This Monday marked the third anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. While the war has been ongoing in some ways since 2014 if not earlier, it did escalate on February 24, 2022. If you haven’t read it yet, Amanda McCrina’s essay for this anniversary here at Current is a must-read.
In addition, I appreciated the chance to write two essays, published this week, about Victoria Amelina’s final book. A poet and novelist before the war, she became a war crimes investigator once the invasion began–until she was killed in a Russian missile strike on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk in summer 2023. The book was released this month, right in time for the third anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
1. In the gym of a Ukrainian kindergarten named Fairy Tale, there is a shell hole. It happened on February 17, 2022—a week before Russian tanks rolled over the border and this round of the invasion officially began. It presaged worse to come—more tearing of any imagined border between the fairytale world, where the wicked are always punished, and this world, where the evils of war are all too real. It is with this “Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale” that Ukrainian novelist and poet Victoria Amelina opens her new book, Looking at Women Looking at War.
Amid brutal war and unfathomable destruction—shell holes in kindergartens and maternity hospitals and playgrounds and restaurants and train stations and theaters and residential apartment buildings—good books are still published, proving the resilience of Ukrainian spirit. These books pack a punch and make a promise: Russia can bomb Ukrainian literary museums, bookstores, and libraries. Ukrainians come back even stronger, with new books—like this one.
Except, to tell the story in this way would be a lie. Or, at least, it would not be the full truth. Sure, we could focus solely on the positive here, further heightening the celebration factor. How about this: Right in time for the third anniversary of Putin’s ruthless invasion, an award-winning Ukrainian novelist publishes a new book that is poised to become a best-seller both at home and abroad.
All this is true. But there is another key fact that cannot be left untold: Victoria Amelina is dead.
You can read the full essay here.
2. The Hopeful Work of Investigating War Crimes. A taste:
The book proceeds in episodes, staccato-paced short stories of sorts, each titled after a particular woman through whose words, experiences, losses, and works of mercy Amelina documents some aspect of living in Ukraine in wartime. Visiting a librarian in the village of Kapytolivka, she describes an exchange about the land mine “in the ground of the school yard in front of the library marked with a red fire extinguisher, lying next to it on the ground.” The librarian casually instructs her driver to go around the mine, taking its existence for granted. When Amelina asks with concern if the kids at the school could accidentally step on it, the librarian assures her that everyone in the village knows to avoid the mine. War, we see, has reworked the local geography, creating its own new normal.
In another episode, we meet Evhenia Zakrevska, a lawyer who was prosecuting the crimes during the Maidan revolution and showed up at court yet again on the morning Putin’s tanks rolled over the border on February 24, 2022. Once she realized that court wouldn’t open that day, yet still eager to obtain justice, Zakrevska went directly to enlist in the Ukrainian army.
We also get to know more about the mysterious Casanova, who inspired Amelina to write this book in this form to begin with. Casanova had originally worked in a more official capacity as a war crimes researcher for Truth Hounds. Disappointed that years of research had failed to lead to a single hearing at the Hague, she decided to continue her work in a more independent capacity. Casanova’s team, including Amelina, ends up being the first to visit several villages that had been liberated after Russian occupation, leaving behind a devastation no less psychological than physical. The first rule, they discuss, is not to further traumatize the already traumatized survivors.
This book is no less Amelina’s own war diary as it is that of many others. Fittingly, she is also the one to recover Vakulenko’s war diary from his garden, digging with her own bare hands. Such is the work of preserving culture and literature, which she relates through story after story. It requires the commitments of ordinary women who have become extraordinary through their actions in this war. But did they even have a choice?
You can read the full essay here.
