“It is 3:30 p.m. and we are still alive. War Diary” (Kriegstagebuch), by Evgenia Belorusets, translated from German by Olivier Mannoni and Françoise Mancip-Renaudie, Christian Bourgois150 p., €18.
This is the story of a woman who does not believe in war. Or rather who “don’t believe in it anymore”. Impossible, not in Europe. “What neighboring country could reduce a city to ashes and rubble in the 21stand century ? » Even in front of the first destructions, its impression of unreality remains: one would say that “someone bit into the wall of a building, like into an apple. It looks like the gingerbread house from Grimm’s fairy tales”.
And then the war sets in. Under his windows. So, to never forget what she sees – “There seems to be nothing to hold on to experiences and memories” –, she takes her own poor weapons. Camera, pen. When the sirens stop “bar”she ventures into “the buzzing silence” streets of Kyiv. Between the cannonades, she machine-gunned, too. In his way. Stunned, engaged. But always quirky, strangely “poetic”.
The first forty-one days of the war in Ukraine
This woman is the Ukrainian writer and photographer Evgenia Belorusets. Little known in France, but much more in the German-speaking and English-speaking worlds, she usually lives between kyiv and Berlin. Co-founder of a literary and political journal, Prostory, she is also a member of the artistic collective Hudrada. And she writes. Texts at the crossroads of fable, reportage and essay. Like this Cycle of lectures on the modern life of animals, to be published soon by Christian Bourgois. Or these “Happy Falls” (2018, untranslated), on women who had to flee the Donbass (International Literature Prize in Germany in 2020).
It’s 3:30 p.m. and we’re still alive is his first book translated into French. Written in German, published in the magazine Der Spiegel, then in the American magazine artforumpresented at the Venice Biennale, this text is the diary she kept during the first forty-one days of the conflict, from February 24 to April 5, 2022. On this date, Belorusets left kyiv for Warsaw and “strength”, from the dusty window of the wagon, to immortalize the decor that goes by. Nothing spectacular – trees still standing amid the well-groomed fields of Ukraine. The ordinary… but become priceless.
What Belorusets is looking for are these writs “islands of reality” which she catches in her lens and crimps into her words. Moments that suggest something other than the numbers that “we repeat on the news and that it is so difficult to really understand”. A “grey and purple smoke” in the sky of kyiv. A father dangerously mounted on his car, to win the pink balloon of his child trapped in branches. An artist, Nikita Kadan, inaugurating an exhibition in the basement of a “gallery-bunker”and meditating on the impossibility of translating the title, Tryvohawho “means both ‘fear’ and ‘alarm'”. From “sun spots” son the white walls of Saint Sophia’s Cathedral. A designer wearing a funny veil on her head, a mask-helmet made with “yellow and blue plastic cable ties”. Or even an empty public garden under the snow, with its derisory slide, as if there were “an error in the landscape”.
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