2023-09-06 22:41:00
War between Ukraine and RussiadossierWith the journalist Elisa Mignot, the Ukrainian sisters, established in Kyiv and Paris, narrate the loneliness and the complicity of a sibling in the daily life of the conflict.
In Kyiv, in Sasha Kurovska’s apartment, in 2023, there is a mattress in the hallway. And two bags. The first contains everything necessary in case of evacuation; the second, in the event of a nuclear attack. “What to take in case of bombardments? This is the question that millions of Ukrainians have asked themselves. Those who left. And those who stayed, like me” and who have been falling asleep since February 24, 2022 to the sound of missiles and sirens. Olga, her sister, lives in Paris: “Impossible to get rid of this thought and the guilt of being safe.” Some days, her relatives do not give her any news – a simple “everything is fine, everything is fine” from her mother – so she draws on social networks and in the press for information, relays petitions, pots. “I feel so helpless.” The solution: keep a two-voice war diary published weekly in M, the magazine of Le Monde. “To tell their daily life to each other”, writes in the preface Elisa Mignot, journalist at the initiative of this project. The first meeting between her and Olga took place in April 2014, during the citizens’ revolution in Maidan. One interviews; the other translates.
“I only wish death on this gnome who plunged his own country into misery, who killed thousands of Ukrainians, Chechens, Syrians, Georgians and even Russians! And all this for what ? To continue to hold the whole world by the balls with its gas mixed with the blood of all its victims. Through singing, Olga tears herself away from this daily life. A chorister, she refuses to give visibility to Russian culture – it’s a political choice. Capital letters to “Putin”, “Russia” fall – politics, too. Sasha transforms her hiding place – an underground car park – into a cinematheque. His neighbor plays the violin. And in Paris, during a visit to her sister, she finds in “the deformed faces and bodies, the bright and abrupt colors of the landscapes” by Edvard Munch, “such strong and tormented sensations”. There is between these canvases and this story a complicity, a familiarity with loneliness, anguish and death.
Olga and Sasha Kurovska with Elisa Mignot, the Journal of Olga and Sasha – Ukraine years 2022-2023, Actes Sud, 288 pp., €23 (ebook: €16.99).
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