On November 15, at the initiative of PEN International, the world has been observing the Day of Empty Chairs since the late 1980s. Empty chairs set at human rights events on this day were meant to symbolise authors who could not be present at those events due to imprisonment, persecution, disappearance, or murder. This year, for the Day of Empty Chairs, Ukrainian PEN initiates #EmptyChairWeek—an informational campaign devised to remember those artists whose lives were taken by Russia since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The campaign on social media will run from 13 to 19 November later this year.
Organisers of the Ukrainian #EmptyChairWeek have called on everyone interested to participate in the initiative throughout the week—from November 13 to 19—by posting on their social media about Ukrainian writers, musicians, actors, historians, artists, linguists, and other cultural figures whose lives were cut short after 24 February 2022 using the hashtag #EmptyChairWeek.
Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukrainian PEN has been monitoring the losses among cultural figures whose stories appear in the media. As of 13 November 2023, PEN has gathered the names of 71 artists who are no longer with us. These names collected for the 2022 monitoring can be found on PEN’s website. The monitoring for the year 2023 can be found here.
This is an unofficial monitoring: the PEN team is aware that since 24 February 2022, more artists have died than is publicly known, and there is still no information about many of them.
The goal of the #EmptyChairWeek is to remember as many names of fallen artists as possible and to make their voices resonate as widely as possible in the public space. Therefore, every post is significant — it doesn’t matter whether you’ll be posting in the memory of those whom you knew personally or those whose names you learned only after they were gone.
Several prominent artists and public figures have already announced that they will participate in this campaign. Those people include actress Rymma Zyubina, director and actor Akhtem Seitablaiev, journalist and TV host Myroslava Barchuk, journalist Vitaliy Portnikov, journalist Olga Herasymiuk, philosopher and writer, president of Ukrainian PEN Volodymyr Yermolenko, poetess Katerina Kalitko, director and writer Iryna Tsilyk, writer Mariana Savka, writer Maria Titarenko, and other cultural and media figures.
