The Language of War
by Oleksandr Mykhed
Oleksandr Mykhed and his wife Olena lost their home when the Russians invaded Ukraine. Before February 2022 he had never held a gun in his hands. But a week before the invasion, fearing the worst, he trained with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. And after helping to make a bomb shelter out of a university library in Chernivtsi, he enlisted in the armed forces of Ukraine.
His book, much of it written during his 100 days in the barracks, is less a record of armed service than a reflection on the impact of war – how it has changed him and others, too, not least children. It’s a ferociously angry book, borne of “rage, love for homeland, revenge”.
Traumas appear in his conversations with fellow Ukrainians, one of them his mother, a literature professor who was forced to flee with her husband from Bucha after the invasion and whose way of coping with the shock of evacuation was to keep her coat on at all times, as if it was a shell or cocoon. His parents’ plight enrages Mykhed: “War is living through history that you would not wish on anyone.” But his epilogue does offer a measure of hope. “My faith in the power of literature is being restored by the Russian occupiers’ fear of our books and culture,” he says, and he imagines himself, “on the day of our victory”, on a wide road between fields, “an amazing landscape before me. Another week or two will pass, and the season will change, hiding the scars of war.” Even then, he’ll still need to let out a long scream: “I want to forget it all. I want to never forget.” Blake Morrison
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