Yevgenia Belorusets has been one of the great documentarians of Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, winning the International Literature Prize for her work. She began keeping a diary on the first day of the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine.
I subscribed to Yevgenia’s emails early on. She’d not posted in some time, possibly because she was busy with the show centered around and publication of the writing, or because she was no longer in Ukraine, or maybe because she simply did not have anything to write during that time. Two days ago an email arrived, and this morning over my first cup of coffee I read it, grateful that she returned to these words, sent as they are to an invisible collection of email inboxes. Primarily because they remind of the horrific circumstances of war, that those circumstances continue to this day. Also because they remind that humans are experiencing those circumstances, that those humans are very much like me—manifold, confused, desiring of both the simple and complex, simultaneously able to tolerate atrocity and intolerant of even the smallest perceived disrespect. And importantly, that our own society, the same one we enjoy and feel secure within, continues to tumble, sick with the same ills, towards similar outcomes.
This latest newsletter explains—perhaps, she never says it outright—why the extended silence. The fact that she speaks Russian has created a division, that no matter how manufactured by propaganda and desperate attempts at meaning-making, exists, and importantly, easily silences.
…the collective sympathy…finds a form, and can be withdrawn, in the media and on social networks—an assessment, a scattered pointillist formation of opinions, so different from the repressive mechanisms of the state, that manifests itself as a wave of brief authorized statements. It arrives under the guise of anonymous common sense and successfully creates an illusion of being supported by the whole of society or a country at large.
…The divide between our countries made the idea of sharing a virtual community seem ridiculous. The other country, the neighboring country, had long been inaccessible, even to me, but after February 24 this gap manifested itself in a new way.
While incomparable, the war in Ukraine acts as a warning bell for our own crumbling society. Institutions meant to keep said society together speak of love, but rarely of the implications of love—curiosity, humanization, and vulnerability in the face of emotional attacks, as just one example. Other such institutions ignore their calling and simply join the cacophony of fear and hate, which they dress up in the words of morality or perceived religious imperatives.
Earlier this evening I talked on the phone with a Ukrainian soldier. He is younger than me and stationed in the south of the country, in Mykolaiv, where his grandmother lives. Mykolaiv is one of the cities that has come under the heaviest rocket fire—all the university buildings and almost all the schools have been destroyed during nine months of war. With a particular sadness, he spoke of the Pylyp Orlyk International Classical University, from which he himself had graduated. “This beautiful university, one of the best in the country, is in ruins,” he said. “All the rooms that I know, that I spent years in, have been turned inside out.”
I wanted to ask him about his daily experiences. He has been on the front for several months already.
But he began to talk about the war, the origin of which he sees in a thousand-year conflict between Russia and Ukraine that flares up again and again. “That’s the only way,” he says bitterly, “that you can can explain it all. Our biggest mistake was that we forgot about all those years of conflict and trusted them again.” At this I was silent for a while. Then I asked him what he sees around him. I wanted to know how this lazy, slow, melancholic southern city deals with the constant rocket fire. He said, as if answering a completely different question, that war is terrible and not romantic, that no book he has ever read has described what is happening there now. The war does not encourage heroism—there is nothing heroic—it just breaks people. “I’m a pessimist,” he said. But in some ways life in Mykolaiv has remained as it was. The people are just as melancholic and slow as they were before the attack. They try, as they did before, to enjoy their days somewhat sullenly. His grandmother, he said, gets up every morning at five, goes to the cellar, waits for an hour, and then goes back to sleep. The shelling takes place early in the morning almost every day.
I was reminded about how in Sarajevo the people returned to pre-war ways of being so quickly. I was there only a handful of years after the war had ended and despite the appalling, extreme example of hate they had just lived through, society’s ills remained. Humans are resilient, as is human nature.
This level of practical violence—a violence that engulfs life in Ukraine and makes millions of people eyewitnesses to war crimes—is theoretically justified by the aggressor again and again in new ways, enabling and exonerating at once. Alongside it arises an Everest of propaganda—irrational, fanciful descriptions of why this war was so necessary and so inevitable for Russia, why one should just die, be murdered and watch as everything one has loved and cherished since childhood is destroyed, or kill oneself and thereby protect oneself from the suffering.
So one wants to separate oneself from this question—to kill or be killed—in theory, even if there seems to be almost no choice in practice.
Identities, “cultural communities,” are created before our eyes, the aim of which is not to describe but to exclude, to define through negation. Many Ukrainians switch languages to avoid being defined as “Russian” by Russian propaganda. There is too little understanding for the grey areas of society, for the political indecision in the occupied territories, for the regions of Ukraine that used to even be admired for their multiculturalism.
This tendency, I think, mostly goes in the wrong direction. It is not the perpetrators or their enablers who get caught in the web of desperate and radical accusations. The ones caught in the web are almost always those who already feel a sense of guilt, who perhaps have lived with this guilt for a long time and have themselves fought in vain against the same crimes.
…The values, the world order we knew, carefully taught to us from childhood, first slowly, through fairy tales and games, no longer exist. And in place of this great absence—for which there is no serious explanation—there is only delusion, propaganda. It works like a procession of empty spaces that are randomly and reactively filled with new concepts, words, and radical emotions.
And then, the gut punch:
My father, a German-language literary translator, calls this void “dead empire.” An empire that no longer lives, and cannot live, strikes, kills in the name of its impossible return.
…and the sorrow:
…one sees a huge discrepancy in the dimensions of violence. The place of birth, previous places of life, education, body, pronunciation—these seem to fix the speaker in a particular identity with such expressive force that their actual language and speech almost lose meaning.
Through the grids of fixed aggressive perception, I see lost opportunities in many languages and voices that I miss.