By the Second Spring
Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Americans have identified deeply with the Ukrainian cause, while others have cast doubt on its relevance to their concerns. Meanwhile, even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Leavitt tracks the experiences of seven Ukrainian families in her harrowing debut account of the war's first year. They include Maria, a 20-something mother whose soldier husband Leonid was taken prisoner by the Russians; Tania and Viktor, pig farmers whose village was occupied by Russian troops who looted houses and menaced Ukrainian loyalists; and Yulia and her husband Oleg, who fled the Donbas region for Kramatorsk, where Yulia lost a leg to a Russian missile attack on a train station. (Interspersed throughout are episodes from the Gogol-esque narrative of documentary filmmaker Volodymyr and his effort in 1989 to exhume and repatriate the body of Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus from a Russian gulag.) These are intimate, human-scale stories of anguished survival: people live in cellars for weeks while bombs shake the earth; scrabble for water, firewood, and cell-phone reception after the grid collapses; seethe with anger at neighbors now collaborating with Russian occupiers; tensely calculate whether the danger is serious enough to abandon their homes; and weep for dead loved ones. Leavitt's evocative prose conveys these heartbreaking scenes in unsparing detail. ("Then came a powerful explosion, like the sound of a whip multiplied by a hundred thousand.... Yulia pushed herself to a sitting position.... On the ground next to her were her broken bones.") It's a searing rendition of Ukrainians' suffering.
