MEMOIR
The Language of War
Oleksandr Mykhed
Allen Lane, $42.99

In an article in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Oleksandr Mykhed frames the Russian invasion of Ukraine not as belligerent power play or geopolitical stunt but an outright assault on Ukraine’s very existence.

The passage begins with a dream Mykhed has one night, a “whimsical homage” to Catcher in the Rye, but instead of catching children falling from a cliff, he catches them before they step on chunks of white-hot phosphorous from Russian bombs. In a letter responding to the article, an English reader, Mr Stephen, rebukes Mykhed’s scathing attack on Russian aggression, saying that Mykhed has “become a catcher of current Ukrainian patriotism” and he should “profess peace” instead of “preach[ing] revenge”.

The article forms a chapter in Mykhed’s The Language of War, a book that documents the author’s experiences, and those of his friends and family, of the invasion’s first 13 months. The work is so unfiltered, so honest and raw in its hatred of Russia and its ideology of Ruscism that it will affront those, like Mr Stephen, that demand victims stand for redemptive humanity.

This rawness stems from the book’s immediacy, written as the true horror of modern war – its kamikaze drones, social media doxing and mass graves – unfurls. Without time for the hatred to cool, the book rarely asks why, let alone shapes the litany of horrors into a cohesive narrative. Interpretation is most often left to the reader.

Instead, the book compiles different forms, half-remembered memories, eulogies, poems, interviews and even what games children have begun to play. The author collates these shreds like reconstructing a life based on fragments from a bombed-out apartment.

On loss, grief and trauma, the book is frank. Russian bombs destroy the author’s home and those of his parents, who must choose between saving their cat or salvaging a briefcase full of memories. Brilliant friends close and distant are killed while places the author loves are shelled into oblivion, the memories they contain also disappearing forever.

While tragic, destruction is the cost of any war. It is the war crimes, catalogued in dispassionate summaries, that stirs the greatest fury when recalled later: looting, the discovery of mass graves containing hundreds, shelling of obvious civilian targets and critical infrastructure, enemy soldiers committing gang rape and torture. The Russians bring body bags with them, not intended for soldiers but for civilians. The author discovers the identity of war criminals, where they live, and the distance from his home to theirs, but this provides no consolation.