Victoria Amelina obituary: rising Ukrainian novelist who became a war crimes investigator

Born: January 1st, 1986

Died: July 1st, 2023

Victoria Amelina, who was wounded in a Russian missile attack in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on June 27th and died, aged 37, of her injuries four days later, knew that being a writer made her a target for Russia. She was aware that the invading forces had lists of activists and intellectuals to eliminate, but she also understood her country’s history: in March 2022, summoning one of the darkest pages in Ukrainian literary history – the murder of a generation of Ukrainian writers during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, known as the “executed renaissance” – she wrote that “there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs”.

Amelina sought to protect and promote Ukrainian culture as the country came under attack: in 2021 she founded a festival of literature in her husband Oleksandr’s home town, New York, in the Donetsk region. The town (whose unlikely name is thought to have been originally Neu Jork and to have come from 19th-century German settlers) was occupied by the Russian army in 2014 and has been on the frontline ever since.

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As the assault on Ukraine and its culture unfolded, Amelina set aside writing of fiction and trained as a war crimes investigator with the Ukrainian human rights group Truth Hounds. She travelled to areas liberated from Russian occupation and recorded the testimonies of witnesses and survivors. The crimes she investigated included the murder of fellow writers such as Volodymyr Vakulenko, whose occupation diaries Amelina discovered buried in his family’s garden and helped to have published this year.

Victoria Amelina’s international reputation grew quickly, leading to translations into multiple languages, and, in 2021, she was awarded the Joseph Conrad literary award

Amelina’s missions to the east of Ukraine took their toll. She had recently, reluctantly, decided to take a break from her war crimes work and accepted a scholarship from Columbia University, New York, for a year’s writing residency in Paris. Having met a group of Colombian writers in Kyiv who were keen to visit war-affected areas, however, she volunteered to accompany them for one last trip. They were dining together when a missile hit their restaurant.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Amelina had been known not as a human rights defender, but as a novelist and children’s writer. After completing a degree in computer sciences at Lviv Polytechnic National University and working for several years in IT, she became a full-time writer in 2015, after the publication of her debut novel, The Fall Syndrome (2014).

[ Irish writers protest over Victoria Amelina’s murder ]

It was her second novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom (2017), that cemented her status as a major new talent. The novel, currently being translated into English, explores the troubled past of Amelina’s hometown, Lviv, through the story of one family from the end of the second World War to post-independence Ukraine. It was shortlisted for several Ukrainian and international awards, including the European Union prize for literature.

Amelina’s international reputation grew quickly, leading to translations into multiple languages, and, in 2021, she was awarded the Joseph Conrad literary award from the Polish Institute in Kyiv.

She was born Victoria Shalamai in Lviv to a family who originally came from east-central Ukraine. Part of the city’s significant Russian-speaking minority, she attended a Russian-language school, where she was taught to identify with “great” Russian culture. Yet her actual encounters with Russia undermined this. At 15, she was invited to represent Lviv at an international Russian language competition in Moscow. Surprised by the effort the Russian government put into her visit (“They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia”), she soon realised something was off: a journalist who interviewed Amelina for a major TV channel asked her to describe how oppressed she surely must be as a Russian speaker in Ukraine. She refused to play along with the propaganda, stating that she had no such experience. “I will have turned out to be one of the worst investments of the Russian Federation,” she reflected.

Standing with her compatriots against an attempt to turn Ukraine into a Russian-style dictatorship, she understood that ‘to go to the streets of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other’

Amelina was fascinated by the convolutions of history that had brought her family to Lviv after the second World War. She was, however, equally intrigued by her society’s inability to speak honestly about those convolutions – about the war, the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and the terror and moral grey zones they brought. Dom’s Dream Kingdom overcomes this inability with an ingenious device: its narrator is not a human, prone to selective remembering and nostalgia, but a dog, Dom, who is able to observe objectively his family’s inability to work through the secrets of the past.

[ Victoria Amelina: She wanted us to grasp what was happening in her country, and she was unforgettable ]

Another turning point in Amelina’s life was the Maidan revolution of 2014 that brought down president Viktor Yanukovych and marked the beginning of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine. Standing with her compatriots against an attempt to turn Ukraine into a Russian-style dictatorship, she understood that “to go to the streets of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other”. She also understood that trust in the present requires truth about the past. “There were silences instead of much-needed stories,” she wrote of Ukrainians’ struggle to be open about certain aspects of history, “and where there’s a lack of true stories, there’s a lack of trust”. After February 2022, she realised that uncovering the true stories of Ukrainians’ experiences under Russian occupation would be indispensable for her society’s future.

[ ‘She was standing up for Ukrainian culture’: tributes paid to writer killed in Russian strike ]

Amelina’s writing had, of late, taken two very different directions. She had, unexpectedly for herself, begun to write poetry. Her other project was a nonfiction book describing the experiences of Ukrainian women, like herself, fighting for truth against tyranny and violence. She had completed most of it, and it will be published – one final contribution to a postwar Ukraine that she will never see, but which she helped build.

Amelina is survived by Oleksandr and their son, and her parents. – Guardian