Diary of an Invasion

4 ideas

1. Novelist's westward flight from Kyiv to Transcarpathia

   As Russian forces advanced on Kyiv in late February 2022, Andrey Kurkov, a Russian-language Ukrainian novelist, left the capital with his family and moved west through Lviv to Uzhhorod in Transcarpathia. By his own account in the preface, he wrote nothing for several days during the flight, and the diary resumes once he could write again. It is a first-hand account of a civilian writer displaced inside his own country while the war was still unfolding.

2. Ukrainian individualism as resistance to conquest

   Kurkov argues that Ukrainians hold a stubborn, almost anarchic individualism. Everyone keeps their own opinion and distrusts centralized authority, and this is set against a Russian political culture that trades freedom for stability under a strong ruler. The trait makes Ukraine hard to govern in peacetime, but for the same reason it is hard to subjugate. A population that never fully deferred to its own state will not defer to an occupier, so resistance organizes itself from below.

3. Invasion turns language into a chosen allegiance

   Russia justified the war as protecting Russian speakers. Kurkov, himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, shows how the invasion had the opposite effect: many Russian speakers began switching to Ukrainian or re-labelling their identity as Ukrainian first. A pretext that claims ownership of a linguistic group can push that group to use language as an act of political choice. The result is a stronger national identity than existed before the attack.

4. Read war through persisting ordinary routines

   Kurkov often tracks the war through what ordinary people keep doing, such as planting gardens, caring for pets, cooking and volunteering, as well as through battles. The routines that continue show one side of how people live under war and whether they mean to stay. Alongside this he records fatalism, so these routines are one part of his picture of resolve and not a measure that outranks everything else.

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