Diary of an Invasion

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Harding traces the miserable fate of Volodymyr Cherednichenko, a 26-year-old electrician who was abducted, tortured and murdered by Russian troops Kurkov's diary first came out online. I'd read parts of it and found it insightful and I'd wanted to read it properly. Now I'm glad to have read it from the beginning. The diary is insightful in the way it describes the events that led up to the war. It delves into a bit of history and it is very informative to read. It is also inspiring in the way it describes how ordinary Ukrainians have continued to live their everyday life inspite of the war and show everyday acts of heroism. It also describes the kindness of strangers, people who help others in need because they've been displaced because of the war. Kurkov himself is living in a stranger's apartment after he had moved away from his home, and his landlady tells him that he can stay in the apartment however long he wants and he can use everything that is there in her home. His own kids help refugees everyday. This is how the world survives, a country runs, because of the kindness of strangers. Kurkov’s contemporaneous account begins not with the invasion but with the build-up, the daily ups and downs of a country on the brink of what might be extinction, or maybe just another round in a grinding cycle of Russian threats and detente. Often meandering, sometimes unfocused, his exposition of Ukrainian politics and culture at times seem unsure of its intended readership – domestic or foreign? – but there is always much of interest. Not least, the extent to which actor-president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was seen, before the invasion, as too soft on Putin and too easily distracted by his feud with his own predecessor, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.

Diary of an Invasion By Andrey Kurkov | Used | 9781914495847 Diary of an Invasion By Andrey Kurkov | Used | 9781914495847

There are many fascinating characters who populate the story. There is Kurkov's friend Svetlana, who is not able to leave Kyiv. She sends a message to him – "I decided to say goodbye just in case. They have warned that there will be a terrible shelling of Kyiv. I'm going to stay in my flat. I'm tired of running through the basements. If anything happens, remember me with a smile." I cried when I read that. There is Tetyana Chubar, a 23-year old single mom. She is the commander of a self-propelled cannon (an armoured vehicle something like a tank) and she has four men under her command. She paints her nail yellow and blue, and she hopes to paint her combat vehicle pink one day. These are just two of the many fascinating, inspiring real-life characters who stride through the book. The army is now the most trusted institution in Ukraine," he says. "Something like 85 percent of Ukrainians believe in the army and only 60-something percent believe in Zelensky. The army is more important than the presidential office." This review could go on and on due to my fascination with so many parts of it. Even the multiple typos I came across didn’t have enough weight this time to result in a reduction in the rating! I would suggest this book to each and everyone who is interested in Ukraine, the currently ongoing war and the people’s stories behind it. I’m really glad about having discovered the author and am looking forward to reading more of his books. To sum it all up, I will leave one last quote here:Taken together, this is not only a chronicle of Russian aggression in Ukraine but a chronicle of how the war imposed by Russia – and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine as an independent state – have contributed to the strengthening of Ukrainian national identity. After four years in Moscow, Harding was expelled in 2011 for reporting on the brutal corruption of Putin and his cronies. Like Kurkov, he views Ukraine as a victim of Russia’s enduring imperialist mindset. Many Irish readers will note the parallels between his portrayal of Russia’s disdain for its “little brother” – even great Russian writers such as Solzenitshyn and Bulgakov dismissed Ukraine as a folk myth – and the brutal ignorance of certain other overbearing colonialist powers. One of my favourite writers A.J.Cronin gets a mention in Kurkov's diary. But not in the way we might expect. That particular passage goes like this – on big explosions, when nothing remains, no identification is possible - forever missing [entertainment center in Kremenchuk] The year before Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s former puppet prime minister and president, had stated bluntly that Ukrainians were Russia’s “vassals”.

Diary of an Invasion – Deep Vellum Diary of an Invasion – Deep Vellum

The first volume of his Diary Of An Invasion begins on December 29, 2021, with "Goodbye Delta! Hello Omicron!" - if only Covid was all Ukraine had to worry about - and ends in early July, before the recent successes of Ukraine's army, to whose soldiers Kurkov has dedicated the book. 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.”

Summary

In his new book, a version of the diary he has been writing since Russia invaded his country last February, the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov writes, among other things, of soup. It is July and on the cultural front, where fighting with Russia has also been “very active”, there is at last good news for Ukraine: Unesco has just registered the culture of Ukrainian borscht as part of its intangible heritage. Kurkov, like the rest of his countrymen and women, is thrilled. Apparently, the world disagrees with Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, who has repeatedly tried to defend Russian borscht from the “encroachment of Ukrainian nationalists”. This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. It would be happening over time," insists Kurkov. "We had the accession of Crimea eight years ago and now this new escalation. But he doesn't have much time left, he could speed up the plans." In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, Andrey Kurkov writes about recycling. While over 3,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed since the beginning of the latest war in Ukraine, it’s the smaller scrap metal and artillery shell casings that artists have focused on painting for European auctions that have raised money for the Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid. The war offers other opportunities for recycling in the forms of historical figures, renamed places, and myths about national identity. Such are the adaptations of a culture at war, a thoroughly modern war that Kurkov examines through his own understanding of the history that led the Ukrainian people to where they are now.