts of their collections.

“Because of the war,” Kovalkenko explained, “our services use more than physical spaces. We will tell the new students about our websites … about our digital repository, about the electronic catalogue and how to use it,”

Since online access to research materials hitherto available only in a library reading room has altered the conception of a university library, Krychenko said: “We may speak about libraries as being the heart of universities, as being the image of preserved and accumulated knowledge.” However, “the change in modality of access to collections means that we now think about libraries in a very different way”.

They’ve become “co-working spaces": a space for creative work, for working with resources and meeting with people, said Krychenko, who also said that this year KSE is inaugurating its fourth generation of bomb shelters.

Sumy State University’s campus, which is in the centre of the city, serves the cultural needs of the city. In addition to the main reading room and book storage areas and other library-related spaces, the library housed a room for dance, space for events and conferences, and an indoor beach volleyball court that were open to the public. The building also housed a theatre troupe and performance spaces.

“It’s not just a hit on the library in what, let’s say, is from the traditional perspective [of books and manuscripts]. It was a hit on the university spaces that are serving the function of the modern university – to bring people together to create,” said Krychenko.

‘They can’t break us’

Fandikova and Kovalenko spoke in terms rather different from the librarians I worked with at Bard College (Red Hook, New York) and at McGill University (Montréal, Quebec).

As are Sadivnychyi’s, Gladchenko’s and Krychenko’s, the librarians’ voices are tempered by three years of war brought to the streets of Sumy by missiles and drones and by seeing beloved books and reading spaces reduced to ashes and clumps of melted metal by the rapid oxidation process that is fire.

Even after having been burnt out of their library three times, their voices prove their mettle – something Kovalenko and Fandikova credit to Sumy’s head librarian, Krytska.

“Our director, Olga Krytska, said that we cannot allow ourselves to be weak because the library is and remains a support for university education, research activities, and the library is a cultural centre. September is here, and the library is here to support our students,” said Kovalenko.