Diary of an Invasion

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Kurkov's diary is beautiful, moving, inspiring, heartbreaking. It is not often that we get to read a diary in the middle of a war, in which the author of the diary gives an insider's view of things. I'm sad that this diary exists because of the war, but I'm glad that Kurkov decided to share his thoughts and insights with us and takes us deep into Ukraine in the middle of the war-torn zone and shows us how life is. We get a live account of events as history is being made. Recalling that night at the start of his new book on Ukraine, Invasion, Luke Harding notes that their host made excellent borshch; having reported on the former Soviet Union since 2007, the veteran Guardian/Observer correspondent is presumably in a position to know. Kurkov, Harding writes, was “an agreeable companion, the author of many playful and magically luminous books, and Ukraine’s most celebrated living writer. Also, remarkably, he was an optimist.” Paraphrasing Kurkov himself, at some point you start looking for internal enemies. And that's understandable. Nothing is being published in Ukraine now and I cannot imagine much reading going on among Ukrainians either. I don’t read, although I try to. War and books are incompatible. But after the war, books will tell the story of the war. They will fix the memory of it, form opinions and stir emotions. Het boek begint op 29 december 2021. Een groot deel van de wereld maakte zich vooral druk om de nieuwste variant van het coronavirus. Dreigend genoeg, maar in Oekraïne was er een andere dreiging die steeds meer naar de voorgrond drong. Rusland was bezig om met veel materiaal en manschappen een enorme legermacht op te bouwen aan de grens. Je wordt vervolgens als op een roetsjbaan geslingerd door het eerste halfjaar van de oorlog.

Diary of an Invasion — Mountain Leopard Press

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." On 24 February 2022, the first Russian missiles fell on Kyiv. At five in the morning, my wife and I were awakened by the sound of explosions. It was very hard to believe that the war had begun. That is, it was already clear that it had, but I did not want to believe this. You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun. Because from that moment on, war determines your way of life, your way of thinking, your way of making decisions. The more powerful these mediums are, the longer the works remain relevant to the people, and, in the end, the best of them fall into the cultural canon of historical experience.” Not all Russia is a collective Putin. The unfortunate thing is that there is within Russia no collective anti-Putin.” As if by some divine joke, in the Ukrainian National character, unlike in the Russian one, there is no fatalism. Ukrainians almost never get depressed. They are programmed for victory, for happiness, for survival in difficult circumstances, as well as for love of life.”

Summary

A week goes by, and all the news is suddenly of the miles and miles of territory Ukraine has liberated in the east, and of the Russian army’s hurried departure. So I send him a message, and a couple of hours later – he was finishing off his column for a Norwegian newspaper – he calls me from somewhere in Germany. Even by his standards – Kurkov has a smile that could light Saint Sophia Cathedral – he sounds happy. “I’m very excited,” he says.

Diary of an Invasion – Deep Vellum Diary of an Invasion – Deep Vellum

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. Romana Yaremyn poses in the bookshop she runs in Lviv on 20 April, among hundreds of books evacuated from her bookshop and publishing house in embattled Kharkiv. Photograph: Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP/Getty Images 30 March 2022 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)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."

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

He was under the influence of this philosopher, Alexander Dugin, an advocate of the Eurasian policy (which considers Russia to be closer to Asia than Western Europe) based on anti-Western values. 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. 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. 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 –A few hours later, at 4.30am local time, Russia unleashed a barrage of missiles, air strikes and artillery rounds, and sent airborne forces and armoured columns on a smash-and-grab raid on Kyiv. In Diary of an Invasion, his own newly published account of the war so far, Kurkov wryly observes that at least Putin did not spoil his dinner party. Instead, Kurkov and his wife were woken by explosions in the small hours of the morning. As well as examining the invasion from a civilian perspective, as you might expect from a novelist, Kurkov's book is filled with vivid and impossibly poignant descriptions of life during conflict. During World War II, there was a slogan in the Soviet Union that said, “For the Motherland, for Stalin!” The soldiers who died did so for the U.S.S.R. and for Stalin. […] Now the Russians are dying, “For the Motherland, for Putin”. Ukrainians die only for their Motherland, for Ukraine. Ukrainians don’t have a tsar to die for. […] Ukraine is a country of free people.