As Russia launches a new wave of airstrikes on Ukraine – intensifying its two-year war on its neighbour – here’s the highly topical Feb21 This Week, Those Books, which marked the anniversary of the Russian invasion. Sign up for free at https://thisweekthosebooks and get the post the day it drops
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story.
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The second anniversary of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine takes the conflict into its third year.
There’s been slow progress on Ukraine’s counteroffensive and Russia shows no sign of quitting.
Geopolitics aside, the quality that seems to most mark both sides is endurance.
In the words of Christopher Skaluba, a former US Defense Department official now at the American think tank Atlantic Council: “The Russians don’t seem to be going away, but the Ukrainians aren’t either.”
The Backstory:
An important tradition of Greek thought involves the concept of endurance.
The ancient Greeks believed that the courage of endurance and the will to resist is directed at both external enemies and inner passions, according to W. Thomas Schmid, philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He writes that this makes courage more than the “special virtue of the warrior, but a matter of ‘ironness of heart’.”
Mediaeval theologian Thomas Aquinas also categorised endurance as a form of courage. Unlike active attack – the strength we draw on in facing problems we can solve – passive endurance means our resilience in facing adversities that do not go away.
It’s of a piece with what Napoleon said: “The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue”.
This Week, Those Books:
Two collections of short stories.
Women feature in tales of resilience from a part of Ukraine that endures a decade-long war.
Liberation, of a sort, from one of the world’s best English short story writers.
By: Yevgenia Belorusets (translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky)
Publisher: New Directions Books
Year: 2018
These short stories are set in eastern Ukraine, where a low-intensity war started in 2014 with Russia’s declared aim of “liberating” the old industrial heartland known as the Donbas.
Ten years on, photographer, artist, truth-teller Yevgenia Belorusets’ vignettes of life on the sidelines of a protracted war become even more urgent. They paint a picture of the endurance of the ordinary when war has come and continues, and shows no sign of ending. This is a portrait of resilience under siege.
The protagonists are almost all women – florists, manicurists, cosmetologists, hair stylists. They are not fighters though war is all around them, bringing fear, displacement and loss. The author explains her focus: “The insignificant and the small, the accidental, the superfluous, the repressed – all of these things attract my attention because they will never turn into the trophies…that winners carry from the present into the future so that they might lay down their booty, like bricks, to construct the dominant historical narrative.”
The collection is shot through by the motif of womanly arts and crafts such as sewing and weaving ribbons. In ‘A Needle in a Nightshirt’, a woman forgets a needle in her favourite nightshirt after sewing up a hole. When another decides to leave her hometown, she is also parting from her mother, who weaves ribbons at a local factory. Many of the characters in the stories fled the war in eastern Ukraine to resettle in the capital Kyiv, making up the 1.5 million displaced by the conflict. Others continue to live in Ukraine’s disputed eastern territories, looking to strange juxtapositions of the stars – their horoscopes – to judge when it might be safe to wander around their war zone of a city. A story titled The Stars has the local newspaper horoscopes advising on the matter: “It turned out that Pisces could be sure of their well-being and safety from 3 to 5 p.m. that day.”
Some have discerned echoes of another Ukrainian-born writer, Nikolai Gogol, but it may be more accurate to say Belorusets is in a league of her own – turning the camera on her subjects and then scribbling furiously.
Liberation Day
By: George Saunders
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2022
Despite the title, Liberation Day wouldn’t normally be classed as a study of human endurance. But it is, in so many ways. Take the story titled Elliot Spencer. The mind of the protagonist Elliot has been wiped, but he doesn’t give in to the formlessness; instead, Elliot fights to recover his memories. That Saunders is able to show us how this might happen is a measure of his greatness as a writer. He can give shape and presence to nebulous concepts, he uses words the way Vincent Van Gogh took striking colours, emphatic brushwork and contoured forms to portray the image he had in mind.
In these short stories, some of Saunders’ characters try to liberate themselves from the prison in which they are cast. Others endure a corrupted system that continues stubbornly to stand.
