Marina Lewycka on the ambiguities of being Ukrainian
On her website, British Ukrainian novelist Marina Lewycka offers some observations on eastern Ukraine, to which her family belongs.
In the summer of 2014, she wrote about a trip to Ukraine to stay with her relatives. She posted photos of the pretty, rural and peaceful area of Krasniy Derkul, with its “communal cow-milking field” and recalled her cousins’ smallholding with its “long garden where they grow tomatoes and sweet corn and onions”. A field at the bottom of the garden and then a river is all that separates them from Russia. Ms Lewycka also had a photo of “a home-made tractor”, something I would’ve expected because her 2005 debut novel was ‘ A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian ‘.
Ms Lewycka went on to note: “Ukrainians are clever, inventive, hardworking, and poor — they deserve so much better than the bunch of thieving politicians and oligarchs who have robbed them shamelessly. And they certainly don’t deserve a civil war while …
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