Radio Romania Culture is launching the second edition of the Prayer for Peace campaign, a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which turned into a war that destabilized the whole world.
The message of this campaign will be read, like last year, by the poet Ana Blandiana, a symbol of Romanian freedom, a writer who transmitted, exactly one year ago, the first message of peace through a short fragment from the preface of the book Last Witnesses by the Ukrainian – born writer, Nobel laureate in Literature, Svetlana Aleksievich.
One year after the war broke out, dozens of cultural institutions in Romania will broadcast, simultaneously with Radio Romania stations, on Saturday, February 25, at 7:00 PM., a fragment read by Ana Blandiana from the novel Internat, by the Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. One day, after waking up from sleep, you see that something is burning outside. You didn’t light that fire. But you need to extinguish it.
Internat is a novel of formation that takes place against the background of war and emphasizes its consequences. It is considered one of the most remarkable books on the war in Donbas.
Serhiy Zhadan was born in 1974, in Starobilsk, Ukraine, and graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Kharkiv University. Among his best-known works are General Judas (1995), Ballads about War and Reconstruction (2001), Anarchy in the UKR (2005), Internat (2017), Jazz in Donbas (2017). His lyrics are sung by the most famous Ukrainian rock bands.
Serhiy Zhadan received the famous Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a distinction awarded since 1950 and and whose recipients have been, among many others, Vaclav Havel, Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, Hermann Hesse, Svetlana Aleksievich, Orhan Pamuk.
In 2022, Serhiy Zhadan was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Polish Academy and also received the Freedom Prize from the Frank Schirrmacher Foundation.
The well-known Ukrainian writer continues to live in his hometown, Kharkiv, since the beginning of the war, where he supports the Ukrainian army as a volunteer. Through the Prayer for Peace campaign, Radio Romania Culture calls for solidarity, empathy and compassion for the tragedy of the war in Ukraine, which continues a year after its outbreak.