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Diary of an Invasion:

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In fact, we did not really think much about what to take with us. We thought that we would go to the village, not a great distance from Kyiv, and would return quite soon. I think this is always the case at the start of a war. 24 March 2022 The manuscript is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and the text of the diary has been recently published in Ukraine, with a foreword by Amelina. The notes offer a unique, granular sense of the terrors of occupation. With its many excisions and corrections, the manuscript can be confusing. But then, as Amelina put it in her poem, war has a way of destroying coherence. Kurkov is most famous for writing fiction. His novels have been translated into 42 languages. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, he felt unable to continue. The fact that the crimes of the Gulag… are not a historical trauma for Russia today proves that Russia has not yet recovered from the past — Andrey Kurkov A lot of discussion about I.D.P., himself included, and their relocation within Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe (latter mostly being women, children and pensioners; men under 60 who don’t have proof of enrollment in a foreign university or medical statement saying unfit for war are not allowed to leave the country)

A dramatic experience makes for a dramatic perception of the future. But, as if by some divine joke, in the Ukrainian national character, unlike in the Russian one, there is no fatalism. Ukrainians almost never get depressed. They are programmed for victory, for happiness, for survival in difficult circumstances, as well as for the love of life. As if by some divine joke, in the Ukrainian National character, unlike in the Russian one, there is no fatalism. Ukrainians almost never get depressed. They are programmed for victory, for happiness, for survival in difficult circumstances, as well as for love of life.” Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov is strongest when he writes on cultural matters. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP From day one I stopped writing fiction. I couldn't concentrate on anything but reality. So, when I was asked to comment about events, I started speaking on radio and television then writing about what was happening."

Summary

As a young man, Andrey Kurkov travelled round the USSR – on trains, riverboats and in lorries he’d hitched a lift on – interviewing former Soviet bureaucrats. He’d read a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s prohibited The Gulag Archipelago and wanted to know more about the gulag itself. One judge he met owned up to signing 3,000 death warrants for people sentenced without trial. The experience was a lesson to Kurkov about the suppression of memory and truth: members of his own family had suffered forced deportations, famine and decades in the camps, but such traumas weren’t ever discussed. For Kurkov – ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking but long based in Ukraine – truth-telling has been a mission ever since. However, this territory is complicated, too. Like millions of Ukrainians, Kurkov, who was born near Leningrad, is a native Russian speaker and part of the fascination of his book lies in its accounts of the struggle for identity within the country, something the war has made more vexed. Ukraine has, for instance, demanded that Russian culture be boycotted. But while many younger Ukrainians are enthusiastic about this idea, older people are more conservative. The council of the Pyotr Tchaikovsky conservatory in Kyiv, the country’s national music academy, recently met to discuss whether it should be renamed after the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko – and eventually decided against. Meanwhile, an opera-loving friend of Kurkov’s wept at the thought of not being able ever again to hear Eugene Onegin at Kyiv opera house. A week goes by, and all the news is suddenly of the miles and miles of territory Ukraine has liberated in the east, and of the Russian army’s hurried departure. So I send him a message, and a couple of hours later – he was finishing off his column for a Norwegian newspaper – he calls me from somewhere in Germany. Even by his standards – Kurkov has a smile that could light Saint Sophia Cathedral – he sounds happy. “I’m very excited,” he says. Like Bulgakov, Kurkov moves between cultures and languages. Unlike Bulgakov, who served as a physician in the White Army after the First World War and remained in Moscow until his death, Kurkov remains a proud citizen of Ukraine and an open critic against the kind of cultural homogenization that claims writers and their work for political causes. He knows from history that the lines are never drawn so clearly. The nuance of identity comes up throughout the dozen of his novels translated into English, including Death of the Penguin and, more recently, Grey Bees, which tells the story of a beekeeper from the Donbas who feels increasingly alienated from his own culture amidst the Russian invasion of 2014.

They say that people remember the bad things more often than the good. Not me. I remember well what has pleased and surprised me in my life, but what I did not like or what has hurt me has been forgotten, left at an almost inaccessible depth in the well of memory. In this we see the instinct of self-preservation, although it works in a special way. We protect our psyche from bad memories and support it with good memories. In our memory, we can idealise the past so that nostalgia soon sets in, even for times that we would not have wished upon our worst enemy." Volodymyr Vakulenko has two graves. When I talk to his father among the cherry trees, which are budding once more in April, he tells me that his son’s corpse was found not far from the railway lines near Izium station, on 12 May last year. He was then buried – unbeknown to his family, who would still be searching for him for months to come – in the mass graves on the edge of the town. These graves of occupation, more than 400 of them, including a single pit containing the bodies of more than 20 Ukrainian soldiers, were exhumed by the Ukrainian authorities on 16 September, a week after the liberation. Those who were there say they will not easily forget the odour of death. Russians have a collective mentality," he explains. "They used to have one tsar and he was the symbol of stability. For them, stability is more important than freedom.Kurkov is best known for his 1996 novel Death and the Penguin, a book that has been translated into more than 30 languages. When the war began, he was hard at work on a new novel, but he hasn’t touched it since. At first, he was too distracted and he missed his library, left behind in Kyiv. Then he started writing his diary, the phone began ringing and he found himself too busy being a voice for Ukraine out in the world: “It’s a big responsibility. I wish there were more like me.” But there are also, he knows, things he can say that might sound hollow if they came from a non-Ukrainian. Take culture. He believes that it is never more important than in a time of war, offering as evidence for this the fact that no sooner had the conflict started than Kyiv’s metro platforms were being used as free cinemas. “People cannot live without it,” he says. “It gives meaning to a person’s life. It explains to a person who he or she is and where he or she belongs.” When I saw someone reading this at the cafe in the spring, I thought it might be a good introduction to Ukraine (a country I know little about) and the war from the Ukrainian perspective. I’m so glad I did. This is written just before and during the first 6 months of the war. Kurkov and his family become IDPs in their own country and he essentially journals that experience. He is furious and anxious and grim but also full of cautious patriotism and hope for his country. While key events we know from the news are referenced, Kurkov also covers the mundanity and minutiae of war. What people do in the in between. He also talks history and politics and culture but also about his neighbours and shops and cinema and the plight of animals. I found it really enlightening to have his perspective on Russian aggression, Putin’s motivations, European politics as it pertains to Ukraine and Ukrainian daily life (the culture of Ukrainian borscht! Easter bread! Eurovision! Life in metro stations. The people who stay.) But most interesting was Kurkov’s discussions about the status of Ukrainian literature and the attempted cultural destruction of Ukraine by Russia. Such lofty disdain translates, on the ground, into hatred and murder. At Bucha, the Kyiv suburb briefly held by Russia before its northern offensive was routed in March, Harding traces the miserable fate of Volodymyr Cherednichenko, a 26-year-old electrician who was abducted, tortured and murdered by Russian troops. His mother and aunt, who risked their lives to search for him, last saw him under interrogation, his arm broken, covered in blood, sobbing that he knew nothing. He was found alone a few days later, shot through the ear in a filthy basement, one of at least 1,400 Ukrainians to die in the area.

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