The Economist April 2nd 2022 Culture 79A
littlegirlsings“LetItGo”ina
bomb shelter. A cellist plays alone in
a ruined city. The chorus of the Odessa
opera performs Verdi in the open air. The
clips of Ukrainians making music in
adversity are among the war’s most
poignant: the melodies seem at once
ephemeral and indomitable, ordinary
and defiant. In one video, a stubbly man
in a hoodie sings for an entranced crowd
taking shelter in Kharkiv’s metro. Gradu
ally the listeners join in, as if in a rite.
The figure with the gravelly, soulful
voice is Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, known as
Slava, the frontman of Okean Elzy (Ocean
of Elza), Ukraine’s most popular rock
band, which he cofounded in 1994.
“Sometimes I sing,” he says of the visits
he is making to hospitals, wounded
soldiers and refugee centres from Khar
kiv to Lviv. Sometimes he just talks. Some
onlookers are fans, others simply buoyed
by seeing a celebrity—Mr Vakarchuk is
the Ukrainian equivalent of Bono or
Bruce Springsteen—in a dangerous place.
He is one of the many Ukrainian
actors, musicians and dancers to have
joined the war effort. Several have been
wounded or killed. He doesn’t consider
himself a hero: “I’m not Mel Gibson in
‘Braveheart’.” Everyone knows fear, he
says, but you do what you can “to make
the victory closer”. In his case, signing up
to the army has let him crisscross his
embattled country with his guitar.
Mr Vakarchuk is not a regular soldier,
but nor is he a regular rock star. He has a
phdin theoretical physics. In 2005 he
won the jackpot on Ukraine’s version of
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and
donated the prize to orphanages. He has
done stints at Stanford and Yale, and two
as an mp, on the second occasion launch
ing his own party, both times surmising
that parliament was not for him.Rock’n’rollhasoftenbeenpolitics by
other means. During the Orange revolu
tion of 2004, when protests overturned a
rigged election, Okean Elzy played sets on
Independence Square to keep morale and
the numbers up. “Rise up, my darling!” Mr
Vakarchuk sang, bouncing on the stage as
a gentle snow fell. “Your land is waiting.”
That track rose up again during the revolu
tion of 201314, along with “Without a
Fight”, a love song repurposed as a resis
tance tune. Offstage he strove to halt the
ensuing violence. Escalating tragically
from peaceful to bloodstained uprisings,
then to this invasion, these three events—
in all of which Mr Vakarchuk has played a
role—are, he reckons, part of a single
struggle for independence.
These days the Okean Elzy song people
most want to hear is, consolingly, “Every
thing Will Be Alright”. But a hit of 2015 that
decried the Kremlinbacked conflict in the
Donbas, “Not Your War”, is in demand too.
How many more children, it asks, will you
lose in someone else’s war? The tendency
of his lyrics to chime with current events
has led some to take him for “an oracle”,Mr Vakarchuk says. Perhaps it’s a gift, he
speculates, or a coincidence, or just a
form of wishful thinking.
For Ukrainians, after all, artists have
always carried a special burden. For
generations, their sense of nationhood
rested more on bards—above all Taras
Shevchenko, a revered 19thcentury
poet—than on politicians. Misrule since
independence in 1991 has meant stars
like Mr Vakarchuk have again embodied
the country’s yearnings. “Culture is the
best cement” while a true political nation
is evolving, he comments, but afterwards
symbolic figureheads are no longer
needed. Artists can just be artists.
Amid the agony, the war is accelerat
ing that process, rallying Ukrainians
around the values of “dignity and free
dom”, as he puts it. As for the aggressor:
in the past Okean Elzy played in arenas
and stadiums in Russia, hoping to im
prove relations and showcase Ukraine’s
culture. But it stopped going after Crimea
was annexed, resolving not to return
until “there is a new Russia and our
territory comes back”. Now things are
grimly “black and white”, and Russians
who back their murderous army, or keep
silent, have become “our enemy”.
Music is part of war—national an
thems, marching songs, battle hymns,
ballads of loss and longing—yet also its
opposite, as creation is to destruction.
There is never much time for songwrit
ing on the road, Mr Vakarchuk says, let
alone on his emergency solo tour. But he
has written a poem: “Where have you
come from, my hatred?” He has never
hated anyone before and hopes the feel
ing will pass when the war is won. And
he has made a recording, a cover of “You
Are So Beautiful”, accompanying himself
on the piano. “The beautiful woman I am
singing to”, he says, “is Ukraine.” Back Story The man in the arena
Slava Vakarchuk, Ukraine’s most famous rock star, is singing for victorybaptism”. Thus was born the vast genea
logical database that it keeps in a vault in a
Utah mountain. Such registries, though
popular, are imprecise, and can suck in
people who never asked to be included. In
particular, dnadatabases lend themselves
to abuses such as racial profiling (as in the
creation of facial “mugshots” that are ex
trapolated from dnaevidence).
For all that research, though, “the na
turenurture puzzle of personality” re
mains unsolved. Epigenetics, the study of
the interplay between genes and their ex
pression, is still in its infancy, Ms Newton
notes. At bottom, this is what she most
wants to understand. Are her bouts of de
pression, irrationality and selfharm—and
her creativity—in some sense inherited?
Psychotherapy seems not to have supplied
an answer. Ultimately she finds relief in
connecting with those troublesome prede
cessors through an alternative approach
called “ancestral lineage healing”.
Her most compelling chapters detail a
whole set of “monstrous bequests” handed
down to this white daughter of the Ameri
can South. On one side, an ancestor robbed
and probably murdered Native Americans.On the other, successive generations of
plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta
enslaved scores of AfricanAmericans. Her
estranged father’s parents were “openly,
unremittingly—‘jubilantly’ would not be
too strong a word—racist.”
It is a toxic inheritance, to which Ms
Newton returns again and again, asking
whether and how descendants today can
atone for their ancestors’ sins. At a mo
ment of reckoning over America’s violent
history, her book is a salutary callforan
“acknowledgment genealogy” of theharms
that are hidden in many family trees.n