Pub By: Mountain Leopard Press
‘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.’
These words written on 24.03.22 in ‘The Diary of an Invasion’ are so strangely prophetic of the fate of Ukraine today. More than two years have passed, and yet the war seems unending; the world is seemingly overwhelmed with other conflicts and pressures. Each day adds one more day to the never-ending battle for freedom and normalcy … a country fighting to keep its terrain independent and its people determined to defend it.
The book begins two months before the invasion. It is a diary … of everyday existence in a country invaded by a powerful neighbour and fraught with a troubled history.
The author had been at home in Kyiv when the missile struck. Travelling to the safety of his village, and then further on to Transcarpathia, he kept writing the diary. “But I stay and will continue to write for you so that you know how Ukraine lives during the war with Putin’s Russia. Stay safe where you are.” At this stage, you feel the book is transgressing into a different realm.
Andrei Kurkov is a respected Ukrainian writer who has silently been chronicling the war. The book reads like a diary of people desperately trying to lead a normal life, yearning for the old. “I am waiting for the opportunity not just to return to a peaceful Kyiv, but to return to my library, to my desk, to the archives.”
He writes about the people he knows and also encounters, logging their survival tactics and documenting their history in the process.
“Ukraine will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all. Then they will write about it in European history books, shamefacedly hiding the fact that the destruction of Ukraine was possible only with the tacit consent of Europe and the entire civilised world.”
It is a journal chronicling how Ukrainians are going all out to help each other. People buying online tickets to the zoo to feed the the resident animals, as the zoo is closed to visitors. It is also a journal of a human mind’s desperation to believe in a positive future and looking for brightness all around.
“When air-raid sirens, explosions and gunshots are all you have heard for so long, the gentle ringing of a tram’s bell against a background of general silence must sound like paradise.”
The human mind is desperate to live… the author has continuously tried to document characters who are an example of “survival”. Trying to cope. Trying to exist. Trying to live. One is desperately trying to sew threads of normalcy into the blanket of everyday life … hoping to get through and learn to live another day.
This book will always be referred to in the future as a document on this apparently ongoing endless war.
“I have the feeling that the war is now inside me. It has become a chronic and incurable disease. It can kill, or it can simply remain in the body and in the head, regularly reminding you of its presence.”
Preeta Chag 