KING DOMS DREAM KINGDOM

by Radice Lebewsu

The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded last week in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, has died from her injuries. Tributes to both Amelina’s activism and her writing poured in from across the worlds of literature and politics, after PEN Ukraine announced she had died in a hospital in Dnipro, surrounded by friends and family. Amelina, 37, won the Joseph Conrad literary prize in 2021 for works including Dom’s Dream Kingdom and had been nominated for other major awards including the European Union Prize for Literature. She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline. —The Guardian, July 3, 2023

            “In death’s dream kingdom…”
                        —T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
            “Faith is…absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.”
                        —Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries
 

Ukrainian Victoria Amelina has died
from injuries along with others; it was dinnertime.
It happened in the city Kramatorsk, more death, more grime,
another dozen dead at th’ restaurant where they had dined.
She had been documenting Russian war crimes for a year,
her prose attempting dealing with the horror and the fear,
like as her fellow writer Vakulenko tried to do, 
when he was killed in Izium in 2022,
his diary found buried underneath a cherry tree,
unchopped, like those in Chekhov’s arbour… arbitrarily.

Radice Lebewsu, an anagrammatic heteronym of Bruce Dale Wise, is a poet fond of Ukraine.

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