February 24, 2022: Around 5.30 am, in Irpin, a city in Ukraine, Zhenia Podobna, a war correspondent, walked up to the employees of a local supermarket, warning them of an imminent attack.
“However, supermarket employees in Irpin [are preparing] for an ordinary workday; they tell… Zhenia … to calm down and let them do their job… Around noon Zhenia heads up to her apartment on the eighth floor near the beautiful lake. She hears the sound of helicopters and looks out of the window. What she sees will haunt her for months: black ‘alligators’ flying like crows over Hostomel airport. Looking at them, Zhenia knows Kyiv might fall. Terrified by this sudden realization, she cannot move away from the glass, as if destined to watch the war from a jar. Her home, her city, and her parents seem defenseless against the black alligators, the occupiers they’re carrying, and their weapons…”
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March, 2014: Two women — Evhenia Zakrevska, one of Ukraine’s most prominent lawyers, and Lesya Ganzha, a journalist — are driving back to Kyiv from Crimea that has just been occupied by Russia. A month ago, they had witnessed the Russian army quelling a protest by a defenceless crowd swathed in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar flags. Neither could do much to stop the Russian aggression. But Evhenia did manage to save an arrested Ukrainian; her journalist companion went on to file one of the earliest accounts of the Russian crackdown on Ukrainian protesters.
That March, on the road to Kyiv from Crimea, the two women contemplate, for the first time ever in their lives, joining the Ukrainian army.
Eight years later, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Evhenia, who, over the years, has carefully documented the murder of peaceful Ukrainian activists, including “the chronology of the events, the bullets’ trajectories, the shapes of the bullet traces in the tree trunks…” would “cut her red hair” and enlist in the army. As would Lesya.
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February 23, 2022: Around 11 pm, Iryna Dovhan receives a text from a friend who is in the army. Russia, it informs her, will launch an invasion in a matter of hours.
“[Iryna] jumps to her feet and goes to tell her husband. But he is already asleep. She watches him sleeping, phone with the message in her hand, and decides not to wake him up.”
This is because Iryna wants to spare her husband from knowing anything more. Iryna had spent some time in Russian captivity in 2014. She had not confided to either her husband or an interviewer (Evhenia Zakrevska) the horrors of that time, the depravities that she was subjected to by the Wagner Group. Later, a photograph had appeared in The New York Times: that of Iryna beaten up in one of Donetsk’s squares. It led to her release — but it also caused the collapse of her husband’s inner world.
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March 8, 2022: That morning “… the territorial defense soldiers help the staff of the Kharkiv Literature Museum to load the manuscripts, letters, and first editions of the Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century on a train heading west. Tetyana Pylypchuk, the director of the museum, boards the train too. It is hard for her to leave the city, which itself is crucial for Ukrainian literary history, but she is the one responsible for the unique collection, almost everything tangible that is left from the Executed Renaissance generation. She won’t leave the collection unattended even for a second; if a missile were to hit, she prefers to be near too.”
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These passages, paraphrased as well as in italics, are to be found in a remarkable book that was published this month last year. Looking at Women Looking at War, with “A War and Justice Diary” as the subtitle, is a compilation of on-the-ground experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine, now raging in its fourth year, seen principally, as the title suggests, through the eyes of Ukrainian women. The chronicler of this ‘diary’, Victoria Amelina, a novelist and researcher of war atrocities, began painstakingly documenting these singular feminine voices, collecting testimonies, eye-witness accounts of violence and photographic evidence of ruin left behind after Russian attacks. In her Foreword to the book, Margaret Atwood states that Amelina had been able to put together only 60% of the book, and that “[m]uch of that material was in raw form — fragmentary, unpolished, unedited”.
That is because Amelina was killed on July 1, 2023: she perished from the injuries she sustained in a Russian missile attack.
Yet, Russia could not erase her.
An editorial group, Atwood writes, collated Amelina’s unedited notes and field reports, fleshed them into a narrative structure, and published it in the form of a book, albeit a posthumous publication.
Some of the distinct aspects of this book are obvious. The foregrounding — indeed centring — of women’s voices and views on a war must count as one. All the more so because the historiography of war has not quite been able to shun the gender imbalance, with men — soldiers, generals, politicians, civilians, among others — dominating the chronicles of conflict. In fact, there is a case for further expansion of the female voice — across Ukraine’s border. The world awaits an intrepid researcher who could, like Amelina, illuminate the perspectives of Russian women on their State’s depredations on a neighbouring nation, at once sovereign but also one with which many Russian citizens share kinship ties.
But Amelina’s book is also revelatory in other aspects.
The Ukraine war, like many other contemporary hostilities, has been extensively documented not only visually — on television and social media — but also in print — books and the legacy media. This work is a testament to the perceptible differences in the comparative depth of such visual narratives and the corresponding textual ones. While images from Ukraine, of both destruction and resilience, are crucial in terms of their functions of immediacy, documentation, and mass dissemination, a skilled, sensitive narrative such as Amelina’s captures, unlike the visual media, two simultaneous wars: the one that is external, clouding Ukraine’s skies and ground, and the other that is being waged within, inside the Ukrainian mind. This searing subterranean — psychological — register of a conflict is no less valuable than the demonstrable evidences of war.
Looking at Women Looking at War also challenges popular notions of courage and heroism by expanding their boundaries, their meanings. The battlefield is, obviously, one of the theatres of valour. But some of the bravest acts during war, Amelina shows, can also be the ones that are committed by ordinary people who are not combatants in the conventional sense. The sacrifice, grace, empathy, love — is bravery not a mishmash of all these elements? — demonstrated, say, by Tetyana Pylypchuk, who chooses to stand between Ukraine’s literary and cultural treasures and Russia’s missiles or, to cite another example, Iryna Dovhan, who gives her traumatised husband a few additional moments of repose instead of waking him up to the news of war or, for that matter, Evhenia Zakrevska’s decision to take up arms, would have afterlives even after the guns fall silent one day.
We, readers of Amelina’s precious book, cannot shy away from the moral choice that this young, departed woman and her sisterhood confront us with. Is our role to be limited to that of a passive consumer, marvelling at the literary merits of a book from a great, safe geographical distance? Or should Amelina’s war and justice diary force us to take sides, in the fourth year of the Ukraine war, against warmongers and the many different kinds of conflict they bring in their wake?
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in