In Ukraine, the time for books is over,” writes Andrei Kurkov from Kyiv, one of Ukraine’s best-known authors, in his war diary. This set of hammers can be found under the date of March 30, 2022; by then the war was already a good month old. “When we became refugees, we left all our books in Kyiv except for a Bible and my latest novel, which my wife packed at the last minute. Now, since my first wartime trip to Europe, I have a few books again. I brought five books in English from London – gifts from my British publisher.” Like millions of his compatriots, including many authors, Kurkov could travel the world freely today, but he cannot go to his desk at home and go to his archive in safety Kyiv back.
Do war and books go together?
“The world I’ve created around me for decades, the world that makes me happy,” is blocked to him, he writes. He always believed that happiness was not a material value, but a state of mind. “I couldn’t even have imagined that this happiness could be destroyed so easily.” We read that nothing is being published in Ukraine at the moment, and he, Kurkov, also cannot imagine that Ukrainians are still reading a lot. “I don’t read, although I try. War and books don’t go together. But after the war, books will tell the story of the war.”
#Book #culture #war #shortage #reading #material