War Diary

by Yevgenia Belorusets, Greg Nissan (Translator)

Overview

A monumental, deeply penetrating document of life in Kyiv during the first forty-one days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine

The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: “I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future.” With power and clarity, the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine; what it feels like to interact with the strangers who suddenly become your “countrymen”; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day; the new danger of a routine coffee run. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day on the site ISOLARII (and on Artforum), the War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide: it was translated by an anonymous collective of writers on Weibo; read live by Margaret Atwood on International Women’s Day; adapted for an episode of This American Life on NPR; and brought to the 2022 Venice Biennale by President Zelensky as part of the pavilion “This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811234818
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	56 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer, artist, and photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. She is the author of the “unsettling and illuminating” (Washington Post) collection of stories Lucky Breaks and the cycle of lectures Modern Animal (ISOLARII). Her photographic work has been shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 2022. She is a member of the Hudrada curatorial collective and cofounder of Prostory, a journal for literature, art, and politics.
Greg Nissan is a poet and translator living in New York, and the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views.

Editorial Reviews

"How do you remain an artist at such a moment of terror? One answer might come in the form of Belorusets’s war diary which she began publishing as the invasion started and which has gained the appreciation of writers like Margaret Atwood and Miranda July. Through this act of documentation, in words and photographs, she is processing the total collapse of her world and keeping alive her openness, her powers of observation."

The Atlantic - Gal Beckerman

"The big emotional takeaway from War Diary is a sense of abandonment. Belorusets can’t believe that the world is watching these atrocities, right out on Ukraine’s streets, and not stepping in more forcefully. Russia’s troops, to her, seem more like terrorists than soldiers."

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

"War Diary mounts an unrelenting assault on civilized comforts."

Brooklyn Rail - John Domini

"The Ukrainian artist and writer began keeping an online diary the day Russia began shelling her hometown of Kyiv, but it quickly took on a global life after its translation by an anonymous collective and a live reading by Margaret Atwood on International Women’s Day. In book form, these collected entries bring home the mix of fear, banality, helplessness and incredulity Beloruset experienced in the war’s first 41 days."

The Globe and Mail

"Belorusets said the practice of photographing her day has been helpful in fighting the fog of war. That at the end of the day she'll start to write, and look at her collection of pictures from the day, and suddenly, things will come back to her—things she'd completely forgotten. . . . And if taking pictures helps remembering the un-rememberable, the writing helps believing the unbelievable."

NPR - Andrew Limbong

"Beloruset’s diary is animated by a simple and sincere disbelief that anything as cruel and senseless as war can exist anywhere. … Her struggle to make sense of the violence that has entered her city is an eloquent reminder that missiles falling at home are always unfathomable. In this sense she is speaking for everyone whose life has been interrupted by war, no matter where they live, no matter what their country’s position in the geopolitical landscape."

New York Review of Books - Sophie Pinkham

"In War Diary, no veil of fiction stands between the reader and the nightmare of life under military assault."

Wall Street Journal - Ben Shull

2022-12-27
A noted Ukrainian-born artist and writer offers an eyewitness account of the Russian invasion of her country.

Though the Russian war against Ukraine began in early 2022, for Belorusets, it actually began in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea. As a journalist who was in the region when the conflict began, “I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who could leave at will, because I lived somewhere else.” All that changed when shells fell on her city on Feb. 24, 2022. In the disjointed hours that followed, Belorusets could do little more than look “out the window and listen to check if the explosions were approaching,” endure the intermittent air raid sirens, and digest news reports of casualties that suddenly turned the abstraction of war “into something very concrete.” The diary that she began on that day and kept until she left Kyiv for Berlin in early April records how simple day-to-day activities—e.g., going to the few open grocery stores, restaurants, and coffee shops or gathering with friends and family anywhere in the city—became fraught with unimaginable possibilities for violence. Yet even in the face of evenings sometimes spent in bomb shelters, days spent walking among destroyed buildings, and musing on the fate of Ukrainians in other, more devastated cities like Mariupol, people continued to carry on, some with the belief that Ukraine would ultimately be “protected by the whole world.” The surreal circumstances Belorusets depicts, both in her writing and in the accompanying color photographs, set against the drama of war, are quietly disturbing. By showing how the war forced people to adapt to create any semblance of normalcy, she creates a compelling portrait of a nation under siege as well as the inspiring resilience of ordinary Ukrainians.

A soberingly spare and humane record of disastrous events.

Kirkus Reviews