What is left for the writer when the war pulls him out of his office and takes him to the air, to a foreign country, to the “nowhere” between heaven and earth, putting him on pause?… Memory. Language. A stock of untold stories.

In her new essay, written for a Western audience, Oksana Zabuzhko examines the origins of today’s russian-Ukrainian war in two-time dimensions — thirty years and three hundred years, interspersed with her own memories of how an incalculable amount of human will can change the course of history.