Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.
The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.
In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.
“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”
In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.
“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”
She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”
Here are some other things to read.
Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”
Reading: Do you write in your books? President John Adams did, and Joel Miller offers five reasons for doing it too.
“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”
Reading: Chekhov said, “I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.” Yes, but maybe there are other legitimate categories.
Photo: Sigurdur Fjalar Jonsson/Unsplash