The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Returning fire on Russian lies
Ukrainian writers and scholars drew on their history to win the war of words
Spurred on by the urgency that comes with war, writers from Ukraine and foreign experts on the country have published huge amounts this year. In Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy’s outstanding book The Russo-Ukrainian War (Penguin, £10.99), he summarily dispels any arguments that the invasion is simply a response to Nato’s eastward expansion. Russia, he shows, has made numerous attempts to subjugate the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plokhy combines an expansive knowledge of Ukrainian history and behind-the-scenes goings-on with gruesome first-hand accounts of war. “You might know the smell of rotten meat,” he says of the bodies being burned in crematoriums across the country, “but this was deeper.”
The war began, Plokhy makes clear, in the Donbas in 2014 and two further books agree with him. The War Came to Us (Bloomsbury, £20), a memoir by Christopher Miller, the Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times, begins with his arrival in 2010 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bakhmut, a city now famous for its destruction. It contains conversations with prisoners of war in 2014, descriptions of being invited to dinner at checkpoints in occupied Donbas, and accounts of the alternate reality built up by Russian propaganda in Ukraine’s east. Read alongside Andy Brassell’s excellent We Play On (Robinson, £22), which looks at Ukraine’s recent history through the lens of Shakhtar Donetsk, the country’s best football team, nicknamed “the Barcelona of the east”, which was forced to relocate from its home in Donetsk in 2014 and has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the years since.
For those wanting to understand the bigger picture of Ukraine beyond its embattled east, there is Meghan Buskey’s Ukraine is Not Dead Yet (Ibidem, £22). A family history set almost 1,000 miles west of Bakhmut and Donetsk, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, this is a personal account of Buskey’s western Ukrainian ancestry, and the tragic history of the region in the 20th century.
With the second year of the full-scale invasion came much reminiscing on the first. Serhiy Zhadan, the Ukrainian novelist, poet, rock star and volunteer, published Sky Above Kharkiv (Yale, £14.99), a collection of his Facebook posts during the spring of 2022, when the city on the front line was surrounded on two sides by Russian troops and facing nearconstant shelling. The book is not, like Zhadan’s novels and poetry, a literary achievement, but taken for what it is – social-media posts sewn together – it offers an important window into those first days of war and highlights how local volunteer movements stepped in when the state was unable to cope. Above all, it’s a love letter to the city and to the people who fought for it.
Ukraine 22 (Penguin, £12.99) and A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War (Egret, £24.99), edited by Mark Andryczyk and John Freedman respectively, are anthologies of responses to the invasion by some of the country’s best-known writers. Angry, defiant and often heart-wrenching, these authors invite readers to share in their attempts to comprehend what befell them in the six months following February 24 2022.
But maybe the most compelling book on Ukraine published in English this year is A Small, Stubborn Town (Ithaka, £12.99), by British foreign correspondent Andrew Harding. Focusing on the town of Voznesensk in the southern Mykolaiv region close to the Black Sea – which Russia tried and failed to take – A Small, Stubborn Town reads like a novel, both in light of its beautifully wrought prose and the extraordinary story of the civilian defence mounted by the town’s eclectic residents.
Finally, when thinking about 2023’s books about Ukraine, it would be remiss not to mention Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian novelist, poet and war-crimes investigator who was killed by a Russian rocket attack on a restaurant in Kramatorsk this summer. While her book-length account of female resistance during the war, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, will never be completed, a short excerpt published online by the London Ukrainian Review, titled The Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale, is hugely moving. There are hopes that the unfinished remainder of her book will be published posthumously.
Crematoriums across Ukraine, Plokhy says, stink ‘deeper than the smell of rotten meat’