Review: 'War Diary,' by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from German by Greg Nissan
NONFICTION: Juxtaposing the ordinary and extraordinary, a Ukrainian woman documents the unimaginable effects of war in words and photos.
Thirty-three days after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian writer Yevgenia Belorusets types the following words into a public diary she'd been keeping for the German newspaper Der Spiegel since the start of the war: "My previous entry was an eternity ago. At least that is how I perceive it."
From her apartment in the center of Kyiv, not far from where the 2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Russian leader, Belorusets observes the surreal distortions of war, echoing the words of other Ukrainians. Time, the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko also writes, "is an unpredictable sequence of plains and abysses."
This sequence of unpredictability — both oppressively real and imagined — dominates the pages of "War Diary," a compilation of Belorusets' photographs and roughly 41 entries, which were translated from German by Greg Nissan. It must be said that by including a photograph of ordinary city scenes with each entry, Belorusets achieves a profound kind of juxtaposition, one that overlays the ordinary with the extraordinary realities of war.
It all started that Thursday morning with a barrage of missed calls on Belorusets' cellphone. Fearing for her safety, family and friends tried to reach her because of shocking news — Kyiv had been shelled and the war had begun. But in her entry that day, Belorusets is quick to clarify: "I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war."
Her reasoning is simple, her insight damning. Since 2014, the Russians had been waging war in that "foggy opaque zone of violence," the Donbas region of Ukraine. Read More…
