Andrey Kurkov, by far Ukraine’s most celebrated contemporary writer, was working on a new novel when Russia invaded his homeland last year. It was, it seems, historical, about events in Kyiv in the spring of 1919.
“The present war crossed out all my plans for that novel,” he says in Diary of an Invasion, published last September, his touching journal of a life turned upside down. At once, he had lost “the world that I have been creating around me for decades, the world that made me happy”, he lamented. “War and books are incompatible,” he also said. Kurkov had lost his sense of humour and even found he had forgotten how to read, let alone how to write creatively. He has vowed not
