No One Talks About the War: Travels in Ukraine During the War
by Nina Kossman
NO ONE TALKS ABOUT THE WAR is based on a series of everyday conversations, mainly between the author and people she meets, and occasionally conversations she overhears. It is written from an extraordinary place at a crucial inflection point-Ukraine in the middle of a protracted fight for its very existence. These conversations are tied together as a journey across Ukraine, taking us from its western regions, which enjoy an eerie and uneasy relative peace, to the war front, where life is measured in days and hours. The price of things, the right to language, suspicions about government, corruptions of history, paranoia, resignation, and the steadfast commitment to a dream or duty all factor into a gradual picture of a people with an uncertain future.
Nina Kossman’s fascinating travelogue is a choir of voices: kind, angry, contradictory, accusatory, or caring - voices of humanity that cannot be silenced even by death and destruction unleashed by Russia on Ukraine.
— Zinovy Zinik
Nina Kossman is a transdisciplinary artist. A writer and painter, she exhibited her paintings internationally, and her writing has been published in a dozen languages, including French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, German, Persian, Chinese, Bengali, and Japanese. Nina Kossman’s 12 books include poetry (in Russian and English), short prose (in Russian and English), children’s poetry, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, and a novel. Her English-language work has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies. Her plays have been produced in the US, the UK, and Australia. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, grants from the Onassis Foundation and the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, and the (now defunct) UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award. Born in the former Soviet Union, she lives in New York.
