Cassandra is wrong once.

“Do not confuse tourism with emigration, and emigration with evacuation,” the main character of this book would sarcastically remark. Kyiv – Vienna – Paris – Berlin – Przemysl – Kyiv – Berlin – such is the abbreviated route of her narrative.
The Russian-Ukrainian war, scaled to the entire world, permeates this collection of essays. But the unique optics inherent in essay writing transforms the kaleidoscope of human images and emotions, behavior in extreme circumstances from a documentary sketch into literature. And then into documentation of the intellectual landscape of modern Ukraine.
Numerous cultural, literary, historical allusions, piercing dialogues with Western neighbors about global politics, field studies of Russians in the diaspora, combined with self-irony and sarcasm, make this book a fascinating introduction to the mental map of the author’s generation.