Diary of an Invasion:

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This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. As a young man, Andrey Kurkov travelled round the USSR – on trains, riverboats and in lorries he’d hitched a lift on – interviewing former Soviet bureaucrats. He’d read a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s prohibited The Gulag Archipelago and wanted to know more about the gulag itself. One judge he met owned up to signing 3,000 death warrants for people sentenced without trial. The experience was a lesson to Kurkov about the suppression of memory and truth: members of his own family had suffered forced deportations, famine and decades in the camps, but such traumas weren’t ever discussed. For Kurkov – ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking but long based in Ukraine – truth-telling has been a mission ever since. His voice is genial but also impassioned, never more so than when deploring Putin’s efforts to erase Ukrainian culture and history. Ukraine, he says, “will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all”. That’s why the war has to be fought, with no concession of territory. And he remains quietly hopeful that it will be won. As if by some divine joke, in the Ukrainian National character, unlike in the Russian one, there is no fatalism. Ukrainians almost never get depressed. They are programmed for victory, for happiness, for survival in difficult circumstances, as well as for love of life.” one historic trauma that of forced deportations, gave rise to another historic trauma, the fear of hunger. “

Not all Russia is a collective Putin. The unfortunate thing is that there is within Russia no collective anti-Putin.”on big explosions, when nothing remains, no identification is possible - forever missing [entertainment center in Kremenchuk] There are more manifestations of patriotism on Facebook than in the real world. I do not know the reason for that.” (75) When war approaches your home you are left with a choice – to evacuate or accept occupation. A person starts thinking about this choice well before the first explosions are heard on the outskirts of their city or village. War is like a tornado. You can see it from afar, but you cannot easily predict where it is going next. You cannot be sure whether it will blow your house away or only pass nearby, whether it will uproot a few trees in your garden, or blow the roof off your house. And you can never be sure that you will remain alive, even if the house itself is only slightly damaged." Kurkov's diary first came out online. I'd read parts of it and found it insightful and I'd wanted to read it properly. Now I'm glad to have read it from the beginning. The diary is insightful in the way it describes the events that led up to the war. It delves into a bit of history and it is very informative to read. It is also inspiring in the way it describes how ordinary Ukrainians have continued to live their everyday life inspite of the war and show everyday acts of heroism. It also describes the kindness of strangers, people who help others in need because they've been displaced because of the war. Kurkov himself is living in a stranger's apartment after he had moved away from his home, and his landlady tells him that he can stay in the apartment however long he wants and he can use everything that is there in her home. His own kids help refugees everyday. This is how the world survives, a country runs, because of the kindness of strangers.

Both of Kurkov’s grandfathers were communists. One died fighting for the Soviet Army in 1943 while the other lived until 1980. Other relatives were sent to gulags. Of his older grandfather’s silence about these relatives, Kurkov says, “It turned out that I was protected from the dangerous past.” Yet, his willingness to interrogate this dangerous past is what informs nearly every one of his detailed descriptions of the people and places caught up in the war happening now. Diary of an Invasion' is Andrey Kurkov's diary written during the ongoing war in Ukraine. It starts a few months before the war and describes the events leading up to the war and Kurkov's own everyday, personal experiences. It ends at a time a few months after the start of the war. The diary runs for around six months. Around the time the diary ends, the expectation was that the war will get over before winter or latest by spring. But now we know that the war has dragged on into the second year with no end in sight. Kurkov says in his epilogue that he is continuing to work on this diary and we can expect a sequel. When we became refugees, we left all our books in Kyiv. Now, since my first wartime trip into Europe, I have some books again – gifts from my English publisher. I’m wondering when I will be able to take those books home and add them to my library.Then the armoured personnel carrier halted outside the house. “Any talk about heroism, like stopping an APC, etc – that’s for big cities,” he wrote. “We’re a small village, where the number of patriotic people you could bring together was two, three people max. I had known this for a long time, which is why I lived my life as a hermit.”