Review of Our Daily War, by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025
All the policies of tsars are now being implemented by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Teaching in Ukrainian is once more prohibited in the occupied territories of Ukraine and Ukrainian books are being withdrawn from libraries there.
I’ve already reviewed one book about the war in Ukraine, last year. That was the journalist Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa, by an outsider whose interest in the area led her to spend time in a war zone. This, by contrast, is an insider view: essentially the diaries and other connected writings of the novelist Andrey Kurkov, who was Russian-born but has lived in Ukraine from the age of two and naturally considers himself Ukrainian.
Like Stout, he is informative on what it is like to live in a constant state of war; he notes, as she did, the way people get blasé about air-raid warnings, and the expanding vocabulary of children (to judge by his surprised tone, the f-word was, before the war, far less common among Ukrainian children than it has long been among English ones). He dwells more than she did on the effects of power cuts, having experienced more of them: “The Russian aggression has given electricity a very bad name. People in older buildings with gas stoves and ovens consider themselves very fortunate. They can cook and make hot drinks. What is more, bricks placed strategically on the gas hob can heat a room quite effectively”. And there are chilling details like this: “In the Kyiv metro, there are adverts for apartments in newly built blocks. The posters show floor plans and I noticed that all the new apartments have rooms set around a spacious, windowless area – a clever design for wartime.”
What I hadn’t bargained for was how, as both a writer and a Welsh person, I would identify with him in the culture war. Kurkov can speak and understand Ukrainian, but his native language, the one he grew up hearing his parents speak, is Russian and as any writer knows, it is very hard to compose in any but one’s native tongue. Kurkov still writes in Russian but does not publish in it; he gets his work translated into Ukrainian and other languages and it is the translations that get published, not the originals, a decision eased by the fact that his work has been unwelcome to the Russian authorities since he took part in the Orange Revolution.
You’d think this would qualify him as a Ukrainian writer in most people’s eyes, but as Welsh writers in English will know, things are not that simple: “I continued to write literary texts in Russian but I called myself and considered myself a Ukrainian writer. Some of my Ukrainian-speaking colleagues treated my self-identification with hostility. They stubbornly called me a Russian writer and insisted that if I wanted to call myself a Ukrainian author I should switch to writing in Ukrainian.” Groans of recognition… The one difference, as far as I can judge, is that Ukrainian and Russian are a hell of a lot closer than Welsh and English, so it might be easier to switch between the two, but it still wouldn’t be that easy.
This linguistic antagonism is not universal; “Odesa is a commercial city – full of sellers and buyers – where people are used to responding in the buyer’s language if they know it. At the central market, in addition to Ukrainian and Russian, you will hear Moldavian, Bulgarian and Gagauz. Hatred of Russia, which is evident at every step around the city, has not transposed into hatred of the Russian language”. And bigoted statements do generate angry responses:
“The climax of this round of the fight over language was a statement from the infamous anti-Russian-language crusader and former Member of Parliament, Iryna Farion, who declared that Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers should not call themselves Ukrainians. Feedback from both Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking soldiers was not long in coming. Ukrainian soldier Ekaterina Polishchuk – known throughout the country by her call sign Ptashka (Birdie) – who fought in Mariupol and survived Russian captivity, said: “Your position is not pro-Ukrainian and I consider you a project of the Kremlin. You are an enemy, promoting poisonous narratives. Your position and statements are complete shit. I say this as someone who spoke Ukrainian in captivity and who has been defending Ukraine for three years side by side with heroes who speak Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Belarusian, Polish, dozens of dialects, English, and dozens of other languages …” Kurkov adds that the commander Major Zhorin responded with a similar message, “but in words nobody was likely to print”.
Nevertheless, the intolerance of language zealots is understandable; if you spend generations undermining someone’s language and culture, they are liable to attack yours in return. Hence the recycling project in Kyiv: “turning Russian-language books into pulp to raise money for humanitarian projects. This campaign is not spearheaded by the state but by Ukrainian-language writers and cultural figures who believe that he preponderance of Russian-language books in libraries, both public and domestic, is an aspect of Russian aggression.” Understandable but saddening, like the campaign against the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov: “a memorial plaque dedicated to the writer was publicly removed from the wall near the entrance to Kyiv University, where he studied. Now a host of Ukrainian intellectuals and writers have decided to ‘take up arms’ against his museum”. The issue with Bulgakov is not just that he wrote in Russian but that he opposed Ukrainian nationalism. But he’s long dead, he was a fine writer, and Kurkov plainly shares the Facebook view of the Ukrainian soldiers who comment on such goings-on: “While we are fighting here, are you out of your minds?”
I must not imply that the cultural question dominates unduly. There is far more about politics, the course of the war and everyday life for civilians in wartime. And it is fascinating and informative, from remarks like “Ukrainian children can already tell the difference between the sound of a blast made by air defence systems and the noise of the explosion of a missile hitting its target” to humour, like the story of Grandad Danylo, the one man in Kurkov’s village near Kyiv who, in the 1980s, subscribed to a newspaper: “Every morning, a postman cycled up to the gate of Danylo’s house and left a newspaper between the slats in his fence. Danylo immediately pulled it out and read it from cover to cover before beginning his “anti-Soviet” activities. He walked along the street stopping to talk with everyone he met, calling over the fence to neighbours if he saw a potential interlocutor in a courtyard. First, of course, he greeted them and then he told them, in detail, what the Soviet press was lying about that day.”
But the book is essentially the diaries of a writer in wartime and not only does the cultural aspect naturally matter a lot to him, it also resonates more with any reader who shares that preoccupation.
