Victoria Amelina, who was wounded in a Russian missile attack in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on 27 June and died, aged 37, of her injuries four days later, knew that being a writer made her a target for Russia. She was aware that the invading forces had lists of activists and intellectuals to eliminate, but she also understood her country’s history: in March 2022, summoning one of the darkest pages in Ukrainian literary history – the murder of a generation of Ukrainian writers during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, known as the “executed renaissance” – she wrote that “there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs”.
Victoria sought to protect and promote Ukrainian culture as the country came under attack: in 2021 she founded a literature festival in her husband Oleksandr’s home town, New York, in the Donetsk region. The town (whose unlikely name is thought to have been originally Neu Jork and to have come from 19th-century German settlers) was occupied by the Russian army in 2014 and has been on the frontline ever since.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/X7PZRW3
via
0 Comments