For thirty-five days, after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Kyiv-based writer and photojournalist Yevgenia Belorusets blogged about day-to-day life in a country under violent siege. “The word ‘war’ is even less comprehensible during wartime than in peacetime, when it’s used quite differently,” she commented in one of her final posts. In early April Belorusets temporarily left Ukraine for Italy. By this time her blog had been widely and avidly shared. Belorusets’s first work of fiction, a tantalisingly oblique collection of very short stories called Lucky Breaks, translated from Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky (Pushkin Press, £9.99), should find her an even wider audience. Lucky Breaks is not straightforward; it is as sharp and fragmentary as the shards of lives upended.
There are elements of legendary Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel’s sardonic wit, but this is fiction mostly about women in a state of fugue: dislocated and forever altered by the ongoing conflict with Russia, one that began long before the current invasion. “You can’t really live in this country – you’re threatened from every side at every moment” points out the narrator of Lena in Danger. Language is either discombobulated and lamenting, as in My Black, Broken Umbrella in which an ordinary domestic item is destroyed due to its resemblance to a weapon of destruction; or pared down, such as in My Sister, which sparsely describes the sinister horror of the abduction of an informer from suddenly silent streets: “The pedestrians were all gone, as if they had died out.” Roaming the country from Donestk to Dnipro, ordinary lives unfold to produce extraordinary outcomes.
