A vivid, moving and sometimes funny account of the reality of life during Russia's invasion' -- Marc Bennetts, The Times 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.” This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. I believe this book is incredibly important to read, especially for Westerners as this provides an up close and personal account of the war, from someone who is Ukrainian and has lived in Ukraine most of his life, and is well known there as an Ukrainian author. Some of his takes on the war and western responses to it were quite refreshing. 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.

Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov review - New Statesman Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov review - New Statesman

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. 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.

Summary

They say that people remember the bad things more often than the good. Not me. I remember well what has pleased and surprised me in my life, but what I did not like or what has hurt me has been forgotten, left at an almost inaccessible depth in the well of memory. In this we see the instinct of self-preservation, although it works in a special way. We protect our psyche from bad memories and support it with good memories. In our memory, we can idealise the past so that nostalgia soon sets in, even for times that we would not have wished upon our worst enemy." 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."

Andrey Kurkov: from novelist to Ukraine’s travelling spokesman

Though Kurkov holds a Ukrainian passport, he was born in Russia. Writing in both Russian and Ukrainian for most of his life has opened him up to criticism from both sides. Ever on the lookout for historical parallels to explain the present, Kurkov has written in defense of writers like The Master and Margarita author Mikhail Bulgakov after members of Ukraine’s national writers’ union called for the renaming of Bulgakov’s family home, which is now a literary museum in Kyiv. On February 24, 2022, all citizens of Ukraine found that their lifetime had been cut brutally in two, into the period “before the war” and that “during the war”. Of course, we all hope that there will be a period “after the war as well”.When we became refugees, we left all our books in Kyiv. Now, since my first wartime trip into Europe, I have some books again – gifts from my English publisher. I’m wondering when I will be able to take those books home and add them to my library. 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.” This review could go on and on due to my fascination with so many parts of it. Even the multiple typos I came across didn’t have enough weight this time to result in a reduction in the rating! I would suggest this book to each and everyone who is interested in Ukraine, the currently ongoing war and the people’s stories behind it. I’m really glad about having discovered the author and am looking forward to reading more of his books. To sum it all up, I will leave one last quote here: Kurkov’s contemporaneous account begins not with the invasion but with the build-up, the daily ups and downs of a country on the brink of what might be extinction, or maybe just another round in a grinding cycle of Russian threats and detente. Often meandering, sometimes unfocused, his exposition of Ukrainian politics and culture at times seem unsure of its intended readership – domestic or foreign? – but there is always much of interest. Not least, the extent to which actor-president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was seen, before the invasion, as too soft on Putin and too easily distracted by his feud with his own predecessor, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. President Zelensky was telling us to prepare for May picnics and barbecues, and blaming the US for creating panic." So why does he think Putin has done this? "He is getting old and he had too much free time during the pandemic when he was alone somewhere in the bunker," he adds.