Ukrainian Night: Very Personal Stories of the Revolution

“It was the last European revolution, and it has not yet taken its rightful place in the common and communal history of Europe.” This is a book about the experience of that revolution, revealed through the stories of its participants. Among them is Katya Mishchenko, a German scholar and editor, to whom the first sentence belongs. In 2023, as I write these words, the heroes of my book find themselves in even more hellish conditions than could have been imagined in the winter of 2013-2014. This text will tell about the lives of some of the book’s heroes over the past decade, building a bridge between 2014 and 2023.
What, however, does it mean to build a bridge in times of war? War destroys bridges. It destroys borders. It cripples space and accelerates time, “shortens the distance,” writes Ukrainian poet Halina Kruk, “from person to person, from birth to death.”
War takes the nuances out of language; and fresh blood gives words a heavy flavor.
(c) Marcy Shore. From the preface to the 2023 edition