In the gym of a Ukrainian kindergarten named Fairy Tale, there is a shell hole. It happened on February 17, 2022—a week before Russian tanks rolled over the border and this round of the invasion officially began. It presaged worse to come—more tearing of any imagined border between the fairytale world, where the wicked are always punished, and this world, where the evils of war are all too real. It is with this “Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale” that Ukrainian novelist and poet Victoria Amelina opens her new book, Looking at Women Looking at War. 

Amid brutal war and unfathomable destruction—shell holes in kindergartens and maternity hospitals and playgrounds and restaurants and train stations and theaters and residential apartment buildings—good books are still published, proving the resilience of Ukrainian spirit. These books pack a punch and make a promise: Russia can bomb Ukrainian literary museums, bookstores, and libraries. Ukrainians come back even stronger, with new books—like this one.

Except, to tell the story in this way would be a lie. Or, at least, it would not be the full truth. Sure, we could focus solely on the positive here, further heightening the celebration factor. How about this: Right in time for the third anniversary of Putin’s ruthless invasion, an award-winning Ukrainian novelist publishes a new book that is poised to become a best-seller both at home and abroad.

All this is true. But there is another key fact that cannot be left untold: Victoria Amelina is dead. 

On June 27, 2023, she went to dinner at a popular pizzeria in Kramatorsk. It was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday night. Two Iskander missiles hit the building, which was nowhere close to any military targets. “Human rights activists say the attack on the crowded building, which killed 12 people including 14-year-old twins and injured at least 60 others, was a war crime.” Amelina was one of those injured critically and died of her injuries several days later. Photographs of the building show utter devastation, a war zone—except, this is a café. Or, rather, it used to be a café. 

At the time of her death, Amelina was working on a new book that was just published this month. War turned her, a novelist and poet, a mother to a ten-year-old son, and a leader in promoting Ukraine’s literary culture around the world, into a war crimes researcher. It seems a strange transformation, as she herself acknowledges. In 2017, she published an award-winning novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom, a modern fairytale of sorts, telling an ordinary story of a family’s life, but through the perspective of Dom, the family’s dog. Amelina’s creative genius—seeing the beauty of the ordinary in her beloved Ukraine—comes through in this present book as well, but with a harder edge. The book, unfinished, alternates between polished chapters and staccato lists of topics, ideas to follow up, outlines, and quotations from interviews. Editors’ notes add details about poems Amelina wrote about particular events and atrocities during this invasion—a reminder that not only her prose has been transformed by this war, but her poetry as well. 

How do we look at war? And how do we look at a war that has no end in sight on its third anniversary? Perhaps on the first anniversary, one could be optimistic—and maybe on the second one too. By the third, though, these shell holes, scarred concrete, and defaced monuments in city squares all blur into a new normal. Such is the sense in Amelina’s own writing, cut short as it was in June 2023, a year and a half into the war. Life in a warzone with missiles as companions became hauntingly ordinary: People going about their days, going to work, going to school, and going out for pizza on a nice summer night. Except, there was a threat of death, latent in any moment at all, in any place at all. 

The difference between living in war or in peace could just be this: You do the exact same things as always, except in one of these scenarios, you sort of know at the back of your mind that your luck could run out at any time, a missile could hit the place where you are at any time of day or night. But then again, it might not. You could continue to be lucky, so you might as well just live your life. And in the process, keep writing. Except, how could one write about anything other than the war now, Amelina wondered? She wasn’t alone. 

Multiple books about the invasion have emerged in these three years, in addition to Amelina’s own. The novelist and Kyiv resident, Andrey Kurkov, published his poignant Diary of an Invasion. It documents his shift from incredulity that Russia really could invade Ukraine in such a fashion to his recognition that he should have seen it coming. And then there is Illia Ponomarenko, another Ukrainian journalist whose writing shifted exclusively to covering the war, once the invasion began. His energetic and angry memoir of the war’s first few months, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, appeared in May 2024. In it, Ponomarenko reflected on the familiar places transformed. These streets are still there, they bear the same names, and aside from some shell wounds, they even look the same—and yet, they are changed.

Everything looks different, changed somehow when we look at it through the fog of war. After three years of daily shelling, one can barely remember the “before.” But then, as both Kurkov and Amelina repeatedly observe in their own writing, the “before” is really before 2014, not before 2022. Such is the story of Kurkov’s novel Grey Bees, whose bee-keeping protagonist finds himself as just one of two men left living in his village, in the “gray” zone between Russia and Ukraine. There too the story hinges on how people adjust to the most bizarre of circumstances. After a while, living as just one of two men in your village, in the middle of a war zone, with no one but bees for daily companions, seems normal. Each day resembles the next, and on you go, making morning tea or coffee, chopping wood for the long winter, rationing noodles from your pantry, waiting for summer without any real reason, as summer won’t bring any changes other than eliminating the need to chop all that wood.

At least war provides subject matter for writing—just ask any historian, ancient or modern. Or, just as well, ask a poet, ancient or modern. The period of the Peloponnesian War, the cruel three-decades-long conflict that engulfed the entire Greek-speaking world in the final third of the fifth century BC, is just one example. This war was the backdrop for the golden age of Athenian literature. Might these stunning tragedies have been written without it? And who would the historian Thucydides have been without this war, which made him a household name ever since? 

Indeed, considering Thucydides reminds me of Amelina as well. Except unlike Amelina, before the war, he wasn’t even a writer. Once the war broke out, he began documenting—and he eventually realized that he was documenting war crimes. How does war affect human character? The question occupied him a great deal. Perhaps Amelina, in her decision to begin documenting war crimes, would have understood, but with a key difference. She already knew how war affects human character. Living in Ukraine, whether under Soviet rule or after, offers education enough on this subject. 

In fairy tales, even Russian ones, good wins, the evil children-devouring Baba Yaga dies, and even Kaschey the Deathless gets shackled and removed somewhere secure where he can do no harm for a while—until, that is, another hero in another fairy tale accidentally frees him. And, of course, people in love get married, raise children, and live happily ever after in a palace with no shell holes. 

But this is no fairy tale.