It is a strange and cruel irony that some of the worst fighting seen during the conflict that has been going on in eastern Ukraine since 2014 has taken place in the town of Shchastya, a name translating literally as “happiness” or “luck”. Yet in this hybrid war of grey areas and disinformation, in which one of the belligerents props up separatist groups while posing as a non-participant, such surreal irony is perhaps characteristic.
In Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks, a similar feeling of surrealism abounds. This collection of immediate and eccentric stories, first published in Ukraine in 2018 and now available in Eugene Ostashevsky’s lucid English translation, presents a series of sideline encounters with Ukrainian women — manicurists, florists, cosmetologists, card players, even a witch — whose lives have been caught up, often imperceptibly, in the Donbas conflict.
A florist in Donetsk seems to “disappear” after the building in which she lives is destroyed, while her shop is “refitted into a warehouse of propaganda materials” and her neighbours maintain that she must simply have gone off “into the fields”.
In Anthracite, a secessionist city state ruled over by a Cossack military commander, “hair stylists, manicurists, and other workers at the Pyramid Beauty Salon” are put before a magistrate, recalling the summary justice that was reportedly meted out in the Luhansk region, to determine how “mutinous ideas and thoughts grew and took root in [their] heads”.
And in an unnamed town, women sheltering in a basement study their horoscopes in a local newspaper to decide when they can venture above ground. “Pisces could be sure of their well-being and safety from three to five pm that day,” they read and believe.
In documenting the bizarre twists and fragmentary turns inherent throughout these stories of loss and trauma, Belorusets draws on the grotesquerie of Nikolai Gogol’s fantasies and the absurdist gallows humour of Daniil Kharms, whose haunting vignettes responded so well to the terror and seeming unreality of life in the Soviet Union. Yet against the present and looming risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, these combinations produce an especially unsettling awareness of the myriad ways in which imagination walks hand in hand with violent reality.
In describing the effects of one of the most brutal conflicts to have occurred during — and to be in part aided by — the age of fake news, Lucky Breaks asks essential questions about the ethical implications of blurring the boundary between fiction and reality. “Any document is partly a lie,” says Belorusets, challenging us, by analogy, to see the truth in her fictions. It is a perverse logic but an effective one — one that lays bare the device of so much manufactured reality at the heart of the war.
That same perverse and surreal rationale informs the thinking of Belorusets’ characters too. In “Philosophy”, a disaffected young man whose unit is stationed near the ill-starred town of Happiness worries that the end of hostilities will force him back into contact with an even less desirable reality. It seems he needn’t have worried. At the time of writing this, the “frozen” stalemate of the past years is thawing rapidly under the heat of troop manoeuvres and escalating political rhetoric. Once again, Shchastya has found itself under artillery bombardment.
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, £10.98/$14.95, 112 pages
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Lucky Breaks — Ukrainian encounters in the shadow of war
Pinoy Variant