The Indestructible Stars of Porcelain War

“I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight,” wrote J.D. Salinger, in a characteristic musing on the absurd tensions of human life. Had he seen documentary film Porcelain War (directors Slava Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo), and had he met the film’s stars as I had the rare opportunity to do, I wonder if the choice away from grief might have become a bit more defined for him.

I don’t think I have ever met a person so clear-sighted about doing good through unchosen violence during a time of evil as Slava Leontyev. It’s one of the eternal questions begged by the film: does this kind of goodness only become visible—can it only exist—in the face of such a depth of depravity as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (and if so, what does that say about human life)? Porcelain War doesn’t answer those questions, of course—but it does thoroughly answer some others.

Slava and his wife Anya Stasenko, both porcelain artists, and Slava now a former Ukrainian Special Forces soldier who trains civilians to fight on the front lines, have some messages they would like the rest of the world to receive loud and clear. “Evil exists,” for one, as Slava tells us plainly from his home just outside Kharkiv. It is evil that he and the Ukrainian forces are fighting, for another. And for a third, evil will not stop itself. “It will keep pushing,” and if Ukrainians don’t effectively stop this one, it will reach all the way to us. We know this already. We don’t seem to learn too well, collectively, across history. And it’s just this line of thinking that makes it so easy to run toward grief, to lament the world and its sufferings as they unfold over and over again.

But on the other side of that same coin that is melting in the crucible of the Ukraine war, it’s exactly this kind of frustrated, detached grieving that meeting Anya and Slava has made it impossible to do. When the people at the center of the fight—their homes crushed, families torn, weapons in their porcelain-painting hands—when those very people tell you from the core of their being that they know why they are fighting, that there is a reason never to stop, that there is a goodness that they absolutely know is worth preserving—it becomes impossible to doubt that. There are very few evident answers in life. You will find one or two in Porcelain War.

Appearing with the central couple in the film (and their inimitable dog, Frodo, who had also made the journey to the US for this screening) is their friend and fellow artist, Andrey Stefanov. Though Slava and Anya have been inspired to continue creating whimsical and beautiful porcelain figures throughout the war (“I think about the eternal things when I make art,” says Anya, “I decided not to let the war affect it in any way”), Andrey, who describes a harrowing drive to drop off his wife and two daughters at the Polish border while he remained to fight, has not been able to paint since the war began.

The question of the role that art and artists play during wartime is not fully explored in the film, though it is juxtaposed with footage from the front lines to shocking effect. But whatever the film leaves incomplete becomes much less important than the clarity and rootedness with which Slava, Anya, and Andrey discuss the horrors they’ve been called upon to witness and fight against, and the tenderness they emote around why it matters. Putin’s supporters are “in a tough spot,” Slava opines during the film (in a tone of empathy rather than sarcasm); “they aren’t ready to stand up against him and die. We are.” It’s a stunning and simple, and deeply lived, summation of a heroic courage that the whole country is demonstrating.

I couldn’t quite understand how such a ready and extraordinary response had come to be the case across an entire nation in the blink of an eye in 2022. And I asked Slava this after the film. Does he think this is simply how people respond to attacks of this nature, or is there something in the Ukrainian spirit that is allowing us to watch the unusual, somewhat unprepared, and undying heroism we are watching? In Ukrainian, he answered through a translator, “If your neighborhood was attacked in the same way tomorrow, you would not believe what you would see. You would see your neighbors respond in exactly the same way we are.” But I’m not sure he’s right. I think there must be something about where Ukraine was in the confluence of its own history, learning, and leadership at the moment this happened that has allowed for the miracle of its response.

Lest I sound naive, Anya corroborates this miracle in the film: “I didn’t know people could ever be so good like this until now. I thought it was only in books, sort of shining from within.” Standing just a few feet away from them, shaking the hand of Slava who hates his gun, but has used it with an unexpected skill against a power that doesn’t care for anyone’s humanity, including my own—I was shaken by his softhearted demeanor and the force of his spirit, shining indeed. He cut a much slighter figure in real life than his fatigues and the big screen suggested. Holding his small dog, he spoke slowly and seemed almost in tears (I was way past “almost”) as I tried to convey a sense of my thanks for the fight he is fighting and the person he is. I hope I will never forget the lesson against despair that he brought me in such a desperate moment of his own life. Slava and Anya have not made a choice between mourning the world and the “high delight” of their figurines, their forest, each other. They operate from purpose, in war and in art. There are things worth fighting for; that’s all. Certainly it must be artists, preservers of culture, who are best equipped to explain what those things are.

Human events are rarely as clear cut as they are in Ukraine in 2025. Our postmodern age is uncomfortable even thinking that choices, people, and language like this—not perfect, surely, but heroic—are possible. “We are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,” claims Slava, but there is something of biblical proportions taking place in Ukraine and the people who are fighting this fight have grown beyond themselves, and they know it. And they do not romanticize this shift. “No one really knows how this will affect us after it’s over,” Slava reminds us. It should have been over long before this. The least we can do is thank them, and pay attention to offerings like Porcelain War and the others which are coming from the war zones. May Slava, Anya, Andrey, and every Ukrainian soldier and civilian return to their fields, farms, homes, businesses, paintings, and families in victory as fast as the world can help them do it.

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