IHer death hit us all like a rebound. There have been enough difficult weeks, but this one was special. People who had not communicated for a long time wrote to each other: “Hold on” – and it was clear that this is about Vika, Victoria Amelina. It has now been almost two weeks since the Russian missile killed her, along with 12 other civilians in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, but the stream of memories doesn’t stop. Writers, their friends and acquaintances – literally everyone writes.
Screaming, sad, swooning, an amazing amount of declarations of love, as if all these texts were contributions to the documentation of Russian crimes against the civilian population, eyewitness reports. Tanya Malyarchuk simply calls Vika “angel” and asks if she has become an obituary writer. My little text may seem redundant to me, but not the grief itself. It is mixed with the magical illusion that we can keep Vika on this side of life for a little longer, with each of our texts.
Closed, determined, big as the moon
I was traveling through Germany by train when I read of her death. In Ukrainian networks there was hardly a message without her face – closed, determined, big as the moon, conquering the whole horizon and every thought. I looked outside and kept seeing her face framed by straw hair as if it had become part of the landscape. I had to explain to strangers on the train why I was crying and I said I was Ukrainian as if that was enough, and maybe it is. Then I told about Vika, much more than I can write here.
She was just in Kiev at the Arsenal book fair, had discussions with Colombian authors and presented the diary of the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was killed by the Russians. She herself dug it out of the ground where the author had hidden it when the Russians came. Vakulenko was found in the Izyum mass grave. Vika published his book, stood up for him like for many others. She had made plans: her new book War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, her literary festival, traveling with her son. The woman who documented crimes against women now fell victim to them herself.
Between scream and silence
I think that in my whole life I have seen a picture of the Madonna less often than Vika’s face in recent weeks. She often said herself that as a writer you live between screams and silence. She wrote two novels before the war. The first was November Syndrome or Homo compatiens (2014), about a man fighting his empathy. From this novel, Victoria developed empathy as her special driving force – empathy as a literary device and as a device for action. She was born in Lemberg, her family comes from the east of the country, and she was always looking for ways of understanding. In her “Haus für Dom” (2017), for example, a dog has to tell the tragic story of the country because the people are silent.
It happened before our eyes: we saw the birth of a poetess, before the war she didn’t write any poetry. The poem, entitled “No Poetry,” reveals the moment: “The reality of war / devours the punctuation marks / the ongoing story / the connections / devours them / as if a bullet had hit the language / splintered language / sounds like poetry. “
In this photo, Victoria is a little distant, as if she’s already stepped back from us. We see her in Nju-York, a town between Donetsk and Bakhmut founded by German Mennonites in the 19th century, where she had launched her “New York Literature Festival” just before the war. She is sitting in front of a shelled library, where she recently read her books to children. I look at the bullet holes in the door, at the punctured ornament – it hasn’t been hit yet – and I still can’t take in her death.
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