Writing about Ukraine

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A thread for responses to the invasion of Ukraine by writers intimately involved.

A War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets
Ominously, her last entry at the time of writing is Sunday 27 February (day 4 of the war)

War Diary | ISOLARII

isolarii.com

A thoughtful and moving piece by Russian writer and cardiologist Maxim Osipov, son of an exiled Ukrainian Jew, watching the war unfold from Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow.

The Fifth Day of the War | Los Angeles Review of Books

A Russian author faces the war in Ukraine.

lareviewofbooks.org

Three poems by Iya Kiva, a poet living in Kyiv, written following the Maidan protests of 2014, but posted on LitHub on 25 February 2022 as the first in a series featuring contemporary poetry from Ukraine. It features an introduction by Amelia Glaser discussing among other things the issue of multiple ethnicities and identies and the question of the Russian language.

“February. Get the ink and weep.” Contemporary Poetry From Ukraine

“I just heard three explosions,” the poet Iya Kiva posted to her Facebook feed on the night of February 23, 2022. “Wait… it’s still going.” Kiva, a poet, translator, and journalist, has lived in Ky…

lithub.com

ETA: Yevgenia Belorusets's diary continues to be updated.

 

[Orang Utan]

Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees is probably his most apposite novel right now

 

[belboid]

I just picked this up Ukraine and the Empire of Capital from 2018

"Providing distinctive and unexplored reflections on the origins of the conflict, Yurchenko unpacks the four central myths that underlie Ukraine's post-Soviet reality: the myth of transition, the myth of democracy, the myth of two Ukraines, and the myth of 'the other'. In doing so, she sheds light on the current intensification of class rivalries in Ukraine, the kleptocracy, resource wars and analyses existing and potential dangers of the rightwing shift in Ukraine's polity, stressing a historic opportunity for change.

Critiquing the concept of Ukraine as ‘transition space’, she provides a sweeping analysis which includes the wider neoliberal restructuring of global political economy since the 1970s, with particular focus on Ukraine's relations with the US, the EU and Russia. This is a book for those wanting to understand the current conflict as a dangerous product of neoliberalism, of the empire of capital."

Review of it at Review: Ukraine and the Empire of Capital

 

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An essay by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky, now living in the US, about the use of Russian and Ukrainian languages by Ukrainian poets writing about war. It's an extract from Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, published in 2017 after a previous episode of Putin's 'humanitarian aid' directed at eastern Ukraine. Putin and his puppets have frequently used the language issue to incite conflict and violence between eastern and western Ukraine, but the poets will have none of it.

Ilya Kaminsky on Ukrainian, Russian, and the Language of War

Editor’s note: this 2017 essay is excerpted from Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. 1. My family huddled by the doorframe at 4 am, debating whether or not to open the door to the stranger…

lithub.com