Book of the dayFiction in translationReviewInfused with magic and black humour, these fables of women affected by Russian aggression have accrued an unsettling timeliness
Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian photographer, writer and artist. For more than a decade, she has been documenting the ominous splits in the social fabric of her country. Her installations and photographic work have showcased the lives of female factory workers, impoverished villagers in western Ukraine, the country’s persecuted Roma citizens, and its LGBTQ community. In 2012 an exhibition in Kyiv of her photographs about non-traditional families was vandalised by rightwing activists. Since 2014, she has worked and reported from the Russian-backed breakaway enclaves around Luhansk and Donetsk, where a conflict was unfolding to the almost complete indifference of the outside world.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all that has changed. A previously obscure war and its attendant disputes over language, nationhood, the Orthodox church and the meaning of fascism have become matters of existential concern for our entire planet.
These events have given Belorusets’ collection of short stories an unsettling timeliness. Most of its 30 tales concern women affected by the war in eastern Ukraine, fleeing conflict and trying to make new lives in unfamiliar cities. Like Belorusets’ photographs, some of which are included in the book, each of the stories is a snapshot of a character in a post-Soviet landscape, burdened with the weight of a complex history that’s implied, but never stated outright.
Mordant, funny, weird and surprising, few of the stories are more than a couple of pages longInfused with magic, absurdity and black humour, many of the stories are reminiscent of fairytales. “Once upon a time there lived a woman who was kind, appealing and pleasant in every respect,” is the opening of A Needle in a Nightshirt. In The Woman Who Caught Babies in a Mitt we meet a witchy midwife who terrorises Kharkiv with her spells. The central character of Transformations has a weirdly banal magical gift: she can change household objects into one another, so a pot of porridge becomes a flower and a teapot turns into a fan. In Three Songs of Lamentation a conscientious caregiver wrestles the angel of death for the life of an elderly neighbour.
Other stories are more overtly satirical. A Woman Finds a Job takes aim at sexism in the workplace. In Two Women on the Airplane Stairs we eavesdrop as two rich Ukrainian women discuss spiritual development while queueing for first-class aeroplane seats. In The Address a talk by a successful businesswoman descends into a tirade as she berates her fellow citizens for being losers.
Mordant, funny, weird and surprising, few of the stories are more than a couple of pages long. As the collection’s translator, Eugene Ostashevsky, explains in an afterword, Belorusets is working in the absurdist tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Daniil Kharms, whose surreal microfictions were his private antidote to the dehumanising ideology of Stalinism.
In Belorusets’ work, too, magic and absurdity are shadows cast by an ominous real world. The intrusion of current events constantly disrupts the fable-like qualities. An archetypal deep dark forest is suddenly logged to near-extinction. The heroine of The Florist seems to be set up as the protagonist of a romance, only to vanish from the plot halfway through. Far from being in a timeless fairytale, she is in Donetsk in 2014 at the moment that war breaks out. In A Needle in a Nightshirt, the flawless heroine leaves a deadly object in the breast of a nightshirt that seems fated to bring disaster.
In many of the stories, the characters’ irrational beliefs and claimed powers appear to be the products of war-related trauma. And the stories’ curious vanishings and sudden relocations often make sense in the light of the conflict that is taking place just out of sight. In Elena and My Sister, family members become estranged from one another for reasons that are never made explicit, but it seems clear that they have fallen out over their support for the Russian-backed separatists.
Often the stories pose a question whose answer the reader struggles to infer. In March 8: The Woman Who Could Not Walk, set in 2016, the narrator encounters a woman in central Kyiv who has suddenly lost the power of her legs. The cause of her disability is never made clear. The woman hints to the narrator that it’s related to a secret she has, but this secret is never shared. The story ends without any conventional resolution. Deprived of a way to make the story meaningful, the reader naturally tries to supply one. Is the disability psychosomatic, and the woman a trauma survivor? Or is the woman, as she seems to imply herself, an allegorical figure, a symbol of a nation that has yet to find its feet? “I am a living monument,” she tells the narrator, as they sit in Independence Square, the centre of Ukraine’s so-called revolution of dignity in 2014. “She maintained that events of historical importance, so to speak, could be taking place all around her, but she would remain sitting on the bench and every so often try to rise to her feet with a triumphant smile.” Narrator and reader are left scratching their heads over the encounter.
Belorusets sets out the reasons for her authorial reticence in a pair of prefaces. The stories are concerned, she explains, “with the insignificant and the small, the accidental, the superfluous, the repressed”. By design, they remain enigmatic. “The voices of different people resonate and clash … Their interlocked coexistence doesn’t allow any one idea, any one voice – especially the author’s – to dominate.”
I really enjoyed these stories, the sharpness and clarity of their observations, their dark humour, and the glimpses they give of an unfamiliar world. Regrettably, aspects of them feel already dated. The tales belong to a time when the fighting on Ukraine’s borders had a surreal, unfathomable quality. Six months ago, this book would have been a timely reminder of an intractable regional problem that didn’t much concern us. The war seemed fated to rumble on for ever at a low pitch, and we might have allowed ourselves a dark chuckle at the characters in The Stars who think they are being shelled by the Canadians. That joke is less funny now. The war has entered a vicious, dynamic phase and the book pricks our consciences for having ignored it for so long.
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, is published by Pushkin (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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