The Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina did not leave the huge literary legacy that she might have done, had she been given more time. When a Russian rocket exploded in Kramatorsk on 27 June, the poet and novelist was just 37 years old. The rocket caused injuries from which she would not recover.
Yet in her short life, Amelina still managed to achieve a great deal. She emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 14, but decided to return to Ukraine, to her native city of Lviv, soon after. She graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and became a computer programmer. She seemed to have a bright future in that field, but in 2015 decided to exchange it for the life of a full-time writer. An extremely active and vivacious person, Victoria also got involved in public life and the struggle for human rights – especially the rights of political prisoners.
Not content with just sitting in her office and writing novels and children’s books, she travelled around Europe organising demonstrations demanding the release of the Ukrainian film director and writer Oleg Sentsov, who was in a Russian prison.
In 2021, she founded a literary festival, primarily aimed at younger readers, in the small town of New York, in the Donbas. A few weeks ago a Russian rocket destroyed the old city cinema which served as the site of the festival. Although very upset about this, Victoria made it clear that the New York festival would be revived after the war.
Since February last year, Victoria has been documenting the Russian army’s war crimes. Perhaps she was motivated to do this by the death of her colleague – the Ukrainian children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko – who was murdered by the Russian military in March last year.
Along with his son, Vakulenko chose to remain in his village, Kapitolivka, when it was occupied. He seemed to have a premonition about his death – the day before he was abducted for the second time by Russian soldiers, he buried his diary in his parents’ garden, under an old cherry tree. When the Kharkiv region was liberated, Amelina immediately went to the village. Vakulenko’s parents showed her the place where he had buried the diary. She dug it up and then panicked, calling her friends at the Kharkiv Literary museum asking “What should I do with it? The paper is soaking wet!”.
At the Kyiv book festival, just days before her death, Amelina took part in the presentation of the posthumous publication of Vakulenko’s work which included his last text, the diary written during the Russian occupation. Amelina died on 1 July – Vakulenko’s birthday.
Amelina left us a children’s book, poetry, several essays, two novels and an unfinished nonfiction book of testimonies about the war, collected in Ukraine during the last 16 months. She wrote this book in English to speed up its delivery to foreign readers. She felt the world lacks a clear understanding of what is happening in Ukraine. I am sure that this book, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, will be published in its unfinished state.
Amelina’s most famous work – the novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom – continues to find new readers and was recently published in Spanish. It is the story of three generations of one family, that of a Soviet pilot Ivan Tsylik, who moved to Lviv in western Ukraine before the collapse of the USSR. The story of his daughters’ and granddaughters’ search for their new identity in independent Ukraine is told by their pet poodle Dominic. The novel was published in 2017, Amelina’s debut novel Fall Syndrome hit shelves in 2015.
Over the past year and a half of Russian aggression, Ukraine has lost tens of thousands of its citizens, including about 30 writers, poets and publishers. Amelina now joins this list and enters the history of Ukrainian literature – a tragic history filled with unfinished books.
I hope that with time English readers will be able to get acquainted with Amelina’s work, but I also hope that one of her colleagues will write a biographical book about her life, her humour and kindness, her incredible energy and eternal smile which sparkled even in the most difficult times.
Amelina never lost her strength of mind, even when she had no physical strength left. At the end of July, she was planning to be in the Carpathian Mountains, at a summer camp for children from the Donbas. She will be very much missed by the children and of course by her parents, her husband and their 12-year-old son.
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