The tickets for this event are now sold out.
Pushkin House is hosting The Ukrainian Genius, an evening of readings and music to raise funds for Ukrainian humanitarian relief. The event has been initiated by a group of London-based friends, led by critic and translator Will Hobson and author Charlotte Hobson. They invite you to a celebration of Ukrainian culture to keep the bravery of its national struggle at the forefront of everyone’s minds and fly the flag for international solidarity. All proceeds from sales (and 70% of ticket price) will go to the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Ukraine Appeal to support refugees from Ukraine. This is an in-person only event.
The evening will include music, candlelit readings of writers, including Isaac Babel, Oleg Sentsov, Serhiy Zhadan, Lesya Ukrainka, Nikolai Gogol and Konstantin Paustovsky, a sale of artworks – spotlight on the magical city of Odesa – and unique homemade objects, delicious food, drinks, and other surprises. Performers include Ivantiy Novak, Sam Spruell, Susannah Wise, Katie Graham, Tom Browne, Iona Anderson and Jessie Collins.
Will Hobson writes:
‘The evening is planned as a love letter to Ukrainian writing, a gathering (one of so many) to support Ukraine and stop Putin and the war. There is such a remarkable sweep of writers from the 18th-21st Centuries to draw on, an intensely beautiful, funny, diverse world with its own ramifying internal relationships – such as that between the Kyiv-born Mikhail Bulgakov and the filmmaker and author Oleg Sentsov, who quoted The Master and Margharita's “cowardice is the most terrible vice” to such devastating effect at his trial in 2015, or the friendships documented in Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames.
‘The range of readings will aim to capture some of this variety, and, by their contrasts, convey some of the dimensions of the horror of this abhorrent war. A wonderful short story by Oksana Zabuzhko, for instance, called Your Ad Goes Here, is ostensibly about a very small, domestic incident, losing a favourite pair of gloves, but by the end has become a haunting evocation of what it would mean if culture and humanity were irrevocably lost.’
Vanessa Kidby, Slava Ukraini, 2022