Twice, I have heard Ukrainians perform Verdi’s Requiem. Once in Lviv , last Maundy Thursday, and once last month, under the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. In St Paul’s , performed by the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra with the Philharmonia Chorus, the great Dies irae – “day of anger” – unfurled in an operatic gale of fury, reverberating so powerfully around Wren’s lofty spaces that the music felt like thunder echoing between mountain peaks.
In Lviv, where it was performed by a Ukrainian chorus and orchestra, the evening began with a call to remember the war dead. Lviv’s lay a mile up the road: 153 graves when I first visited in autumn 2022, and by this year more than 1,000. Ranks and ranks of soldiers killed in their 20s, 30s and 40s, each grave planted with flowers and plants, flags flying above. On that occasion, Dies irae – in the more sober acoustic of the Lviv Philharmonic Hall – seemed to contain the furious ache of grief. Certainly I have never heard a more wrathful day of anger.
I have thought a lot about Ukrainian rage. This was a rage against Russia and Russians, and it burned with a fury that was at times hard to step close to. Ukrainians, too, have sometimes been taken aback by the depth of their anger. Oleksandr Mykhed, an author now in the armed forces, has written a wartime alphabet book for children in which L stands for lyut , rage. He defines it as a “special mixture of feelings when the desire to defend what is yours, hatred for the enemy and enduring love for your own people are mixed in equal proportions”. This complicated, extreme cocktail of feelings is not a peacetime emotion, nor an easy one.
I found myself making sense of it through literature, specifically Homer’s epic poems. Epics need fuel to motor them on their poetic journey. They also need delay, so that they become long poems, not short ones. In the Odyssey , the fuel of the poem is desire – the desire to get home – and the delay is the divine malevolence that brings many obstacles in Odysseus’s path. But in the Iliad, set during the Trojan war, Achilles’ rage is the fuel of the poem: first his outrage as a subordinate insulted by his commander, later the raging grief of a man who has lost his dearest friend in battle. Grief and rage are cousins; that is also clear to me in Ukraine.
It would be wrong to suggest that Ukrainian rage is like Achilles’. His veers beyond the human, into the supersize, mythical emotional zone inhabited by the children of the gods. But I found myself thinking about the vastness of this Homeric rage when encountering the fury of Ukrainians at civilians killed, cities bombed, people raped and tortured. The poet Iryna Shuvalova, in an interview with the writer Kateryna Iakovlenko for Suspilne, the Ukrainian national broadcaster, said rage was “pouring out of us as a reaction to the incredible trauma, the blow, the provocation, the terrible losses”.
Shuvalova’s poem February – referring to the month of the full-scale invasion in 2022 – begins gently, wryly, by pointing out that “we planned to get through February / like any other month— / only shorter”. But then the invasion begins, and “instead, the river roars and grabs us by the legs / this red slippery foaming / February-fury”. The translators, Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, used the phrase “February-fury” to mimic the echo in Ukrainian between lyutyy , the word for February, and lyuta , raging. For me, the immediate resonance of Shuvalova’s blood-soaked river is Homer’s Scamander River, choked in blood and the corpses of the war dead.
And what is the “day of anger” that powers Verdi’s Requiem? The words, no longer often used as part of a requiem mass, are from a medieval Latin poem that summons up the chaos and terror of the Earth’s final dissolution. The intensity of its expression – the visceral, gut-felt outpouring – that I heard in those Ukrainian performances of the work reminded me of Homeric wrath, although it is a rage that has a different force. The anger of the Dies irae is a kind of world-fury produced when everything is disrupted, put out of order by human actions. A world locked into war, perhaps.
I am not a Christian, and the values of Homer’s Iliad are alien to me. But I think perhaps there are different orders of rage. Some rage is trivial and petty; the everyday rage of frustration and aggression. But Mykhed told me of a generative rage: a rage that produces action, that fuels resistance. His rage provided him with the impetus and energy to write his book The Language of War . He told me that he wanted his rage-filled book about the first year of the full-scale invasion of his country to be “a time capsule for myself so that I know where I’ve been, when in five years or 10 years, my rage won’t be so sharp”.
The feeling, he said, is specifically “not hatred, it is rage, because hatred doesn’t give you power, it’s more chaotic. But rage gives you words.” In 1981, Audre Lorde wrote urgently of the fury provoked into flame by racism – a fury that could alienate and be resented by white people. Black women, she wrote, “tremble their rage under harness”. But pulled into service, channelled towards action and words, anger “is loaded with information and energy”. So it has been for Ukrainians: rage turned into action fuelled resistance.
But now, in 2026, Ukrainian rage burns low, at least among my friends. The fire cannot be sustained; it would consume you in its overwhelming heat. What is left? Fatigue, emptiness, an alertness to the dreadful idea that however bad things are now, they could get worse. “I feel like anything is possible – nuclear war, anything,” Iakovlenko told me. “Everything that was written in books and in films is actually happening to us.”
Sasha Dovzhyk, the director of Index, Ukraine’s Institute for Documentation and Exchange, told me that she felt “pure spite and grit and grim determination and a memory of what it felt like to have feelings and a loyalty to that past version of the self who felt rage”. She missed rage, she told me. Rage and grief gave her the power to write her forthcoming book, Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War , which mixes genres – documentary and fairytales – with rageous energy. Maybe rage sometimes brings one too close to the perilous realm of myth, to the destructiveness of an Achilles. But if you can tame the wild horse of rage, it can be ridden, for a while.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer and the author of Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War , published by Jonathan Cape. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
On Wednesday 30 September, join Charlotte Higgins and our panel of acclaimed Ukrainian writers to reflect on the profound connections between war, art and life. With Olia Hercules, Sasha Dovzhyk and Olesya Khromeychuk. Book tickets here
In Lviv, where it was performed by a Ukrainian chorus and orchestra, the evening began with a call to remember the war dead. Lviv’s lay a mile up the road: 153 graves when I first visited in autumn 2022, and by this year more than 1,000. Ranks and ranks of soldiers killed in their 20s, 30s and 40s, each grave planted with flowers and plants, flags flying above. On that occasion, Dies irae – in the more sober acoustic of the Lviv Philharmonic Hall – seemed to contain the furious ache of grief. Certainly I have never heard a more wrathful day of anger.
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Source: The Guardian · Charlotte Higgins. Published 4 Sept 2026, 07:00 am.
