Dying in Ukraine for Kramatorsk and Kapytolivka: we read “War is the proper names” by Ariane Chemin

How many… International organizations estimate today that nearly a million people, civilians and soldiers, have disappeared during the fighting or under bombings. Series in progress… At this point in the disaster, the numbers no longer mean much and a million dead (sometimes without burial) is first of all a million lost faces, a million proper names.

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Splendide et funébre livre

As in creating a work of memory you have to start somewhere, in her last and splendid and funereal book, “War, these are the proper names”, the journalist and writer Ariane Chemin chose to retain two. Enter here, with your procession of wandering specters, Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina.

His figures of resistance are by and for literature which is the weapon of the innocent in the face of guns and executioners

The first was a writer, author mainly of children’s stories, an original, a “holy innocent”, who lived in a town in the east of the country, Kapytolivka, in the heart of the war zone during the first months of the Russian invasion, with his teenage and autistic son as his almost only company. A few weeks after the start of the operations and while Vakulenko was almost better known (to his neighbors at least…) for his attachment to his native country than for his work, he disappeared. His body was found in October of the same year.

Buried under a cherry tree

Among those who will take care of her body, there is a young blonde and beautiful woman, Victoria Amelina. A novelist, she considers that war prevents all fiction and now devotes herself to poetry and above all to documenting Russian war crimes within a Ukrainian organization for the defense of human rights. It was she who unearthed Vakulenko’s occupation diary which he, no doubt aware of his disastrous future destiny, had buried under a cherry tree not far from his home. It is thanks to her that this one will be published. But dead, where is your victory? On June 27, 2023, in Kramatorsk, the restaurant where she found refuge with Colombian correspondents (including the great writer Héctor Abad Faciolince) was hit by the fire of a Russian missile. She died from her injuries a few days later.

Ariane Chemin may well be one of the finest writers in the French press and one of the essential figures of what is commonly called “literary journalism”, she had never exercised her talents on any front line whatsoever. And yet, a story of a sort of tragic astonishment, “War is the proper names” is perhaps his most beautiful book. His figures of resistance are also and perhaps first of all, through and for literature which is the weapon of the innocent in the face of guns and executioners. Without emphasis, but with deep empathy, Ariane Chemin rightly reminds us of this.