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. The narrative follows a journey from the relative peace of the western regions to the front lines, where life is measured in days and hours, exploring themes of language, history, and the steadfast commitment of a people facing 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
"Reminiscent at times of Voltaire’s Candide, Nina Kossman’s remarkable new book presents war not as a heroic spectacle but as a lived reality, shaped by misunderstandings, contradictions, and sometimes confusing human encounters. Most striking is the narrator’s unforced sincerity: through a series of poignant vignettes, the book becomes not only a journey through a wartime Ukraine but an unexpectedly revealing meditation on identity, perception, and the difficulty of truly understanding others."
—Maxim Matusevich
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, short prose, children’s verse, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, and two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. Her English-language work has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies. Her plays have been produced in the US, the UK, and Australia. A finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, 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.
