Recently a strong wind of up to 70 k.p.h. has been blowing across Ukraine. A strong wind usually changes the weather and cuts off electricity simply by breaking the power cables. No electricity supply usually means a break in communication with the outside world - no Wi-Fi or T.V. and no way to charge a mobile telephone. All that remains is a candle and a book, just like two hundred years ago. As was the case then, a candle is more important than a book. And cheaper! When the electricity went off that night in hundreds of villages because of the wind, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians burrowed into the drawers of their tables and sideboards looking for candles. Everyone's world was reduced to the space that can be illuminated by a candle. Forced romance won out over high-tech reality." The more powerful these mediums are, the longer the works remain relevant to the people, and, in the end, the best of them fall into the cultural canon of historical experience.” The manuscript is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and the text of the diary has been recently published in Ukraine, with a foreword by Amelina. The notes offer a unique, granular sense of the terrors of occupation. With its many excisions and corrections, the manuscript can be confusing. But then, as Amelina put it in her poem, war has a way of destroying coherence. There are many fascinating characters who populate the story. There is Kurkov's friend Svetlana, who is not able to leave Kyiv. She sends a message to him – "I decided to say goodbye just in case. They have warned that there will be a terrible shelling of Kyiv. I'm going to stay in my flat. I'm tired of running through the basements. If anything happens, remember me with a smile." I cried when I read that. There is Tetyana Chubar, a 23-year old single mom. She is the commander of a self-propelled cannon (an armoured vehicle something like a tank) and she has four men under her command. She paints her nail yellow and blue, and she hopes to paint her combat vehicle pink one day. These are just two of the many fascinating, inspiring real-life characters who stride through the book. Russians have a collective mentality," he explains. "They used to have one tsar and he was the symbol of stability. For them, stability is more important than freedom.

For several days now, Ukrainian Facebook has been boiling over with the joy resulting from this victory. Ukrainians joke that Putin woke up last Sunday morning and was horrified to hear that Ukraine had won. It took him a while to realise that Ukraine had won the Eurovision, not the war – not yet.

Summary

Sometimes, dropping off for an hour or two, I dream,” he wrote in the diary’s last entry. “During the first period of occupation I dreamed of numbers, old calendars, friends. I also dreamed of our lads fighting, dreamed I was hugging them, greeting them. I am scared to think of how they are. During the first days of occupation I gave up a little, then due to my half-starved state, totally. Now I’ve pulled myself together, even raking the garden and digging up potatoes to take into the house.” These anecdotal curiosities prove far more engaging than the close attention given throughout the diary to some of Kurkov’s closest friends and family. Repeat mentions of the author’s brother who lives near an aircraft factory along with lengthy descriptions of the decisions that friends and neighbors have to make attempt to provide the continuity of a story line (Will they get out? Will they stay?) without building upon themselves or progressing in ways that feel like a plot. The real story here isn’t with these characters, but with Kurkov’s own feelings towards how the war he observes is transforming the people and places he knows so well. Immediate and important ... This is an insider's account of how an ordinary life became extraordinary' Helen Davies, The Times Having registered on TikTok to follow the account of artillery officer Tetyana Chubar, I have started worrying about her too. I am willing her to emerge victorious from each new artillery duel and I would gladly support her quest to paint the self-propelled cannon pink all over – albeit after the war, of course. I think this will not only be her biggest reward but will be the icing on the cake for all her TikTok followers." I […] will continue to write for you so that you know how Ukraine lives during the war with Putin’s Russia.”

However, this territory is complicated, too. Like millions of Ukrainians, Kurkov, who was born near Leningrad, is a native Russian speaker and part of the fascination of his book lies in its accounts of the struggle for identity within the country, something the war has made more vexed. Ukraine has, for instance, demanded that Russian culture be boycotted. But while many younger Ukrainians are enthusiastic about this idea, older people are more conservative. The council of the Pyotr Tchaikovsky conservatory in Kyiv, the country’s national music academy, recently met to discuss whether it should be renamed after the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko – and eventually decided against. Meanwhile, an opera-loving friend of Kurkov’s wept at the thought of not being able ever again to hear Eugene Onegin at Kyiv opera house.

In this difficult, dramatic time, when the independence of my country Ukraine is at risk, the works of the great Scottish writer Archibald Joseph Cronin, who brilliantly combined the talents of a doctor and a writer, help me a lot. I make use of all five volumes of his work, published in Moscow in 1994 by the Sytin Foundation publishing house. It does not matter what the stories are in these books. I do not read fiction now. I use the five volumes to rest my computer on, so that my Zooms and Skypes follow the rules of television, so that the laptop's camera is located at my eye level." As dawn broke on March 29, 2002, Israeli tanks, under cover of helicopter gunships, and accompanied by armoured personnel carriers, rolled into Ramallah. Hundreds of soldiers made house-to-house searches, destroyed offices, besieged hospitals, arrested ambulance drivers and medics and prevented wounded civilians from reaching hospital. Hundreds of Palestinian males over the age of fourteen were detained and brutally treated, some died resisting along with other innocent civilians. Operation ‘Defensive Shield’, long planned, and with the aim of destroying the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), had found its opportunity with the suicide bombings of the week before—months of ‘closure’ of Palestinian towns and villages by the Israelis before that had brought the Palestinians to a state of increasing impoverishment and despair. No one with the slightest interest in this war, or the nation on which it is being waged, should fail to read Andrey Kurkov' -- Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail