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https://pushkinpress.com/books/lucky-breaks/

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Description

In Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins of Ukrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. A woman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative; a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted into a warehouse for propaganda; hiding out from the shelling, neighbours read horoscopes in the local paper that tell them when it's safe to go outside.

In stories of linguistic verve and dark, absurdist wit, Yevgenia Belorusets writes of how trauma seeps into the mundane, telling surreal, unsettling tales of survival in a shattered country.

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Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets | Pushkin Press

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In Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins of Ukrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. A woman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative; a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted...

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https://isolarii.com/kyiv

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YEVGENIA BELORUSETS

Yevgenia Belorusets has been one of the great documentarians of Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014, winning the International Literature Prize for her work. Her diary provides the news from a different vantage.

Updates are published by ISOLARII at 4:00 PM EDT each day-
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In Place of a Final Note

When the war started, I had no set plans to remain in Kyiv, but I quickly became the hostage of my own diary. At the very beginning, it struck me as important to witness what was happening. I decided to write a short text every day about events in the city. I set upon this work-which turned out to be hard-because I expected the war to only last for a few days. This war was so unthinkable, such a blatant violation of global security and human rights, that it seemed the world would quickly find a way to stop the aggressor.

As the attacks unfolded, I was shocked that, although the crimes were continuing, they were met almost exclusively with economic sanctions, which, however effective and lethal, still came without any active show of force on the part of the friendly powers. I realized that the diary was helping me to endure the storm of events that were in fact unbearable, and that it enabled me to describe something I really couldn't find the words for.

I had previously been to Debaltseve in the Donbas, at a time when the city was being regularly shelled by Grad rockets. That was when I first experienced horror in the face of war and in the face of how artillery could be used against a civilian population. I saw with my own eyes the consequences of shelling. I met people who hated Ukraine or Russia out of impotence-out of not knowing where to place the hatred that suffocated them-because of the pain they had lived through.

When the new phase of the war began and attacks reached Kyiv, my body memory kicked in. But it didn't make it easier for me to bear the events. In fact, knowing what happens to a person in a situation of such extreme and senseless violence, I experienced grief day after day. And my grief was much stronger than my fear. Fear came to me later-much more recently, when it seemed that Kyiv was returning to life, when Kyiv felt safe, especially the city center.

Sometimes I would speak to people who stayed in the Donbas, near Mariupol, or even people who had been in Mariupol, near the border with the occupied regions or near Kyiv, in Bucha or in Irpin. After each conversation, nightmares came to me, fear came to me, which sent me wandering around my apartment at night, sleeping on the floor in the entryway between two walls during the air raids. I couldn't fall asleep in the bed. Instead, I experience real horror, remembering meetings, phone conversations, and my previous trips to the Donbas.

A lot of people are unable to cry. But at times something comes over me, and I start crying. I myself find this state strange. At one point, I even decided to try to record the sound of my crying. It may seem ridiculous, but I thought that everything happening with my body needed to be used in some way, so that it could be talked about later. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had become my own working material. But every time I tried to make a recording of my state, the feeling would instantly vanish.

I can't say that the tears bring me relief. They are just one reaction to coming into contact with something new-with the events that are opening up to me.

I think everyone has the right to think and talk about the war. It is our common pain, the common pain of all humanity. The whole world is, in a sense, responsible for what is happening. This is an act of violence, bloodshed, brutality, and genocide. Anyone, anywhere in the world, must connect with this. If somebody has traveled out of Ukraine for whatever reason, but feels it necessary to talk about it, let her speak.

I subscribe to many Telegram channels, where I see photos of the aggressor-country's soldiers lying dead on the ground. Never before could I have imagined feeling such indifference when looking at images of men who had been killed. But now, it would be hard for me to live with the idea that the criminals-who shoot up apartment buildings, who attack old people and children-would go unpunished. Yet, on the other hand, I realize there is no punishment appropriate to the crime. We must have a trial! It is as necessary as air and it will definitely take place. But there is no resurrection of the dead, no restoration of broken worlds. There must be trials to try and prevent similar crimes in the future, there must be punishment for the guilty. But punishment isn't redemptive-it will not change what we have lost.

A key condition for us to preserve who we are is to preserve our diversity. We must carry out the work of accepting different worldviews, different points of view within our country. Then we will survive. Crimes must be punished, but anything that is an opinion rather than a crime, even if it is an intolerable opinion, we must try to accept.

As somebody who works with photography, I have always been struck by the fact that Kyiv, like the rest of Ukraine, has a hard time holding onto memories of its own history. Its history is constantly starting anew, and traces of the past are easily erased. Usually they are erased because of great tragedies or some external circumstances that drive the city to change. And now, something is once again forcing Kyiv to create its history afresh. This moment made me feel a rising desire to save some of that city that didn't know war was possible. Maybe that is why I constantly walked around Kyiv, photographing windows, walls of buildings, random corners, and fragments, without composition or meaning. It felt as if I were trying to save something connected with the past, something endangered, something that might be destroyed.

This is my desire-I don't want to call it a dream, just a very powerful desire: to somehow interrupt the flow of this particular, unbearable story. This desire is what allowed me to remain in Kyiv for so long, and it is what allows me to go on presuming that dreams are still possible in principle.
Adapted from an interview by Olga Serdyuk for NV, a Ukrainian online magazine

Sunday, April 3
DAY 39: A CITY DROWNS IN BLOOD
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A playground next to my house, which reminded me of playgrounds in Bucha. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]

A young man suffering from bipolar disorder, who lived all his life with his grandmother in Bucha-a town northwest of Kyiv-walked to the capital after his grandmother was shot by Russian soldiers in front of the entrance to her house. He completely lost his sense of time and doesn't remember how long he was on the road. For a few days he lived in Kyiv at the train station, where he met a policeman who took him to a volunteer center in the city where an acquaintance of mine works.

For days on end, a woman would not evacuate Irpin. She stopped responding to calls from her daughter, who was abroad. Her friends tried in vain to persuade the woman to leave. Power in her apartment had already gone out and there was no water, but the woman stayed. Her neighbors refused to leave their high-rise as well. They tried to care for the pets left behind and help other remaining residents. But the situation in the city became unbearable. In one of the last evacuation efforts, the neighbors were finally planning to leave and take the woman with them. But when they reached her apartment, the door was locked. She talked to the neighbors through the closed door, but she could not be persuaded. Fortunately, she survived the occupation of the city.

The father of a good friend of mine lives with his wife in Kharkiv. When the war began, they started a volunteer initiative to distribute medicine. My friend kept asking them to leave the city. But they remained and helped many people. When the shelling and bombardment became more intense, my friend's father disappeared all of a sudden. He was not found until days later. He'd had a paranoid episode in which he saw himself in the midst of only enemies, death, and destruction. He couldn't trust his wife, his children, or his friends. In this intoxicated state of suspicion, he reached the Russian military posts, where he was wounded. Two or three bullets were removed from his body. He will survive.

Now I sometimes hear the casual phrase, "this person or that person was wounded." When it comes to possible health issues, gunshots and war wounds have nearly become a legitimized form of harm in the collective imagination. Somewhere on the fringes of my childhood memories, I see children playing at being wounded soldiers. I myself liked to pretend that I was wounded. There always came a moment when I begged my friends in an unmistakably suffering voice, "leave me on the battlefield! I'm too much of a burden for you. Go on without me!"

Bucha is drowning in blood. When you hear that someone has survived there, it is a miracle. The dictator claims that we are not simply related peoples, we are in fact "one people." But when you see what the Russian army is doing here-dead women who have been raped lying on the side of the road in Bucha and Irpin, dead children as well-you understand immediately: this is a genocide of those who have been dehumanized.

Today, the streets of Kyiv were especially silent. The joy of return--quite small, but still palpable just yesterday--was gone. The city mourned by being motionless and deserted of people. Sometimes I heard words said very softly: "communal graves, mass graves."

Monday, March 28
DAY 33: ENDLESS CANNONADES
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During an air raid alarm, a lone woman leans against a tree in an empty park. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]

My previous entry was an eternity ago. At least that's how I perceive it. I may have missed only one day, but it feels like my German has slipped away and that I can no longer get used to expressing my thoughts in it. When I stop to reflect, Russian, Ukrainian, and English mingle to form the voice in my head.

Time sometimes runs too fast-days and hours seem to differ rapidly from one another. A feeling of security arises under the ongoing bombardment, and becomes unbearable: it seems to be cobbled together from counterfeit sensations.

An artist, the acquaintance of a good friend, lives on the outskirts of Kyiv. She says that the shelling sounds much louder in the forest than it does near me, in the center of town-as if there is fighting among the trees, someone on the hunt, shooting at someone else. Reflecting on the gunfire audio messages coming from all around her, she wondered: what if she lay down on a forest path and decided to accept her own death? She thinks this could be somewhat liberating.

Tomorrow, talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators will take place in Istanbul. Perhaps that's why Kyiv has been shelled all day long. Early in the morning I heard endless cannonades, a composition of gunshots. My mother came by my apartment and we went for a walk. We told each other funny stories and imagined that all the explosions came from our air defenses protecting the city. But then we heard a long, deep, and rolling roar. A white line appeared like the trace of an airplane, but short and uneven. It was the trail of a missile. We heard the explosion.

The news was silent even an hour after impact. For several days, reports of attacks and strikes have become increasingly delayed-so as not to give the enemy any hint about whether they have injured us. As a consequence, you hardly know where you are anymore. Where and when does the feeling of security-even if fleeting-begin, and where does it end? There remain only the messages on Telegram channels: "Many Kyiv residents are reporting explosions. But we don't want to write anything more specific about it now."

You can learn more from talk around town. At the kiosk where you can get one of the best espressos in Kyiv (or anywhere), the young barista confided in me that high-rises had been damaged within a fifteen-minute walk of his house. He reported this with a touch of irony in his intonation, as if he were talking about bad weather.

A good friend and human rights activist is now in Chernivtsi in southwestern Ukraine. Her boyfriend, who fled Mariupol on foot, just arrived there. The residents of Mariupol are constantly trying to leave the city-without cars and packing only the bare necessities. They flee in the direction of Berdyansk, where they get picked up. Often news arrives that these pedestrians have been shot on the way. I can't imagine how people can learn about such crimes and not at once do something to stop them. A collective psychosis is sweeping Russian media right now, combined with an obvious enjoyment of impunity and the ability to strike fear into the most powerful countries.

I was awakened by a phone call. It was a young woman who was practically a child in 2014 and who has been on the run since that very year. She cried as she explained that she really loves her new home, the city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine, and never wants to leave it. She got my number from acquaintances in order to ask about possible escape routes. I heard her tender, high-pitched voice-utterly incompatible with the sounds of gunfire and air defenses that are muffled by my tightly closed windows, and that have become the background to my everyday life.

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A group of friends, colleagues, and veterinarians walking their dogs before the long curfew. They are staying in Kyiv to rescue animals. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]

A day in lockdown, without being allowed to leave the house, alone with the news and conjectures about the future. The end of the war is continually announced like a weather forecast. Some experts express themselves in newspapers, others through long and reassuring video monologues. In this way, by leaping into a distant news stream, one can slowly accept what is happening to my country. At the same time, such a thought is unbearable. I push it away. Besides, I know that "my country" sounds abstract enough as an idea that one could be able to "accept" what is happening-but you can never understand how something so brutal can be done to people.

When I walk through Kyiv, I see men and women standing like little statues, looking at their phones; they don't seem to want to know what's happening in their immediate surroundings anymore. They read the news, because only there, it seems, are hidden the secret answers to these dark questions arising every day in new and uncertain ways. Many phone numbers have been disconnected. A humanitarian catastrophe is in full swing in all occupied territories. Hunger reigns, and people are kidnapped and arrested.

Perhaps the tight narratives of the news cycle only testify to something that is missing. What's really missing right now are words. I'm in my apartment, I found some time to write-but I can barely develop a thought.

I watch video clips of the shelling on my phone. They are shared via Telegram channels, posted by residents of Kyiv. I see how silver streaks glow and then settle from the sky onto the rooftops. Someone claims that's what phosphorus ammunition looks like, while others think it's rocket fire from a Grad system, a multiple rocket launcher. A few of the districts of Kyiv, including mine, were shelled today.

Then I think for the first time that this footage could be a forgery, that it is a recording of another reality. It is not about Kyiv at all. Is it possible that right now-as I write this in my apartment while most of my neighbors spend the night in shelters-Grad missiles are flying through the air and white phosphorus is raining down on someone's home, not so far from here, in my own city?

I miss all the walls, all the houses of this city that I haven't seen yet, that I haven't photographed, that have already disappeared and been destroyed, that have become unrecognizable, incinerated.

Around noon today a powerful strike could be felt throughout my house. The rules of news coverage are changing, so it is not clear right away what attacks are happening where. Only the body of the house and one's own body sense the danger. For now they have become the most immediate sources of information.

A few hours ago, I spoke on the phone with Elena, an employee at a zoo outside Kharkiv, an area subject to constant onslaught. She is the director of a theater where children perform as actors together with dogs, mice, and rats. Time and again employees try to feed and evacuate the animals. But as soon as the Russian army sees cars, bullets begin to fly.

On March 7, Elena tried to reach the zoo one last time in order to bring food to the animals. On the phone she explained to me that many animals remain in their pens. "The deer were shot at. Some of them died. Others managed to escape through the ruined fence into the forest. When we arrived by bus, the shelling started. We ran out of the bus with the feed and made it to the pens. Some great apes had been shot. We ran through the damaged rooms trying to distribute as much of the feed as possible. Then we ran to the bus, but the driver was already dead. We tried to get another car to go back and transport his body to the city. Another colleague was fatally injured. Only one other colleague and I were able to escape."

"I can't cry," she went on to say. "I can't even believe it took place. Before my eyes I keep seeing the plastic display window where the monkeys were waiting for us. Many of them were standing there with babies pressed against their bodies. They were hoping for food, but we didn't manage to feed them that day." Elena has stopped going to the zoo for the moment, but other staff members are trying to reach the pens so that the animals, the ones still alive anyway, don't die of hunger.

I don't want to write a "last" sentence. Every day we encounter our choices.

Thursday, March 17
DAY 22
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[photo: Nikita Kadan]

Today there is no entry.

Edited by ISOLARII with translations by Greg Nissan

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YEVGENIA BELORUSETS Yevgenia Belorusets has been one of the great documentarians of Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014, winning the International Literature Prize for her work. Her diary provides the news from a different vantage.

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Pink Floyd - Hey Hey Rise Up (feat. Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox)

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https://www.ukrainianlessons.com/fmu/

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If the answer is: to talk to Ukrainians, you are in the right place! 5 Minute Ukrainian is a new podcast from Ukrainian Lessons that is all about conversations. Each episode contains a short dialogue that you will listen to in natural and slow speed.

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I'm not very good at reviewing films for their artistic quality. I can only say how it made me feel, which was empty, just as was said in the film. I can imagine how their lives must have been. I think this film was brilliant.

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The Earth is Blue as an Orange - Klassiki

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Переписи і нотеси

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https://www.ukrainianlessons.com/season1/

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Привіт! Я дуже люблю Ukrainian Lessons Podcast. Я волонтер корпусу меру, і я живу в Україні. Моя вчителька мене сказала я розмовляю українською дуже добре. Я слухала кожного уроку. Дякую!

Hi! I love this podcast! I am a Peace Corps Trainee, and I just moved to Ukraine, where I will be serving for 2 years. I listened to this podcast A LOT in the months before my departure, and now that I am here I made it into the advanced language study group. My teacher said I speak very well, and she was especially impressed that I know how to conjugate some verbs. When she asked where I learned, I told her about this podcast! I've listened to every episode. Thank you!

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Ukrainian lessons podcast - Ukrainian lessons

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Привіт! Я дуже люблю Ukrainian Lessons Podcast. Я волонтер корпусу меру, і я живу в Україні. Моя вчителька мене сказала я розмовляю українською дуже добре. Я слухала кожного уроку. Дякую! Hi! I love this podcast! I am a Peace Corps Trainee, and I just moved to Ukraine, where I will be serving for 2 years.

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https://forvo.com/languages/uk/

You can download the pronunciations and then make a playlist out of them to listen to.

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