By the second spring Seven lives and one year of the War in Ukraine

Historian Leavitt, a fellow at Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, chronicles the experiences and stories of seven regular Ukrainians living through the unprovoked Russian invasion. Anna, Maria, Polina, Tania, Vitaly, Volodymyr, and Yulia lived very different lives but shared one thing in common: extensive participation in an online diary and humanitarian project run by the institute. From these journals and in-depth interviews, Leavitt pieces together the broad experiences of a representative sample of Ukrainian civilians who serve as proxy for many more wartime lives. She also weaves their personal stories together with accurate and poignant historical facts and the story of Volodymyr's quest to reclaim the remains of three Ukrainian writers from a gulag cemetery in Russia, writers whose works form a chronicle of resistance, poetry and prose in the Ukrainian language that provide spiritual sustenance for soldiers and civilians alike as they battle for independence. By the Second Spring presents invaluable testimony about the cost of war for civilians and is a great addition to the reportage on Ukraine's fight to defend its very existence.

Affecting portraits of Ukrainians caught up in a war whose origins trace back centuries. A historian who grew up partly in Ukraine, Leavitt writes of the country's lifeways: "the smart and dark sense of humor, minor--key folk songs, old women selling lingerie in underground walkways, how people regard long walks as a primary -form of entertainment." But, she notes, most people outside the country recognize only one Ukrainian by sight or name, Volodymyr Zelensky. Aiming to correct this, Leavitt focuses on ordinary Ukrainians across the country and their experiences in war. One, Vitaly, owns a struggling coffee shop near Kyiv, making most of his living recycling; another, Tania, lives on a pig farm in a Russian-occupied part of southern Ukraine and has taken to calling the invaders orcs, "invoking the grotesque, nonhuman characters fromLord of the Rings," or "rashist," "a mix of the words 'Russian' and 'fascist'"; yet another, Maria, is caught in the hellish bombardment of the eastern city of Mariupol until being evacuated to a far-western town where few speak her native Russian, a language "still perceived as an outsider tongue." Apart from offering memorable portraits of her dramatis personae, each of whom copes in one way or another with all the hardships of war and occupation, Leavitt serves up fascinating observations befitting a top-tier ethnography. One track she follows, thanks to Vitaly the recycler and a publisher named Volodymyr, are the changing reading tastes of the Ukrainian public: "In the 1990s, everyone was throwing away Soviet books, manuals, pamphlets, propaganda….In the fall of 2022…Vitaly hauled away vans full of books by anyone who was Russian or represented Russia, even if they had never said anything about Ukraine." Elsewhere she offers helpful explanations of why, despite Russia's imperial ambitions, Ukraine truly is a separate nation--and why it behooves the West to defend it. A vividly written, memorable series of profiles in courage and fierce resistance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.