A Slain Ukrainian Writer's Unfinished Manuscript Shows Courage Amid Chaos
Victoria Amelina was killed in a 2023 Russian airstrike. It's a crime that her book on women and war is unfinished.
It's a crime that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina's book, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, will remain forever unfinished. Amelina died on July 1, 2023 at age 37 as a result of injuries from a Russian airstrike on a pizza parlor in the city of Kramatorsk, about 20 miles from the frontlines. Her manuscript, which was only about 60 percent finished, is being published this month, and is a vivid portrait of how Amelina and other Ukrainian women showed extraordinary courage amid the unthinkable. I met Amelina briefly in her native Lviv in 2022; I was struck by her warm personality, ability to tell stories, and commitment to documenting truth.
Her bravery and strong writing voice comes through in the early pages of the book. The book begins about a week before the invasion, when she is getting ready to go away for a week's vacation to Egypt with her son, then 11. She wrote, "I have just bought my first gun in downtown Lviv. I've heard that everyone is capable of killing, and those who say they aren't just haven't met the right person yet. An armed stranger entering my country might just be the right person." She thought that she wouldn't need the gun now, but maybe after she got back. On February 24, her flight from Egypt to Ukraine was cancelled; she was stunned to hear about explosions in Kyiv; she flew to Prague and then found her way back into Ukraine as millions of others were fleeing in the other direction.
A few weeks later, Amelina, who had written poetry, fiction, and children's books, decided to become a war crimes researcher. She wrote the following message to human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk, who would later win the Nobel Prize: "I see the tremendous efforts you and your colleagues make to give justice a chance. Yet despite all our efforts, we still might lose. And if we lose, I want to at least tell the story of our pursuit of justice. Please let me work with you to tell your story." Matviichuk replied immediately and said the two should meet; Amelina was trained in investigating war crimes by the NGO Truth Hounds, and took testimonies from survivors of war crimes in regions where Russia had occupied.
Between vignettes about Amelina's experiences in the early days and months of the war, she profiled Matviichuk and other women. She wrote about Tetyana Pylypchuk, the director of the Kharkiv Literary Museum, who, in the early days of the war, evacuated the archives of the Executed Renaissance, the generation of Kharkiv writers killed by the Soviets in the 1920s. "Their archive would mean nothing to the rest of the world; they are the weird ones, Ukrainians by choice: They are the Executed Renaissance, slaughtered, buried in mass graves in the 1930s, and prohibited from being remembered in the Soviet Union," Amelina wrote. "But for people like Tetyana Pylypchuk, who is guarding them in the dark, they mean the world."
Amelina did not complete the second part of her story about Pylypchuk saving the archive; it ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence. (Her notes follow.) The jarring nature of the unfinished manuscript shows how Vladimir Putin's war has robbed Ukraine--sometimes very suddenly--of some of its most talented writers, and that the documentation, which Amelina did meticulously, remains incomplete.
Amelina frequently drew parallels between the Executed Renaissance and the present generation of Ukrainian writers. In a March 2022 Eurozine essay, she wrote: "Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs. For me, it would mean the majority of my friends get killed. For an average westerner, it would only mean never seeing their paintings, never hearing them read their poems, or never reading the novels that they have yet to write."
Since her death, Amelina's poetry has been published in the New Yorker; during her life, she wrote poems about the war. In her manuscript, she included a poem entitled, "A Poem Instead of an Epilogue." Here is an excerpt:
In a barren springtime field Stands a woman dressed in black Crying her sisters’ names Like a bird in the empty sky
…
And from pain and the names of the women
Her new sisters will grow from the earth
And again will sing joyfully of life
But what about her, the crow? She will stay in this field forever Because only this cry of hers Holds all those swallows in the air