Diary of an Invasion

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one historic trauma that of forced deportations, gave rise to another historic trauma, the fear of hunger. “

Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov review - The Guardian

On the night of February 23rd this year a few writers and journalists gathered in the Kyiv flat of renowned writer Andrey Kurkov, where their host fed them borshch, Ukraine’s national dish. 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. 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”. The day before the start of the war, our children, including our daughter who had flown in from London, had gone with their friends to the beautiful city of Lviv in western Ukraine. They wanted to visit the cafes, museums, the medieval streets of the old centre. We decided to join them. The journey of 420km took 22 hours. The traffic jams varied in length, from 10 to 50 miles.The Ukrainian novelist whose vivid journals have captured the world’s attention, has thrown himself into touring the world to make the case for his nation. Here he talks borscht and politics

Diary of an Invasion | The Spectator Andrey Kurkov: Diary of an Invasion | The Spectator

Kulturen spelar en viktig roll i Ukraina och Ryssland har genom historien upprepade gånger försökt utplåna den och dess kulturutövarna. Precicionsbomber har under detta krig till exempel bombat historiskt viktiga konstnärers och författares hem. Ukraine has given me thirty years of life without censorship, without dictatorship, without control over what I wrote and what I said. For this, I am infinitely grateful to my country. I now understand very well that if Russia succeeds in seizing Ukraine, all the freedoms that the citizens of Ukraine are so used to will be lost, together with the independence of our state”, reflects Andrey Kurkov at some point in his “Diary of an Invasion”. Oftentimes, though, he dismisses such pessimistic thoughts by affirming Ukrainian spirit and the will of Ukrainians to fight and defend their country at all costs.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.” He points out that historical truth and trauma are returned to the people through works of art, literature, and cinema.

Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov review — Ukraine’s

Ukraine has lost probably 50,000 people already - 30,000 in Mariupol alone - so in every village there are now widows and orphans. This hate will not disappear."

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. 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.

Come back Boris! Support for former PM in Ukraine still

This erasure of history, memory and fact is, Kurkov says, key to the enduring power of the Kremlin, whoever may be lodged there, whether Czar, Stalin or Putin. Most Russians, he says, don’t want to know what the Kremlin did to Ukraine: they don’t even want to know what it did to Russia.His voice is genial but also impassioned, never more so than when deploring Putin’s efforts to erase Ukrainian culture and history. Ukraine, he says, “will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all”. That’s why the war has to be fought, with no concession of territory. And he remains quietly hopeful that it will be won. 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 –