Book "Найдовша подорож"

What is left to a writer when war rips him from his study and hurls him into the air, into a foreign land, into the vast “nowhere” between heaven and earth, putting everything on hold? Memory. Language. A store of untold stories.

In her new essay, written for a Western audience, Oksana Zabuzhko examines the origins of today’s Russian-Ukrainian war across two time frames — thirty years and three hundred years — interweaving them with her own memories of how an incalculable sum of human wills can alter the course of history.