Oleksandr Mykhed is angry. He speaks as he writes, calmly, elegantly, icily. All the while he throbs with anger — as do so many Ukrainians in this grim third year of the war — not just about Russia, but about Russians. All Russians.
Rage, he says, with his thin smile, is the first word he writes when inscribing a dedication in his new book. “The rage is for keeping our rage really sharp. It is something we should not forget; that we have to remember.”
The 36-year-old Ukrainian author and sometime soldier — he joined up soon after the full-scale invasion of February 2022 — is angry, of course, with Vladimir Putin and his siloviki, the hard men of the Kremlin, for invading his country and killing so many of his compatriots. He is also, though, angry with the very idea of Russianness, that destructive nationalist spirit that he says has underpinned Moscow’s approach to Ukraine for centuries.
“Russian culture is an integral part of a repressive imperial machine,” he writes in The Language of War. “My hatred flows from the small things to the big ones. Every fibre is filled with it. Hatred towards the smallest particle of Russian collective consciousness and to their greatest symbols . . . ”
He is also infuriated by the insouciant tendency in the west still to link Ukrainian writers with exiled Russians, as if they have some kind of pan-Slavic kinship, and also by the quest to explore the “Russian soul”.
Even now, 800 days into the war, he says there is a “totally blind understanding of what is happening”.
Mykhed emails me once he is back in Ukraine to say that he came across a “perfect” explanation of what the great Russian and Slavophile novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky stands for at Tate Modern: a painting by the Soviet artist Viktor Pivovarov with the title “(He) Hit Me with a Hammer and Burst into Tears”. “This is the best example and explanation of the so-called Russian soul,” Mykhed wrote in his email. “They make a barbarian atrocity, then they cry (provoking compassion) and start all over again.”
The Language of War is part memoir, part narrative history and part j’accuse — not just of Russians, but also of all those outside Ukraine who he says have failed to grasp how this is an existential war for democratic values. Set in the 18 months after the morning of February 24 2022, when his parents awoke to the humming of Russian aircraft over their homes in the small town of Bucha, outside Kyiv, it is a stunning account of life in a time of war. If this doesn’t make you look up from your screen to reflect on Ukraine, then nothing will.
Mykhed started writing it in the first days after the invasion even as his own home near the airport of Hostomel was under bombardment and as his mother was relaying to him over the telephone the drama outside her window. The early chapters were written when he was a recruit in the barracks and have a compelling precision.
“This type of writing became my kind of self-therapy, the only way I could scream, how I could cry through these words,” he says. “It was the only way to make sense of this chaos.”
His material is often heart-rending. There is the chapter titled “Requiem for Tarantino”, an account of a film director who joins up and dies on the frontline. Then there is his re-enactment of the last hours of a family of dear friends, some of whom make a fateful decision to leave their home by car on a particular day hoping to cross the frontline.
But this is far more than history, invaluable as his detailed reporting is. As well as a reckoning with Russia, it is also a reflection on humanity in any war. His insight reminds me of Ryszard Kapuściński’s superb Another Day of Life, set in Angola’s civil war. He writes of pets and abandoned bookshelves and sundered weekend walking routines and life sometimes continuing pretty much unchanged even as, every day, relentlessly, another atrocity unfolds elsewhere in Ukraine.
War, as anyone knows who has fought in or lived through one, has its absurdity; humour is famously often the way for soldiers to cope with their uncertain lot. Mykhed’s account of negotiating the bureaucracy of the armed forces has an echo of Evelyn Waugh’s second world war Sword of Honour trilogy. He also deploys novelists’ wiles, inverting timelines, switching from the past to the present and back again. He drew inspiration, he says, from the “new journalism” of the 1960s, whose adherents aspired to write history as a novel.
But this is not the time for fiction, he stresses. He quotes in his book Ukrainian writer Halyna Kruk as saying that “those who can still write ‘beautiful and deep poetry for eternity’ about this war are Russian poets who haven’t known air raids and occupation . . . ”
Mykhed adds a bleak coda: “The Ukrainian poet says: ‘I regret that poetry doesn’t kill.’” It is just one of many lines when he stares down the reader and dares them to disagree.
There is “a boom of poetry in Ukraine and it’s non-fiction poetry”, he says. “When I say it’s not time for fiction, it’s just that I cannot imagine fiction about the full-scale invasion. The whole reality is so cruel and abnormal you should not invent anything.”
Like increasing numbers of Ukrainians, he believes it is simplistic to blame the war on Putin. Rather you have to look at the culture of Russia that has nurtured and indulged nationalism over the years. “I still blame all Russians,” he says.
“I think that Russia is using their culture as the instrument of hybrid warfare. Each cultural platform is used to show their narrative. There is no ‘Russian soul’. There is just a void in it.”
There was an initiative across Ukraine last year to tear down statues to Alexander Pushkin, the 19th-century poet widely seen as the lodestar of Russian literature, prompting a big debate over the right thing to do. Mykhed leaves no doubt where he stands on this. “Russians are using monuments to Pushkin as a sign of the presence of Russkiy mir [the Russian world],” he says.
He highlights the record of the Russian forces in Syria who, allied to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, flattened cities, in a precursor of their tactics in Ukraine — and then erected monuments to Pushkin.
When the FT’s photographer positions him by chance in front of a copse of silver birch trees for a portrait, Mykhed insists on moving to a new spot. “These are Russian trees and a classic Russian framing,” he says quietly. His hope is that now at last the world will start to pay attention to Ukrainian voices so long in the shadow of Russian writers.
The second and third words of his book inscriptions are “love” and “memory”. As for the former, he says: “We do not know how much time we have. I have a really sharp feeling that we are losing people and losing the possibilities to tell them how much we love them.”
As for memory, it “works in a tricky way and tries to say it wasn’t so bad. I wanted to remind you how bad it is.” And he does.
The Language of War by Oleksandr Mykhed, Allen Lane £18.99, 304 pages
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