Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary
Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary tells the story of the 2014 Russian invasion and occupation of her hometown. Stiazhkina blends realism and magical realism, tragedy and farce, bitterness and love in a series of vignettes that are sometimes heartrending, sometimes heartwarming, and always gripping.
Stiazhkina’s writing will give readers the opportunity to experience these initially absurd but ultimately harrowing events, side by side with her, as they unfolded a decade ago. Their impact is even stronger in hindsight.
From translator Anne O. Fisher’s Afterword
Stiazhkina wrote this book [in 2014] in Russian, whose morphological and syntactical features are as different from English as an octopus is from a dolphin. Russian disdains the copula; it loves the kind of impersonal construction that English barely tolerates; its past-tense singular verbs must indicate gender (unless it’s an impersonal construction)—and so on. Stiazhkina plays on all these features beautifully. At moments, her language condenses, gets too heavy to be that small, like a shiny piece of hematite you roll around in your palm. At other times, Stiazhkina’s ear for dialogue, her virtuoso play with register, and her psychological insight make you gasp (or laugh) and reread a passage. The vividness stems from Stiazhkina’s astonishing capacity for empathy, her fiction writer’s appreciation of situational absurdity, her historian’s long perspective on current events, and her half-humanistic, half-devout conviction that love is a valid mode of engaging the world, even—or especially—when the world offers you cruelty, desperation, and ignorance.
Humor, like love, is also an effective mode of engaging the world. Irony’s a good buffer. There’s the occasional wink at academic debates, like the Shakespeare authorship question: “The play Titus Andronicus is considered the worst thing Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s so bad there’s doubt as to whether they even wrote it” (73). Chronic sarcasm flares up. In the diary entry “Rumors” from June 1, Stiazhkina mocks the separatists’ barely-literate communications, but pauses to take her own side down a peg, and even throws in a little self-deprecation for good measure:
Why? Why must I read this!? Although there’s this, too, a patriotic missive, apparently from our side: “Donetsk! Everyone go back home! Don’t go anywhere else! There is fighting in the city’s Kyiv district! Everyone sit inside at home and don’t go fucking around right in front of the window!” But it doesn’t make me feel any better. Because I’m old. What else is left for me besides going and fucking around right in front of the window? (121)
Olena Stiazhkina
Reviews of Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary
“In addition to showcasing the author’s developing relationship with her country as Russia invades and occupies her hometown, her diary hence obliquely divulges complex and often overlooked nuances at the grassroots in Donbas in 2014; specifically, Stiazhkina’s, like many other Ukrainians’, move away from the ‘Russian world’. […] Stiazhkina’s diary, like other works by writers from Donbas, is critical for uncovering the largely overlooked dynamics in Eastern Ukraine – both before, during, and since the beginning of Russia’s war on the country. It likewise highlights the importance of realising grassroots nuances for all studies of war.”
“Thanks to Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, another important book relating to the start of Russia’s war is now available for English-language readers in Annie Fisher’s translation. Olena Stiazhkina’s “Ukraine, War, Love,” a diary documenting the start of the events in 2014, can perhaps be best summarized by the line: “What’s it like when Russians come to ‘save Russian speakers,’ and then kill them?” […]
While "Ukraine, War, Love" offers a somber account of the onset of Russia's war against Ukraine, the "love" in the title should not be overlooked. Throughout the book, Stiazhkina reflects on finding strength in the Ukrainian language and culture “which makes you free” and “becomes the language of safety and life” for those living through “a slow descent into hell.”
This love also encompasses a considerable amount of dark humor, a hallmark of Stiazhkina's work and arguably a significant aspect of the Ukrainian mentality that allows so many to process the horrors of war on a daily basis.”
“Stiazhkina balances a clear-eyed assessment of her country’s leadership (“Generals steal, civil servants take their cuts from city budgets and... politicians tell lies”) with her faith in Ukrainian civilians, “the friends and strangers who—today, and tomorrow, and always—will... rescue, and build, and cook, and forgive, and give, and heal, and defend.” Filled with gut-wrenching anecdotes and rousing prose, this is an alarming look at the human toll of Russia’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine.”
”[One] one cannot overlook the eerie immediacy of Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary. Despite its now historical setting, its carefully curated reflections resonate with today’s Ukraine, where eastern village after eastern village is pummelled by Russian missiles and drones and the internal displacement of nearly 3.7 million people causes multiple humanitarian crises within and throughout Ukraine. Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, too, reminds readers about Ukraine’s historical struggle for independence and Russia’s centuries-old agenda to control the region regardless of Kyiv’s sovereign borders. More significantly, nonetheless, the book serves as a time capsule, documenting the human experience of individuals fighting for survival at a time when the eyes of the world are shifting elsewhere.”