Description
In Book II of the Iliad, Homer lists the ships and warriors that reached Troy—but not the ones that survived or returned home. The word war inevitably carries the word loss alongside it. Loss of soldiers, of equipment, of the enemy, of a son, of an arm, of sleep… Myroslav Laiuk interviewed medics at stabilization centres, army servicemen who lost their limbs or eyes, relatives of the dead and missing, evacuees, and those who stayed behind in frontline towns. He attempts to capture our loss as it exists in this very moment.
Списки (Lists) features reportage stories and essays about what Ukrainians consider to be their losses and why. One story tells of a firefighter from Kharkiv region who arrived at a call only to find his own house destroyed and his wife killed by a Russian guided bomb. There are stories about artworks in Kharkiv, the shelling of the Derzhprom building, soldiers who lost their sight, and children attending school near the Kinburn Spit, losing their childhood to the war. There are stories of losing sleep, memory, a sense of normalcy, and countless other things that war takes away.
Bio
Writer and war reporter Myroslav Laiuk, born in 1990 in the Carpathians, lives in Kyiv and teaches at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He published novels and poetry books, including Old Women’s House (Баборня), Iron Water (Залізна вода), Thistle! (Осоте!), and Metrophobia (Метрофобія), and reportage and essay collections Bakhmut.
Reviews
It is painful and frightening to read this book, yet impossible to put down — because it restores a sense of wholeness in its complexity. The author returns again and again to the places where life became unbearable — but persists nonetheless.
Списки (Lists) by Myroslav Laiuk is a census of losses waiting to be mourned. And at the same time, it reawakens feelings, shades of color, and taste — even if it’s only a phantom aftertaste of “bakhmutka” salt, or a phantom pain from an amputated limb. It reveals ambiguity, irony, metaphor, and connections between lived experience and global cultural phenomena. It reminds us that we are not alone.
It brings back the memory of a world once sensitive, now dulled by pain. Everything still hurts: the minerals in occupied mines, the catalpas left behind in flooded Kherson, the names of the dead, pulsing with nerves. All of them are still alive.
Sofia Andrukhovych, writer, essayist, translator
Painfully sincere, poignant, and intelligent, this book weaves together courageous frontline reportage from Ukraine’s war of survival with a touching, poetic immersion into the culture and consciousness of our nation — the very culture and identity that Russia seeks to erase from the face of the Earth.
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, writer
