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224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
I train almost daily. Is there someone on the enemy's side who also is training and watching our positions? He lifts weights, eats energy bars, goes out for morning runs. Or maybe he just sits, extremely bored, watches for fires on our side and thinks: What do those Ukrainians do? What do they live on? Are all of them drunk or only half? Maybe they're eating? And what do they eat? Those children of Donbas? Maybe they are sleeping in their bunkers watching movies? Which movies?Is this a book that will help you to "understand the roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War", as the NYT would have it? It depends on how you interpret that. When explaining in one chapter why he usually nods and agrees with an older man he's deployed with, an interesting guy everyone calls Uncle Lyosha, Artem writes that "arguing for my version of truth is not something I feel I need to do." Accordingly, the book isn't a polemic. There's no sense of a need to persuade. Nor does it aspire to prescience, even if I'm afraid it occasionally achieves it: "It [the war] will either stop or grow into something more frightening, monstrous, and without compromise." For the most part, though, talk about the future of the war is presented as a phenomenon, as another subject that bored soldiers are bound to talk about. The book isn't history either, although you do see the outlines of a personal history that's intertwined with the birth and development of independent Ukraine, from to the Orange Revolution in 2003, to Maidan. It's also a personal history shadowed by the memory of a Soviet stepfather (or maybe step-grandfather- it's left a little ambiguous) who served in Afghanistan and demonstrates for Artem one possible outcome of having lived through war:
I saw Pylyp for the last time during the Orange Revolution. By then he was a complete drunk, he hung out near the Central Market, for a bottle he moved baskets of vegetables. He didn't wash his clothes, shaved once a week, and often slept in that very market among the tents. Is he still alive? I don't know...So how to describe the book? These are short, fragmentary pieces that, while they don't elide specifics entirely, tend to focus on the day-to-day inner experience of being deployed, often without any appreciable goal or even combat as a distraction. Artem usually begins with a clear subject- a pair of New Balance shoes, a cat that takes up residence in their barracks, a mental habit of watching out for the enemy, the worldview of Uncle Lyosha, the reaction of people in Donbas to the presence of the soldiers- and holds it up for inspection for a page or two, in the process revealing a new aspect of a life that to most of us is alien. And which was once alien to him.
...And so now, with my own war in my head, with my own experiences in this filthy trench epic...I understand Pylyp in a way that I didn't understand him before. He became closer- as if I had the chance to crawl into his head and see his war, to accept it and in some measure like it.