Is it possible to restore doubt as a virtue for a society at war?

Effete Proust in a Prisoner of War Camp

Lately, whenever the conversation turns yet again to “culture during war”—to culture as defense, as soft power, or, worse still, as a “cultural front” — I can’t help but remember the story about the Proust¹Marcel Proust (1871—1922) was a French modernist writer, essayist, literary critic, and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt. He gained international notoriety for his seven volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. lectures given during the winter of 1940–1941 in Gryazovets, in Russia’s northwestern Vologda region, in a camp for Polish prisoners of war.

The lectures were delivered by Józef Czapski—a Polish artist who, at the time, was a prisoner of war, later became an officer in the Polish Armed Forces in the East²Also known informally as “Anders’ Army,” after its commander Władysław Anders, the Polish Armed Forces in the East was formed during World War II through agreements between Soviet diplomats and the Polish government-in-exile. Its units fought alongside the Red Army against Nazi Germany. The army’s ranks included not only Poles but also people of other nationalities, including Ukrainians., and eventually joined the circle around the Polish émigré journal Kultura as a close associate of the Polish writer, publicist, and political activist Jerzy Giedroyc. It was thanks to Giedroyc’s efforts that the world learned the truth about the murder of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn.

About forty prisoners of war attended the lectures, in the cold and filth, after a hard day in forty-degree frost. The overwhelming majority of the Poles who had been taken prisoner in 1939, and with whom Czapski had earlier been held at Starobilsk, in Ukraine’s southern Luhansk region, never made it to Gryazovets—they either perished in Katyn or in the camps of the Russian far North.

The most important thing about this story isn’t that, even under conditions that were horrific even by the standards of the time, prisoners of war gave each other lectures about art or recited poetry. What stands out most to me is the choice of Marcel Proust. Yes, patriotic Polish poetry and lectures about the turn of the century Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz⁵Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846—1916) was a Polish writer and journalist. He is a classic figure of Polish literature and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905., whose epics were heard in the camps. But there was also Proust. Effete Proust with his saturated writing, his childhood paradise, his French aristocrats and demi-monde, his thousands of nuances, his play of light and scents. Nothing in the world was further from the darkness and stench of Gryazovets than Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, which Józef Czapski quoted from memory in French.

“We owed Proust—this writer with not a trace of propaganda, relevance, utilitarianism, or political posturing—pure hours of joy and reflection,” Czapski later recalled.

Proust isn’t easy to read. In a hopeless, terrifying time, Czapski didn’t just pick his favorite writer—he chose not to dumb things down for himself. In doing so, he created a model of resistance.

I very much wish that, in our incomparably more comfortable conditions for “cultural resistance,” we would keep precisely this model in mind. Unfortunately, here and there I observe not just simplification, but the elevation of simplicity to the status of a virtue. Can doubt be restored as a virtue in a society at war?

When simplicity becomes a virtue, it gives a floor to people who wouldn’t have had one otherwise—people who have nothing to offer except the knack for endlessly oversimplifying what’s complex. And we applaud them for what looks like clarity, but is really just oversimplification—the ability to fearlessly cut out important details and shamelessly ignore anything they don’t have the knowledge or curiosity to understand.

Thinking Shaped and Constrained by War

In 2022, the world understood that absolute evil had attacked us. With each passing day of spring, the space for possible justifications of this evil narrowed. Outside of Ukraine, our black-and-white situation initially provoked distrust simply because there are very few black-and-white situations in the world. But ours was precisely about absolute evil and innocent victims. Everything was simple.

This simplicity seduced us.

When you are faced with undeniable, impenetrable darkness, it is easy to believe in the faultlessness of the innocent side. We missed the moment when we fell into a mental trap: if there can be no doubt about the infernal nature of the aggressor, then there can be no doubt about the righteousness of those on the other side—you’re either a victim or a hero. And at some point, even the very act of doubting, the very habit of doubt, became suspect.

Perhaps we would not have had time to fall into this trap if the war had ended quickly. But its full-scale phase has lasted into a fourth year. That’s long enough to realize that victims and heroes are, first and foremost, just humans—you can’t expect them to act like sages or prophets. And it’s long enough to reconsider the “blank check” that society has handed them.

Of course, there are individual exceptions, but if you follow the mainstream, you might simply never encounter them.

Obviously, it is naive and unproductive to complain about the proverbial TV marathon, graphomania, or lack of taste in everyday practices—not to mention that things are not all that bad with those everyday practices. It wouldn’t be fair to overlook their humanity—all the hugs and cats in their marketing, care and sensitivity, the humor and gentle touch. And so-called common people—those not burdened by reputation, public image, or a Facebook audience of several thousand—are much freer in their expressions. But I’m mostly talking about the “educated class”—the people who are supposed to keep our thinking from slipping backward, the very people I know and care about most.

At first, it seemed these worries were premature. But when Serhiy Zhadan—our best poet, The Poet of contemporary Ukraine—feels the need to add a postscript to his interview with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, just because Ai’s points don’t directly echo the familiar set of ideas we’ve all grown used to these past few years, it says a lot. At the very least, it means that no one—not even a future Nobel laureate—can ignore the threat of collective outrage or the fact that we’re now barely able to hear a different voice, even if it’s friendly and compassionate, not at all provocative, just not shaped by our own wartime experience.

This consolidated force of collective outrage can no longer just shrug things off—it bristles whenever it hears something outside the familiar tone and key words. And when, in this odd (and, to me, unnecessary) apology for a guest, the phrase “abstract humanism” slips in—almost certainly unconsciously—it’s a sign that it’s not the poet’s own sensitivity that’s failed Serhiy, but that something bigger has gone wrong with our language itself: some invisible filters have gotten clogged, and as a result, the thing we usually call the intellectual atmosphere has started to change.

Because “abstract humanism” isn’t just some old Soviet phrase—it’s specifically Stalinist vocabulary. And now, out of nowhere, it’s popped back up from oblivion, in a place no one expected. However, this unpleasant resurrection is, unfortunately, understandable: if you open the door to the language of denunciation, if you see “enemy’s narratives” in every deviation, in every disagreement, if every inconvenient fact is labeled as Russian disinformation, if statements (whether a speech, a Facebook post, etc.) are evaluated not by the old scales (“foolish,” “exaggerated,” “emotional”) but by a scale of usefulness—and accordingly, the word “harmful” is used above all—then sooner or later, this language will inevitably draw upon its hidden chthonic resource, including “abstract humanism.”

Aversion to Criticism

Let me be clear: I don’t think anything was off from the very start of the full-scale invasion. It’s just that what made sense then doesn’t fit the moment anymore, and we’re long overdue for a reset. Everyone who could be convinced that we are victims of aggression has already been convinced. So using the rhetoric of 2022 in 2026 is like trying to force open a door that’s already unlocked. The constant complaints about “the West,” which were justified in 2022, now sound, at best, banal. There’s been a kind of inflation—even when sometimes justified—of the claim that we believe in Western values more than people in the West do themselves. It’s reached the point of wild self-congratulation and messianic rhetoric, sometimes echoing Russian or Orbanian talking points almost word for word. (Remember in 2021, when Russian director Konstantin Bogomolov seriously proposed that Russia could “save” Europe from what he portrayed as the West’s moral and cultural decline?) Now it’s become a genuinely grandiose, if sincere, belief that we’re the “truer Europe”—the real West, in contrast to the “corrupt” one—more Western than the West itself.

I think this happened in part because we went into the great war with the old idea that temptation is always something comfortable, pleasant—something that just seems too good to be true. So good and comfortable, in fact, that it lulls us into letting our guard down—it makes us forget that evil exists, that the devil exists. But did anyone ever tell us, did anyone ever warn us, that the devil’s real temptation is just that he’s close, present and real? If the devil is against us, then everything is permitted. And on the other hand, the belief that suffering and hardship automatically make people wiser, more moral—in short, better—has made us resistant to criticism.

Perhaps the worst, the most outrageous thing happening in our public sphere is the appropriation of the suffering and losses of specific individuals by society as a whole. Yes, almost every night we all play a terrible lottery, and the lack of security is truly shared. But losses, grief, hardships—they always belong to someone. The grief of our neighbor is unlikely to make them wiser and more just, and if it does, it’s most likely because the person was wise and just already. But grief certainly doesn’t make the rest of us wiser or more just, and it doesn’t give us the right to be hysterical, to assume the world owes us, or to think everyone has to put up with our sarcasm and bitterness—justified or not. It doesn’t mean everyone has to sympathize with us while we owe no sympathy to anyone else.

In the long run, this is dangerous because it’s already turning into a protective cocoon—not for specific people who actually need support, but for anyone who holds a Ukrainian passport. Even now, having accepted that war trauma affects all of society, we’ve stopped talking about what people cared about just a few years before the full-scale invasion, or about the times when we, as Ukrainians, have been cruel or unjust—both to our own and to others.

We’re quick to project ourselves onto the past, as if people back then saw things the way we do now, and as if our current suffering excuses everything that came before. But let’s be honest: twenty years ago, most Ukrainians really didn’t want to join NATO; fifteen years ago, some were toasting “Moscow time” at New Year’s; and just five years ago, Russian rappers were still on heavy rotation on their playlists. Normally, maybe you could gloss over this—if it weren’t for our outrage at the West for not giving up Chekhov overnight.

It is wonderful that we have finally begun a conversation about the participation of Ukrainians in the building of the Russian and later Soviet empires. But how do we assess this participation? What’s really driving these conversations—is it a kind of hidden pride (as in, “we showed them”), regret that such a promising empire ended up dominated by the Russians and Germans, or is there actually a readiness to take responsibility for our own role in colonization, Russification, and violence? Or at least a willingness to admit that the choices made by some of our elites were driven by personal ambition, resentment, or religious fanaticism? A willingness to admit that our much-suffering people were not only victims, but themselves took part in pogroms and ethnic cleansings? A willingness to abandon the image of Ukrainian peasants as bearers of nothing but bucolic virtues?

To Embrace Complexity Again

We’ve started talking about our own agency—both historically and today—but our public sphere keeps providing a security blanket that runs counter to real agency: the mindset of being eternal victims of global injustice. We love to point out how toxic this mindset was for our Polish neighbors, yet we walk right into the same trap ourselves.

And when Ukrainian liberal intellectuals call for postponing painful conversations and uncomfortable questions until “after the war” (when, by the way, will that be?), to protect society from complexity because it is wounded, while at the same time tolerating the imposition of a “correct” history here and now—a history in which we are never at fault (and if we are, then the defeated enemy deserved it)—they are precisely the ones allowing today’s heroes to be assigned a provenance they never asked for, to exploit the situation and monopolize public space. I do not believe that Ukrainian liberal intellectuals somehow fail to see this.

All this has been described in hundreds of books and discussed thousands of times, and yet a wounded society still wants to believe in its own exceptionalism. Christians call this vanity—popular culture calls it the devil’s favorite sin.

I think it’s time we started talking about how some institutions have gotten drunk on power—and how people, especially those in the public eye, get intoxicated by their own sense of righteousness. That, in the end, gives them power too, even if it’s only temporary and mostly an illusion. Our consensus, our unity, was a good thing, but in the end it creates such intense social pressure that it does the job of censorship better than any official ban could.

This translation was provided by the Frontier Institute, thanks to the support of PrivatBank.