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War Diary

War Diary

by Yevgenia Belorusets; Greg Nissan

New Directions ·2023 ·128 pages
Best of 2022
Top of the Pile
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76/99
Near the Top

68/99

Critics' Rating Index

Top of the Pile

85/99

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51/99

Volume of Reviews

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About This Book

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 "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 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 Defending Freedom."


Reviews

"The surreal circumstances Belorusets depicts, both in her writing and in the accompanying color photographs, set against the drama of war, are quietly disturbing."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Her entries, written in the cloaked darkness of her apartment, convey not only the mood of a besieged city but also the spirit of its undeterred inhabitants."

Angela Ajayi· The Minneapolis Star Tribune Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"She considers compassion and its limits."

Dwight Garner· The New York Times Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Rigorous in its focus on interior life ..."

Sophie Pinkham· New York Review of Books Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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

Benjamin Shull· The Wall Street Journal Read review ↗ Near the Top

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