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Diary of an Invasion

Diary of an Invasion

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Eight months on, despite almost worldwide condemnation of Vladimir Putin's actions, the fighting remains vicious and vast swathes of Ukraine are without water or electricity. The army is now the most trusted institution in Ukraine," he says. "Something like 85 percent of Ukrainians believe in the army and only 60-something percent believe in Zelensky. The army is more important than the presidential office." Kurkov is best known for his 1996 novel Death and the Penguin, a book that has been translated into more than 30 languages. When the war began, he was hard at work on a new novel, but he hasn’t touched it since. At first, he was too distracted and he missed his library, left behind in Kyiv. Then he started writing his diary, the phone began ringing and he found himself too busy being a voice for Ukraine out in the world: “It’s a big responsibility. I wish there were more like me.” But there are also, he knows, things he can say that might sound hollow if they came from a non-Ukrainian. Take culture. He believes that it is never more important than in a time of war, offering as evidence for this the fact that no sooner had the conflict started than Kyiv’s metro platforms were being used as free cinemas. “People cannot live without it,” he says. “It gives meaning to a person’s life. It explains to a person who he or she is and where he or she belongs.” 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.

Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov | Goodreads Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov | Goodreads

one historic trauma that of forced deportations, gave rise to another historic trauma, the fear of hunger. “ In fact, we did not really think much about what to take with us. We thought that we would go to the village, not a great distance from Kyiv, and would return quite soon. I think this is always the case at the start of a war. 24 March 2022 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. In the Ukrainian countryside, there is a long tradition of having plenty of bread on the table and of eating it with butter and salt or dipping it in milk. 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.In this difficult, dramatic time, when the independence of my country Ukraine is at risk, the works of the great Scottish writer Archibald Joseph Cronin, who brilliantly combined the talents of a doctor and a writer, help me a lot. I make use of all five volumes of his work, published in Moscow in 1994 by the Sytin Foundation publishing house. It does not matter what the stories are in these books. I do not read fiction now. I use the five volumes to rest my computer on, so that my Zooms and Skypes follow the rules of television, so that the laptop's camera is located at my eye level."

Diary of an Invasion By Andrey Kurkov | Used | 9781914495847 Diary of an Invasion By Andrey Kurkov | Used | 9781914495847

A vivid, moving and sometimes funny account of the reality of life during Russia's invasion' -- Marc Bennetts, The Times One of Ukraine’s leading writers records the events immediately prior to and during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He writes with precision and clarity about leaving his home to move westward and about how it feels to be a displaced person in your homeland. His tone veers from the wry and satirical - for instance when looking at the mirror war being fought on social media - to the righteously angry as he surveys European nations deciding whether to support Ukraine and its democracy or to safeguard their own interests with Russia. His voice is genial but also impassioned, never more so than when deploring Putin’s efforts to erase Ukrainian culture and history. Ukraine, he says, “will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all”. That’s why the war has to be fought, with no concession of territory. And he remains quietly hopeful that it will be won. 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.” Not all Russia is a collective Putin. The unfortunate thing is that there is within Russia no collective anti-Putin.”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.

Andrey Kurkov: from novelist to Ukraine’s travelling spokesman

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." 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.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 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. For many people, history has long ceased to be a science and has become part of literature. It is edited just as a novel is edited before it is published. Something is added, something thrown out, something is changed. Some concepts are polished and smoothed, some ideas are made more prominent while others are played down. As a result of this editing, instead of comprising familiar past events, a new "formula" arises and the significance of the events is altered, as is their influence on events today. Certain politicians are very fond of commissioning new editions of history so that the history better fits their ideology and their ideological discourse." The day before the start of the war, our children, including our daughter who had flown in from London, had gone with their friends to the beautiful city of Lviv in western Ukraine. They wanted to visit the cafes, museums, the medieval streets of the old centre. We decided to join them. The journey of 420km took 22 hours. The traffic jams varied in length, from 10 to 50 miles. 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.



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