"Every time, when they talk about their son, they are crying again," she said. ![]() They huddled with Amelina, who wiped away her own tears. Today, a small flock of cranes greeted me from the sky, as if to say, 'I believe in victory.'"Īmelina presents a special award from the International Publishers Association to Vakulenko's parents in May. "I have pulled myself together and even worked in the garden a little, bringing potatoes into the house," he wrote. In one of the entries, Vakulenko tried to find hope in his circumstances. With his family's permission, Amelina took it to a literary museum in the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The diary's pages were damp after being in the ground for months. This was a short diary that was hastily made, but it was the last work of a Ukrainian writer killed by Russians." "We eventually found it under a cherry tree," Amelina said. That's when his father told her about the diary. She told them that she had met Vakulenko at literary festivals in eastern Ukraine, where he read his poetry aloud to children near the front line. "I saw a plaque dedicated to him, and that made me stop and think that maybe I can do more than moving the boxes of humanitarian aid," she told me when we last saw each other in early June in Kyiv.Ī destroyed home is surrounded by blooming rosebushes in May in Kapytolivka.Īmelina arrived in Kapytolivka late last year to interview residents for Truth Hounds, and spoke to Vakulenko's parents. She recalled walking around her hometown, where the human rights lawyer Raphael Lemkin once studied, years before he coined the term genocide. ![]() She hosted displaced Ukrainians in Lviv and delivered humanitarian aid. The lines of one poem described the reality of war as "devouring all punctuation / devouring the plot coherence / devouring." She wrote award-winning novels, children's stories and essays, becoming one of Ukraine's most promising authors.Īfter Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, she also wrote a lot of poetry. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she said, she felt like it was happening all over again.Īmelina stands with the parents of Volodymyr Vakulenko in a room that memorializes his life.īorn in the western city of Lviv, Amelina studied computer science and worked in information technology before becoming a full-time writer. She described how, in the 1930s, Soviets murdered Ukrainian writers and intellectuals, destroying their manuscripts and confiscating literary magazines that published their work. In an essay for the literary and free expression group PEN Ukraine last year, Amelina wrote that imperial and Soviet Russia had long suppressed Ukrainian culture. "At this moment, I felt my head spinning, thinking about all the Ukrainian manuscripts that have been lost over the past centuries, and this might be another one." ![]() "The moment when I thought we wouldn't be able to find this diary perhaps is still the scariest moment for me," Amelina said late last May. He usually wrote offbeat, deeply empathetic poems for children but his diary was about life under Russian occupation.Īfter hours of fruitless digging alongside the writer's father, Amelina felt a twinge of grief and panic. She was looking for a diary belonging to children's author Volodymyr Vakulenko. KAPYTOLIVKA, KYIV AND LVIV, Ukraine - Last fall, the novelist Victoria Amelina found herself frantically digging up a fellow writer's backyard in northeastern Ukraine. Victoria Amelina stands next to a cherry tree in the backyard of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian children's book author, where he buried his diary of living under Russian occupation in Kapytolivka before he was killed.
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