Danielle Leavitt, Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia postdoctoral fellow in Ukrainian studies, discussed her debut book, “By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine,” in Weiser Hall Thursday evening. The lecture, hosted by the WCEE and co-sponsored by theInternational Institute and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, examined how ordinary Ukrainians experienced the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Leavitt said her motivation for writing the book stemmed from her frustration with inaccurate depictions of Ukrainians in the media.
“These portrayals were either desperate war people or nearly superhuman heroes, and neither description felt entirely accurate,” Leavitt said. “As a whole, these portrayals had a flattening effect. This bothered me because this was the moment the world was really coming to know Ukraine, and it was essentially becoming a caricature.”
Leavitt based her book on a collection of online diaries and in-depth interviews with seven Ukrainians whose lives were upended by the war, including one woman named Yulia whose legs were severed by a Russian bomb. Leavitt said the stories she encountered while interacting with Ukrainians convinced her that personal narratives are essential to understanding the war itself.
“As I read accounts like Yulia’s and watched them unfold … I felt a growing conviction that these stories mattered, that they were somehow essential to understanding the war itself,” Leavitt said. “In their words, perhaps, was a power to shape how those outside Ukraine might come to understand this war.”
Douglas Northrop, WCEE acting director and professor of history and Middle East studies, told The Daily personal narratives are important in humanizing the war.
“It keeps it from being a disembodied series of abstractions,” Northrop said. “It becomes real and human, and it’s a way for individual listeners and readers to connect the experience to the world they know — to the lives they live — and shows what could be or what could have been for others. It makes them feel a kind of connection.”
Leavitt recounted the story of Vitaly, a man featured in her book who saved up to open a coffee shop in the years leading up to the invasion. She said he allowed himself one indulgence: a high-end espresso machine.
Leavitt then explained how, just weeks after opening his shop, Russian tanks bombed Vitaly’s apartment and coffee shop. She shared pictures of Vitaly’s espresso machine amid the rubble, highlighting that digging through the debris was like searching for parts of his life that had been destroyed.
“He spent days turning over pieces of debris through the night,” Leavitt said. “It was a process he was familiar with from his recycling days, but this time, he was searching for parts of himself. After several days of digging, he found something that he recognized: his old espresso machine. In every war, an entire world can be leveled in minutes. Home, history, memory.”
In an interview with The Daily, Rackham student Sylvan Perlmutter, who attended the discussion, said that as a coffee drinker, the image of Vitaly’s espresso machine in the rubble was uncanny.
“I have to have my espresso every day,” Perlmutter said. “The cafe is an extremely essential infrastructure for reproducing my life and my identity. … So seeing that picture of the espresso machine at the end through the rubble, I mean, wow. Life can be more heartbreaking and stranger and more everything every day.”
Leavitt said telling the stories of individual lives, rather than relying solely on maps and statistics, is essential to capturing the full horrors of war.
“To speak only in terms of strategy or territory is to create a narrow and incomplete historical vision. Writing a people-centered history of any era, but especially the present, means privileging human experience over power,” Leavitt said.
Staff Reporter Zooey Raux can be reached at zraux@umich.edu.
