Stills from Stalker.
For a month, words like "Russia," "Ukraine," "Europe," "crisis," and "energy" have been brushed before our eyes over and over again along with images and videos on social networks.
But we still want to know, a more definitive answer.
What is the background of this crisis? Is it really inevitable? What has ever happened on the land of this ancient region? What's going to happen? What do these crises mean for individuals?
Perhaps it is no longer a "hot spot", but in this list of books, it may be possible to find the key to understanding this conflict.
Author | Li Feng
Edit | Xiao Feng
Europe's Gate
by Shahili Purokki,
Translated by Zeng Yi
Synopsys Culture | CITIC Press, 2019-3
If you had to choose a book that would give us a quick overview of Ukraine's history and present, Europegate is undoubtedly one of the most recommended books.
The historian Plocky, in clear and unambiguous language, shows us the contours of Ukrainian history. The legend of the land between the Dnieper and the Black Sea exists in the chants of the ancient Greek Herodotus. It is like a theater, where the Scythians, Sarmatians, Slavs, Vikings, Mongols, Jews, Cossacks, etc. appear in turn, fighting, fighting, peace, and like a background sound that changes regularly, it is constantly repeated.
In the beginning, the Ukrainian region was the "playground of the gods", and when Europe rose, it became the "bread basket of Europe", and in the 17th century, with the migration of nationalities, ethnic contradictions, religious contradictions, and class contradictions gradually boiled over in this land.
In fact, Ukraine is an "old" and "young" country. It was not until 1905 that the Ukrainian language was legalized, at which point the Ukrainian region was granted permission to publish the first Ukrainian-language newspaper; in 1945 Ukraine was granted a legal seat in the United Nations; and in 1991 it officially became a state.
Since the 20th century, the Russian Revolution, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War have profoundly affected the attitude of the Ukrainian people towards the East and the West. As the "gateway to Europe", Ukraine is the most important buffer space at the eastern end of the European continent, it struggles to balance and survive between the game of great powers, and every hot war and cold war has cost the people of this land a huge price.
At the end of the book, Plockki writes: "In the Ukraine crisis, history has become an excuse more than once. It has also been abused more than once. After reading the thousand-year history of the Ukrainian region, perhaps we can understand the sad state of mind when the author wrote this sentence.
The Melancholy of the Penguins
[Ukraine] by Andrei Kurkov,
Mu Zhuoyun, Tianmu School
Ideal Country | Guangxi Normal University Press, 2019-9
"Autumn is a season of dying, melancholy and sentimentality, nostalgic for the past, and is best for writing obituary. Winter is the season of joy, frost everywhere, snow shining in the sun, is a good time to live. ”
Penguins, unambitious writers, obituarys, girls, Ukrainian cities and people all make up Kurkov's Melancholy of the Penguins. Don't be discouraged by the name, 100,000 words, you can easily read it on the way to commuting.
It's really "lighthearted," the storyline isn't complicated, and the characters are simple and straightforward—maybe it's more of a fable.
In a slowly collapsing world, writer Victor and penguin Misha live side by side, and both Victor and Misha are victims. Victor was talented but could only write celebrity obituary for newspapers anonymously, Andi Misha, who was supposed to live in Antarctica but had to live in Kiev, suffered from depression, but fortunately it still had Victor.
Kurkov writes with a great sense of rhythm, from the perspective of the undesirable writer Victor, he shows the loss, sorrow and loneliness of Ukraine after the upheaval. When Victor, who wrote the obituary, fell into crisis step by step, we suddenly found that the sorrow between the lines was actually a kind of call and accusation.
It's an ingeniously structured, massive fable. The author, like us, wants to know, when everything falls apart, when man becomes a tool, when the world is "weightless", what do we rely on to survive?
"She's from Mariupol"
By Natasha Woding,
Translated by Qi Qinwen
Nova Press, 2021-3
This is the tragedy of history and the times, the tragedy of the family, and the tragedy of the individual.
Author Natasha Woding was born in 1945, at the end of World War II, her parents and a large number of Ukrainians came to Germany, experiencing political turmoil, war, poor fathers trying to find a new life in a new land, to start a new life, but the wounds of history are in the individual, a generation is not enough time to heal it.
In the "camp of displaced people" in Germany, the life of the Wodin family began. In addition to the psychological shadow of life constraints, war and political turmoil, they also have to face pervasive discrimination. It was in this suffocating life that Natasha Wodin's mother committed suicide by throwing herself into the river.
The traces of her mother's life, which had faded at the age of thirty-six, had faded, and after an adventure on the Internet, Natasha had begun to learn about her mother and her family, or rather, the heavy history she carried.
Natasha Woding's writing is plain, but as a reader, you can always feel the "howl of dust". Silent howling, in the night when my mother threw herself into the river, on the long road where my father was banished, in the white eyes of my neighbors and classmates, in the poor and troubled life.
After reading this book, we can see the unimaginable pain that women endure in times of war and turmoil, and most of the time, these pains are invisible and invisible. Why are these women "crazy"? Why unpleasant? Why apathy? In She's from Mariupol, we find some answers.
When we exclude personal perspectives, it is difficult to really understand what real history is, which is why "She's from Mariupol" is precious. We are accustomed to reading history with a withdrawn eye, but no one can be an outsider in terms of history, and this book reminds us of this.
The History of Odessa: The Creation and Death of a City of Dreams
[Beauty] by Charles King,
Translated by Li Xueshun
| Social Science Literature Publishing, 2020-5
In Odessa in the 19th century, Mark Twain saw an "American vision": wide cross streets, yellow and blue walls, sunlight, sea surfaces, occasional carriages, empty grasslands, and vast skies combined to form a "city of dreams".
In fact, the history of the most famous port city on the Black Sea coast is even more vicissitudes than that of the United States. In ancient Greece, a certain urban scale had been formed along the Black Sea coast, and along the rivers and coasts, civilization continued to "spread". Subsequently, after the expansion of the Italian city-states after the Renaissance, the area showed more vigorous vitality. Tatars from the other end of the steppe also appeared in the area. After the collapse of the mighty Mongol Empire, the Odessa region, one of the gateways to Europe, entered a cycle of war again and again.
Merchants, farmers, herders, and fishermen have lived on the land for generations, but the intrusion of the army has become a lingering shadow – which also constitutes the sad background of the land.
Because of its special geographical location, Odessa has been immersed in many cultures. From the Duke of Richelieu to Queen Catherine, to the Soviet period, Odessa ushered in the delivery, witnessing the change of the times again and again on the "periphery".
As a city biography, "The Creation and Death of a Dream City" uses different characters to draw out the development of the entire city, rather than a pure "chronicle", which makes it extremely friendly to ordinary readers on the basis of solid historical materials. The best way to learn about the development of a city is through the stories of people who have been associated with the city.
Through Odessa, we can see the history of the development of the Black Sea region and the brilliance of the civilization that belongs to it.
Odessa, the fourth largest city in the Republic of Ukraine. /unsplash
The Reconstruction of the Nation
By Timothy Snyder,
Translated by Pan Mengqi
Sanhui Books | Nanjing University Press, 2020-1
Readers may also remember the scholar Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community, in which Benedict Anderson famously proposed the theory that the nation is an imagined creation. His assertions are still debated and discussed to this day. But his book offers a possible perspective on the human community.
Timothy Snyder's Reconstruction of the Nation is more like an extended discussion of Benedict's theory, except that this time the protagonists are the "nation-states" of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus.
In the opening chapter, Snyder explores linguistically the changes in the names of the countries of the region. Rus', Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, these words either refer to the region or more closely to the cultural meaning, which already illustrates the complexity of the history and identity of the region.
In November 1943, the Soviets retake Kiev from the Germans. /Arkadi Shaikhet
The central question of the book is to explain why there are so many conflicts in this land. How hatred and reconciliation in the nation-state arise. What this region has to face in modern times is the collapse of vast empires, the chaos of national borders, the status quo of multi-ethnic states, unstable governments, and the memory of genocide...
In the second chapter of the book, the protagonist is Ukraine. The history of Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia was followed by the "Lublin Union" and added to the "messy account". Language, geography and politics together stirred up the region and laid the foundation for future conflicts.
This is a solid academic work, and it is a must-read book if you want to know how the myths of the nation have influenced the present.
Geography of Peace
By Nicholas Spiekerman,
Translated by Yu Haijie
Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2016-9
If you're interested in "geopolitics," the scholar Nicholas Spieckerman's Geography of Peace is a good book not to be missed.
Of course, "geopolitics" here is not an empty word, but a more specific content. He first clarified the concept of geopolitics, arguing that "geopolitics" should first be a type of analysis method and a series of data black nomenclatures - they are important, directly related to the decision-making of the country.
In today's view, the book may be somewhat "outdated." Because this book was written in the first half of the last century, it has not experienced the wave of digitization, and it has not yet experienced the baptism of new technologies (such as information warfare). It continues the nineteenth-century military gaze, centered on maps, synthesizing data, and deriving theories.
But why read it? Because it still has a huge influence, It can also be seen in Huntington's "Political Order in Changing Societies" and "The Clash of Civilizations and the Reconstruction of World Order".
In short, rather than grand concepts, we might as well pick up maps and data like Spieckerman and begin to understand the world.
"Europe's New Ignition"
by George Friedman,
Translated by Wang Zuning
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2016-10
This is the work of the famous public policy scholar George Friedman. This book discusses why (or how) a crisis will erupt in Europe.
In the opening chapter, Friedman quotes Velfred Owen' poem: "Who asks the ant-like deceased to ring the death knell?" ...... The hidden pain of the living is like a bouquet of flowers in front of the spirit, and the curtain that hangs low every time the meditator hangs down. So he asked from history why almost all the major crises in history originated in Europe.
Between World War I and World War II, nearly 100 million people died in Europe for political reasons, and Friedman believed that "the whole of Europe seems to be built on quicksand, and unity is always fleeting." Europe's geography and past have left it "fragmented", and as a result there have inevitably been many conflicts.
The most noteworthy part of the book is the author's discussion of the "sandwich countries" on the edge of Russia and Europe in the third chapter. As a gap between Russia and the European Union, these countries "take a wrong step, that is, the boundary between life and death." In the author's view, one of Ukraine's weaknesses is internal division: the Westernized faction, the pro-Russian faction, and the independence faction, which makes the political atmosphere here extremely unstable, and thus becomes one of the "flashpoints".
Pro-EU demonstration movement in Ukraine. /Аимаина хикари
Sympathy Nowhere to Rest
[De] by Hanning Reed,
Translated by Zhou Yufei
Gravity | Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2020-1
Why do we care about disasters in the distance and turn a blind eye to disasters in the near individuals?
Why is it that we are sad to see the tragedy that happens in the distance in the video, but we can't see those who are experiencing pain in front of us?
Is it wrong to care about distant places?
Are people who care about the nearby necessarily more "advanced"?
Whenever a major disaster occurs, why do we inevitably get caught up in such a torn argument?
In the German scholar Hanning Reed's Nowhere sympathy, he discusses the great proposition of "compassion" on the basis of the great thinkers of the past, such as Balzac, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and so on.
The book is "present" because the author witnesses the distortion and compression of "time" and "space" after technological innovation. We can see disasters in the distance in short videos (and many times it is the norm), but we may not see another neighbor in distress in the same neighborhood. The human senses are extended and restricted.
Through this book, it will be found that Diderot, Rousseau, and Adam Smith's analysis of human nature is not outdated. In 2022, people who have experienced epidemics and various crises seem to be better able to understand the power of morality in the human process and its limitations in time and space.
As the title suggests, contemporary sympathy "has nowhere to go," but at the very least, this opportunity can be taken to re-examine our hearts and focus on our "neighborhood."
Chernobyl: A Tragic History
Translated by Song Hong and Cui Rui
Gravity | Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2020-7
If you want to understand Ukraine's ambivalent mentality toward Russia, "Chernobyl" is the word that is difficult to get around. Its tragedy is still a wound that many people do not want to touch, as if the words themselves are a lament.
This book uses a large number of archives to analyze what caused the tragedy of Chernobyl. For example, after the reactor failed, why did the staff not directly stop the reactor, but pulled out the "control rod"? Why did another nuclear power plant unit go down that day? Why can a dispatcher command an atomic nuclear power plant? What was the background of Ukraine's transformation into a nuclear power plant? Why are the hardware equipment of nuclear power plants having problems on such a large scale?
These problems go back to the Soviet Union's overwhelm during the Cold War era and its lack of adequate support for the Ukrainian region. It was in this situation that Chernobyl became a wound engraved in the hearts of the russian and Ukrainian people, and even after so many years, it can still trigger many sad memories.
The author of this book is also the author of "Europe's Gate", so the use of various historical materials is more comprehensive. If you want to understand the relationship between contemporary Russia and Ukraine, this book is also a "must-read book".
· END ·
Author 丨 Li Feng
Editor 丨 Xiao Feng
Proofreading 丨 Huang Siyun
The original article was first published in the public account "Hardcore Book Club" under the "New Weekly"