Ukraine 22 by Mark Andryczyk

Ukraine 22 by Mark Andryczyk (editor) – Ukrainian Writers Respond to War – is a collection of short essays on everyday life written by various writers. Each chapter is an essay, some only 3 pages long, while others are a bit longer. As I imagined each reader prefers a style to another, so some chapters are better than others. Overall though the book deserves the 5* I awarded it.

This book reminded me of another book, Authors take sides on the Spanish War, which was written in 1937. In that book a British author asked mainly other British authors to take sides and be pro-Franco or pro-Republic. It was a clearly biased book. This book, Ukraine 22, is very different, because, while authors are writing their views, they are the one being affected by the war in Ukraine. They know the culture and history better. I highly recommend this book for this reason.

Some of the authors are from the occupied parts of Ukraine, two of them were russian speaking who switched to Ukrainian after the war. Their lives being different, their views and experiences are different too. I will list the authors with a few words as I think this is the best way to review this book:

Sofia Andrukhovych, 41, wrote 3 books of short prose, 3 novels, and a children’s book. She received the BBC Book of the Year award.

Yuri Andrukhovych, 64, Sofia’s father. He published 5 poetry books, 7 novels, 4 books of essays. Andrukhovych has been awarded numerous national and international prizes. He is known for his pro-Ukrainian and pro-European views.

Oleksandr Boichenko is a literary critic, publicist, essayist, and translator. He taught world literature and literary theory at Chernivtsi University. He translated from Polish and russian into Ukrainian. He also wrote 5 books.

Andriy Bondar, 49, is a poet and translator. He received the BBC Book of the Year in the Essays category in 2018.

Olena Huseinova is a poet. She writes autobiographical free verses in which she explores memory, knowledge, anxiety, the boundaries of hope and reality, and irreversibility of experience.

Taras Prokhasko, 56, is a Ukrainian novelist, essayist and journalist. Together with Yuri Andrukhovych, he is a major representative of the Stanislav phenomenon.

Volodymyr Rafeyenko, 54, is from Donetsk. His degree, from Donetsk University, is on russian philology and cultural studies. For a long time, from 1992 to 2018, he wrote in russian and published his works mostly in russia. For the first 45 years of life he spoke russian. In 2014, after russia’s invasion of the Donbas, he moved to Kyiv and started learning Ukrainian. Since 2022 he decided that none of his future books would be published in russian and that he will not return to his native language, russian, ever again.
He was my favourite author. I plan to read his book Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love when I have the opportunity.

Olena Stiazhkina, 56, is a historian and award-winning Ukrainian writer and journalist. She was from Donetsk, but, like Rafeyenko, abandoned the russian language in favour of Ukrainian.

Iryna Tsilyk, 41, is a Ukrainian filmmaker and writer, the member of European Film Academy, Ukrainian PEN International. Her husband,
Artem Chekh, is a writer who joined the army in 2015 and returned to service in 2022. He wrote in russian initially, but switched to Ukrainian and published his first work in 2007. He published 16 more books afterwards. Last year he was injured, but he is still in the army.