The production of fireflies: Violence, hope and the Ukrainian imagination

Kornelia Kończal interviews Bohdan Shumylovych and Magdalena Zolkos, the editors of Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine: Imprints and Dreamscapes published by Routledge in 2024. The book explores how war imprints upon culture, and its psychosocial effects on the individual through scholarly reflections on ego-documents produced by students and academics in February and March 2022.

Kornelia Kończal: Your book, Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine: Imprints and Dreamscapes, is a transdisciplinary intervention. How did the idea for this volume come about? 

Bohdan Shumylovych: The initial idea emerged as a response to the needs of students at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv, where I teach, in the first weeks of the war. It was a time marked by shock, confusion, and silence—emotions that we all shared. As scholars in the humanities, we lacked ready-made tools to address a crisis of such magnitude. Still, I felt it was crucial to act. I reached out to a colleague from the Philosophy Department who teaches secular meditation, as well as to a psychiatrist. I shared with them a concept for supporting our students, and both agreed to help design a format of psychosocial engagement. We then invited UCU students to participate in what became an experimental project—an attempt to make sense of the unfolding historical moment through personal experience. Although many students were unable to take part due to displacement or instability, around thirty young people joined the initiative. We encouraged them to document not only their own experiences but also those of people in their immediate surroundings. We created a safe and supportive space where these accounts could be shared with others. Within just a few weeks, this process gave rise to a rich and varied collection of diaries, drawings, audio recordings, and dream narratives. ^[1]

The idea of turning the project into a publication came later, and that transformation is largely thanks to Magdalena. Our first step was to translate the ego-documents—originally written in Ukrainian—into English. We then reached out to scholars from around the world who study diaries and dreams, asking them to engage with and reflect upon our material. Magda played a central role in selecting the documents, commissioning new texts, and overseeing the editorial process. Initially, I intended to contribute an academic essay to the volume myself. However, like many of my friends and colleagues in Ukraine in 2022, I found myself unable to write in that mode. Each attempt came to a halt. My eventual contribution to the book is therefore a humble one: a transcript of a conversation.

Magdalena Zolkos: I truly see myself as little more than a facilitator, a kind of midwife to the project. 

KK: The title of the book suggests a dual focus—on the tangible effects (imprints) and the psychological or imagined dimensions (dreamscapes) of war. Could you elaborate on this framework and how it influenced the contributions in the volume? What were your main theoretical inspirations in designing the book? 

BS: Our approach was, to some extent, inspired by the work of the German-Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt, who in the 1930s collected dreams from fellow citizens living under Nazi rule.^[2] The concept of imprints is drawn from the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman.^[3] More broadly, the structure of the book reflects my longstanding affinity with the Aristotelian tradition, which explores the relationship between ideas and images. 

MZ: The two categories—imprints and dreamscapes—emerged organically from the dialogic and dialectical nature of the material itself. This collection constitutes an archive of what might be described, in a transformation of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, as a psychic life of violence. ^[4] In other words, the authors of these ego-documents both bear witness to the imprints of violence and engage in reflective, meaning-making practices. There is, inevitably, a creative tension between the urgency of immediate documentation and the imaginative work that follows. Here, I draw on Baudelaire’s notion of imagination as the effort to uncover hidden relationships—a concept that resonates profoundly with the documents gathered in this project.^[5]

KK: As you explain in the introduction to the book, the diaries and dreams documented in your book can be seen as both acts of witnessing and as acts of resistance. To what extent did the students involved in your project share this perspective?

BS: At the outset, we introduced students to the simple yet resonant concept of літописи (litopysy). This Ukrainian term, derived from літо (summer/year) and писати (to write), translates literally to “year-writings” or “annals.” In essence, we invited our students to become historians of themselves—individuals inscribed within History with a capital “H.” Our emphasis lay in exploring their shared experience. Only in hindsight did we come to recognize that this practice could also be understood as a form of witnessing as resistance, as conceptualized by Ann E. Kaplan, among others.^[6]

MZ: As I see my role as an amplifier, let me simply echo Bohdan’s words. What you’ve just said, Bohdan, reminds me of why I was so deeply drawn to your project from the very beginning: you created a space where students could genuinely exercise agency through their voices. It was a platform that empowered them to speak, reflect, and be heard on their own terms.

KK: A recurring motif in the dreams and diary excerpts presented in your book is the experience of leaving home and returning home. What insights do these accounts offer about displacement, belonging, and the meaning of home in times of war?

BS: The prominence of the theme of home was indeed unexpected—though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. As I was going through our material, I began to research how the motif of home appears in Ukrainian popular culture and realized just how many well-known Ukrainian songs focus on the longing to return home. It became clear that the idea of coming back home holds a deep resonance in the Ukrainian collective imagination. While I can only speculate about the reasons for this, it may be tied to the long historical shadow of what Timothy Snyder refers to as the “Bloodlands”—a region marked by the traumatic loss of home through genocide and forced displacement.^[7]

KK: Could you please highlight a chapter or section of the book that stood out for you and which you would recommend readers to start with? 

BS: We’re not claiming objectivity, you know—and in fact, we appreciate the hybridity of the volume as a whole: its embrace of metaphor, its search for a language capable of articulating something so elusive and difficult to grasp. Personally, I’m especially drawn to Magda’s contribution, “Testimony, Endurance, Tryvoga: A History Open to Shivering Bodies.” In it, she explores the concept of tryvoga—a Ukrainian word whose meaning is almost impossible to fully capture in translation. It connotes alarm, anxiety, and worry, and refers simultaneously to an emotional state and to a technical warning system, like an air raid or emergency alert—especially resonant in the context of war. I would also strongly recommend Chari Larsson’s piece, “Quiet Trauma and the War in Ukraine,” and Luisa Passerini’s chapter, “The Determination to Resist: Dumky by Young Ukrainians.”

MZ: In light of what you’ve just shared about the blockage and your inability to write, Bohdan, I found myself thinking again about the process of working on our conversation titled “The Production of Fireflies.” Thank you, once more, for introducing the metaphor of fireflies—borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini and later expanded by Georges Didi-Huberman.^[8] Pasolini observed that, beginning in the 1960s, fireflies were vanishing from the Italian countryside. He interpreted this disappearance as symbolic of the rise of capitalism and fascism—forces that crush individuality and extinguish the delicate lights of subjectivity. For Pasolini, remaining human meant continuing to shine, however faintly, in the darkness of uncertainty and chaos. Didi-Huberman, while drawing on this metaphor, shifts the emphasis from ideology to violence more broadly. We both share an affinity for his idea that fireflies represent hope—small, flickering lights in a darkened world. It’s such a powerful image. If I read your reflections in our conversation correctly, Bohdan, the metaphor of fireflies helped you express the idea that destruction, no matter how brutal or pervasive, can never be total.

KK: Editing a book on such a sensitive and urgent topic must have been both intellectually and emotionally challenging. What was the most difficult or unexpected aspect of this process for you?

MZ: Whatever prior experience I may have had with editing, it felt almost irrelevant in the context of this project. Coming into contact with—and editing—the archival material was an intense experience on multiple levels: emotionally, intellectually, and ethically. We had to make choices, to select. And in doing so, I often felt as though I was committing a kind of violence against the testimonies themselves. I needed your authorial presence, Bohdan, to help guide this process. At the same time, the project brought with it a peculiar sense of temporality: the archival material captured the first weeks and months of the full-scale invasion, yet we were working with it a year and a half later—at a different point in time, both personally and historically. While editing, I couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened to the individuals whose testimonies I was shaping. That made the task particularly difficult.

Luckily, we were united from the outset in our intention to avoid two key pitfalls. First, we were determined not to let academic voices dominate or overshadow the students’ contributions; instead, we aimed for a genuinely horizontal dialogue. Second, we were committed to avoiding what has been termed “Westsplaining”—we had no interest in presenting the students with interpretations of their own experiences filtered through distant, external perspectives.

BS: For me, it was not just difficult to write and edit, but also challenging to read. I remember that at times, reading felt like being caught in a loop, unable to escape. Yet, at the same time, engaging with the essays provided a way out of the darkness and helped me regain a sense of normalcy.

KK: If I understood you correctly, Bohdan, working on this project played a role in your own process of reconstruction. To what extent was the project behind the book a transformative experience for you Magdalena, as both an academic and a human being?

MZ: I definitely felt a sense of uniqueness when working with this raw, intimate material. Despite my extensive research experience in psychosocial studies and violence, this project profoundly shifted my perspective on war. It heightened my awareness of the pitfalls in dominant war narratives, especially the tendency to shape representations of war around generalized ideas. This contrasts sharply with what could be called the psychic honesty of the testimonies—their capacity to embrace contradictions and complexities.

Thank you both for this enriching conversation!