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ON FEBRUARY 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. For almost a year, millions of Ukrainians have been living amid fear and privation.
Putin’s hostile land-grab precipitated the greatest large-scale movement of refugees since World War II: eight million within Ukraine itself, and a further eight million across Europe. Ukrainians stress this is not a new war, but the escalation of one begun in February 2014 when Russia occupied the Donbas.
Putin’s actions have accelerated a global cost-of-living crisis. But they have also precipitated a thirst to understand more about Ukraine and its peoples — not least because many now have Ukrainians living in their homes, as neighbours, or attending their children’s schools. If you want to get under the skin, to the very soul of a nation, you need to read its novelists.
Nikolai Gogol is sometimes described as a Russian Dickens, but he was actually born in Ukraine. I recommend his tragi-comic short stories, among them The Overcoat and The Nose. Another great Russian who was actually Ukrainian was Mikhail Bulgakov. His post-revolutionary The White Guard is set in Kyiv during the winter of 1918-19.
Bulgakov is renowned for his Stalinera satire The Master And Margarita. An obvious absurdist heir to him is Andrey Kurkov. His Death And The Penguin is set in post-Soviet Kyiv, where Victor, an obituarist, lives with Misha, the depressed penguin he rescued from a penniless zoo.
Closer to home, a novel that reminds us that there have been Ukrainian communities settled in the UK for decades is the wonderfully entertaining A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, who drew on her own background.
And a book that might help us understand the enormity of having to flee one’s homeland because of war is You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary Of A Young Girl From Ukraine by Yeva Skalietska. Its teenage writer and her grandma were helped to safety in Ireland by a Channel 4 news crew who first encountered them as refugees. A book to make you count your blessings.