Diary of an Invasion

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He is probably the number one foreign personality of the year. He's appreciated, he's loved," explains Kurkov. "When he resigned there were lots of jokes on Ukrainian Facebook saying we should ask Boris to come and be our Prime Minister. But then, Ukraine is a country of many shades of political opinion - there are some 400 registered parties - and this rampant individualism, Kurkov says, is at the heart of the nation's steadfast opposition to Russia. 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. Kurkov - who knows 10 writers fighting in the front lines - can recall the Soviet Union but says that for the latest generation of Westward-looking young Ukrainians, Russia is as distant as Poland or the Czech Republic. We found our children disoriented and sad. Not far from the house they were renting, I noticed a gun shop. It was still closed, but there was a line of people in front of it. There were men, young boys and girls in the queue, waiting for opening time.

Diary of an Invasion — Mountain Leopard Press

Equally alarming, he recalls: "The Russians took Ukrainian children to summer camps and they were not returned. On Russian media, I read that a group of Ukrainian kids were taken to a Russian town and were making jokes about Putin, so the Russians started 're-educating' them." He pauses: "I wouldn't believe it if it wasn't happening." One of the most important Ukrainian voices throughout the Russian invasion, the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees collects his searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv. A lot of discussion about I.D.P., himself included, and their relocation within Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe (latter mostly being women, children and pensioners; men under 60 who don’t have proof of enrollment in a foreign university or medical statement saying unfit for war are not allowed to leave the country) When war approaches your home you are left with a choice – to evacuate or accept occupation. A person starts thinking about this choice well before the first explosions are heard on the outskirts of their city or village. War is like a tornado. You can see it from afar, but you cannot easily predict where it is going next. You cannot be sure whether it will blow your house away or only pass nearby, whether it will uproot a few trees in your garden, or blow the roof off your house. And you can never be sure that you will remain alive, even if the house itself is only slightly damaged." The fact that the crimes of the Gulag… are not a historical trauma for Russia today proves that Russia has not yet recovered from the past — Andrey KurkovThese anecdotal curiosities prove far more engaging than the close attention given throughout the diary to some of Kurkov’s closest friends and family. Repeat mentions of the author’s brother who lives near an aircraft factory along with lengthy descriptions of the decisions that friends and neighbors have to make attempt to provide the continuity of a story line (Will they get out? Will they stay?) without building upon themselves or progressing in ways that feel like a plot. The real story here isn’t with these characters, but with Kurkov’s own feelings towards how the war he observes is transforming the people and places he knows so well. 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. We have a small garden and we hope that we can plant potatoes and carrots for ourselves. For us it is a hobby, but what kind of hobby can you have during a war? If the Ukrainian army manages to drive the Russian military away from our region, we will try to return to Lazarevka, to live a normal life again. Although the term "normal life" now seems but a myth, an illusion. In actuality, there can be no normal life for my generation now. Every war leaves a deep wound in the soul of a person. It remains a part of life even when the war itself has ended. I have the feeling that the war is now inside me. It is like knowing that you live with a tumour that cannot be removed. You cannot get away from the war. It has become a chronic, incurable disease. It can kill, or it can simply remain in the body and in the head, regularly reminding you of its presence, like a disease of the spine. I fear I will carry this war with me even if my wife and I some day go on holiday – to Montenegro or Turkey, as we once did." 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."

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

Can war be a time for self-improvement, for self-education? Of course it can. At any age and in any situation, even in wartime, you can discover new aspects of life, new knowledge and new opportunities. You can learn to bake paskas in a damaged stove. You can get a tattoo for the first time in your life at the age of eighty. You can start learning Hungarian or Polish. You can even start learning Ukrainian if you did not know it previously." Diary of an Invasion' is Andrey Kurkov's diary written during the ongoing war in Ukraine. It starts a few months before the war and describes the events leading up to the war and Kurkov's own everyday, personal experiences. It ends at a time a few months after the start of the war. The diary runs for around six months. Around the time the diary ends, the expectation was that the war will get over before winter or latest by spring. But now we know that the war has dragged on into the second year with no end in sight. Kurkov says in his epilogue that he is continuing to work on this diary and we can expect a sequel. Like Bulgakov, Kurkov moves between cultures and languages. Unlike Bulgakov, who served as a physician in the White Army after the First World War and remained in Moscow until his death, Kurkov remains a proud citizen of Ukraine and an open critic against the kind of cultural homogenization that claims writers and their work for political causes. He knows from history that the lines are never drawn so clearly. The nuance of identity comes up throughout the dozen of his novels translated into English, including Death of the Penguin and, more recently, Grey Bees, which tells the story of a beekeeper from the Donbas who feels increasingly alienated from his own culture amidst the Russian invasion of 2014. My friends in Lviv no longer pay any attention to the warnings and no longer run out of their houses to look for bomb shelters. They are tired of being afraid. The disappearance of fear is a strange wartime symptom. Indifference to your own destiny sets in and you simply decide that what will be will be. Still, it remains hard for me to understand the attitude of parents who allow their small children to play nearby to a multi-storey building while shells are hitting other buildings not so very far away. Is it possible to think this way about your own children too – what will be will be?"A vivid, moving and sometimes funny account of the reality of life during Russia's invasion' -- Marc Bennetts, The Times I would be interested and keen in reading the events and experience of it shared by author after Aug’22 till summer of 23. 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. Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov is strongest when he writes on cultural matters. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP on big explosions, when nothing remains, no identification is possible - forever missing [entertainment center in Kremenchuk]