The women of war: a review of Yuliia Iliukha’s My Women

Cover of My Women.

Translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv, Yuliia Iliukha’s My Women is a poignant, inescapable short story collection about women confronted by the horrific brutalities of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The women in Iliukha’s collection navigate national and global political drama; the loss of lives, homes and livelihoods during the full-scale invasion; and cultural and self-preservation while facing seemingly insurmountable odds. Reminiscent of works like Anna Romandash’s Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond and Marina Sonkina’s Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border, reading My Women is like flipping through a scrapbook of visceral, painful snapshots of the conflict. It reminds us of the importance of maintaining a global, collective consciousness in the face of ongoing evil.

In the powerful foreword, Iliukha provides a keen representation of those women who appear in the collection. Those women “utter mundane and frightening words” and “share their pain and despair”. They are women who “believe and wait”, “persevere” and “know the price of each new day”. These women “want the world to listen to them and hear them”. This plea acts as a call for collective, global responsibility, one that becomes clear when Iliukha transfers that responsibility to her audience: “My women… Now they are yours, too.” Iliukha’s call to action extends to not only native Ukrainian women enduring the war’s daily violence, but women everywhere who have been affected by war and injustice. This opening strikes a particular chord in light of an October 2024 UN human rights call for “recognition of sexual violence as torture” in order to strengthen legal protections. My Women’s stories do not focus explicitly or entirely on the sexual violence to which Ukrainian women have been subjected during the full-scale invasion. They do, nonetheless, establish the integral and increasingly important role women have played in Ukraine’s military and societal roles.

One of the most effective propaganda lines Russian President Vladimir Putin has used to fuel support for the flames of war among the Russian population is the belief that the Ukrainian government is persecuting the Russian language. However, this propaganda has predominantly failed among Russian-speaking Ukrainians. One of the most overtly socio-political vignettes in My Women is a piece about the “woman who had been waiting for the Russian world”. According to the story, the woman had “taught Russian language and literature all her life” near her home, and just two years prior to her retirement, “the school had switched to the Ukrainian language of instruction, and she had been quietly dismissed.” To ease the pain of this “blow”, the woman “immersed herself in Pushkin, read up on Lermontov with a pencil in hand, and got carried away with Tyutchev”. The woman “spent her evenings convincing herself of the greatness and glory of Russian culture while sitting in an old armchair she had bought two decades before”. The subtle stab at Russian society’s lack of social and economic progress is enough to make those who have seen the online stories about Russian soldiers pillaging Ukrainian apartments for toilets and washing machines smirk. However, the sly humour does not last long. Even though the woman waits for Russian soldiers to save her – believing that Russian soldiers “would never shoot at civilians” – she ultimately finds herself “buried” by the “greatness of Russian culture”. This is done without “asking her opinion about Pushkin and Lermontov” after the Russians bomb her apartment block. Thus, the story echoes pro-propagandist narratives facilitated by Putin backers such as Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow. It is also related to Russian attempts to eradicate Ukrainian culture by promoting the idea that Ukrainian language and Ukrainian identity – as well as Ukrainian nationhood – do not exist.

In other vignettes, the absolute destruction of villages and cities by Russian forces ties Ukrainian female identity to place. A woman returns “to the town of her childhood and did not recognize it”. “A deep crater and a pile of bricks” replace the woman’s school. “Only walls” stand where her parents’ house had stood, as her childhood, “which until recently had lived within these walls”, has “turned to ashes”. For those who have read the news articles about Mariupol, Bakhmut, Popasna and other Ukrainian villages and cities obliterated as part of Russia’s “liberation”, the woman’s experiences of returning to a childhood home that no longer exists is more reality than fiction. However, it is the story’s final lines that show not only Ukraine’s determination but the fortitude of Ukrainian women who have risen to meet their homeland’s call to duty. As she looks “with dry eyes at the town of her childhood lying in ruins”, the woman adjusts her gun, straightens her back, “which ached from the bulletproof vest”, and “walked back to her fellow soldiers”. The woman is a solitary representation of another phenomena that has emerged in the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014 and through the full-scale invasion. As of January 2024, women comprised 7.3 per cent of the military, meaning that more than 62,000 women – with 45,500 of them holding military positions – currently serve.

My Women does not shy away from addressing the ecocide and environmental crises that have plagued Ukraine’s biodiverse regions during the full-scale invasion. Through a single story about a woman who cares for abandoned cats, Iliukha manages to draw attention to the crisis that the war has created for all of Ukraine’s inhabitants, including pets. Known as “the woman who fed abandoned cats”, the woman remains in her nine-story apartment building and shares her apartment with five cats. Volunteers bring the woman cat food, and every morning when the woman stepped out of the apartment building, “twenty hungry cat mouths met her”. They “cried out from hunger, cold, pain, and loneliness”. Nonetheless, the cats are not significant because their presence in the collection raises awareness about war’s effects on animal populations. They, in some ways, serve as a metaphor for the Ukrainian people who, historically, have been starved and isolated by oppressive Soviet regimes. The outside cats cry out to the woman because “nobody else could hear them”, much like the Ukrainian nation during the full-scale invasion’s early days, when Ukrainian leaders’ pleas for more weapons and military support seemed to be ignored by world leaders unwilling to hold Putin accountable. The woman personifies Ukrainian selflessness, too. Her first concern is the cats’ well-being: “More than anything in the world, the woman wanted to take home all the abandoned cats.” However, “she did not know how she herself would survive the brutal winter.” The woman’s care for the cats mirrors real-life stories about selfless individuals who went to great lengths to protect and rescue creatures large and small by entering severely damaged structures, rescuing dogs, cats and even fish in aquariums. The woman is a single character illustrative of the hundreds of Ukrainian businesspeople who, when invasion knocked on their city’s boundaries, transformed their business places into humanitarian aid stations that provided gear, food and even shelter for soldiers, volunteers and community members.

A similar story appears later in the collection, but instead of cats, the story depicts a woman who returns to her destroyed village and weeps over the skeleton of her beloved cow. The scene might evoke images of a jarring scene from the epic miniseries Chernobyl, during which a Soviet soldier shoots an elderly woman’s cow when the woman refuses his orders to board the evacuation bus. In Iliukha’s story, one of the woman’s first concerns when her son calls and tells her she must leave the village is what she will do with the cow, who looks at the woman “with her big, damp eyes”. Frightened by explosions, the cow flees towards the woman’s vegetable patch “with her tail raised high” – an act of resistance entirely of its own. The woman is forced to leave without the cow, and upon her return, the woman discovers her barn is “just a pile of bricks and boards” and the cow’s remains “lay next to the burned hayloft”. The woman weeps, wanting “to believe that the cow had not suffered too much”. Again, the story seems less fictional if one is familiar with Ukrainian headlines surrounding ecocide, environmental destruction, and even disruptions to Ukraine’s agricultural industry. Ukrainians have reported that Russian soldiers shoot livestock such as cows, and how those cows do not immediately succumb to their injuries and suffer for long periods of time. Nevertheless, the woman’s attitude concerning the cow represents Ukrainian attitudes towards and respect for nature, as well as the unmistakable fact that, for many rural Ukrainian households, the cow is an almost irreplaceable lifeline.

In other stories, My Women fuses the folkloric with Ukraine’s national symbols and folk traditions. In one vignette, a woman who no longer believes in God “remembered the black death curses that her grandmother had taught her”, bringing to mind stories from the war’s initial days when women could be seen placing curses on Russian soldiers. The story captures, too, the role of tradition and ritual in Ukrainian society, as well as the importance of remembering one’s ancestors. The woman asks her ancestors for help while brewing the potion, which she “sprinkled on the ground” and “where a single drop fell, the ground opened up and swallowed the enemies”. This story bears a folkloric tone, one reminiscent of the folktale surrounding Ukraine’s most recognizable tradition – the vyshyvanka (embroidered blouse). It also echoes a scene which made international headlines – that of a Ukrainian woman encouraging Russian soldiers to place sunflower seeds in their pockets so that, upon their deaths on Ukrainian soil, their corpses would fertilize sunflowers.

It is no secret that throughout the full-scale invasion, Russian forces targeted Ukrainian heritage sites such as cathedrals and museums, as well as other cultural artifacts like books and artworks. Like vyshyvanka, the Ukrainian flag has become an international symbol of resistance against Russian aggression and occupation. In Russian-occupied territories, such as Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, people have hidden Ukrainian flags. In My Women, a brave woman “who taught Ukrainian language and literature” buries her Ukrainian flag in her garden, knowing that Russian forces “would come for her soon”. Cultural artifacts and family heirlooms are key to the woman’s identity: “Everything betrayed that she was a ‘nationalist’ and a ‘saboteur’: the shelves tightly packed with Ukrainian books; her grandmother’s embroidered towel under the icon that her mother had given her as part of her dowry; her embroidered shirt, the vyshyvanka, which she always wore to the back-to-school ceremony.” Knowing that she cannot save everything, the woman decides to save the flag, because the flag “did not belong to her alone”. Rather, the flag “was part of the nation”, and even though the woman could not single-handedly “save Ukraine and its language and culture”, she could at least “save the flag” – a simple, yet strong symbol of the Ukrainian people’s independence.

Part of My Women’s emotional grip comes from its compactness. A slim collection of only 73 pages, no story is more than two pages in length. The compactness and brevity reflect war’s rapid, ever changing nature. It also represents the mere split seconds a single individual might have to make a life-changing – or even life-saving – decision. My Women is undoubtedly destined to become one of the Ukrainian literary canon’s most important contributions, echoing compilations like Bohdan Ben and Orysia Hrudka’s Dark Days, Determined People. More so, My Women is a testament to the unbreakable Ukrainian female spirit that has been evident in all areas of Ukrainian society for centuries.

My Women by Yuliia Iliukha. Published by 128 LIT 2024.

Nicole Yurcaba is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is Humanities faculty at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College in the United States. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.

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Book review, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine at war, Ukrainian literature, women, women in conflict, Women in war