On Thursday, PEN America will host a discussion between Ukrainian writers Andrey Kurkov, Victoria Amelina, and Vakhtang Kebuladze, who will offer their perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. More than a thousand other writers, including Orhan Pamuk, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Svetlana Alexievich, have signed PEN International’s open letter condemning the invasion and calling for peace. PEN Ukraine and PEN Belarus are holding a fundraiser to aid Ukrainian writers, journalists, scholars, translators, and artists who are evacuating their homes.
“On the Polish side of the border there’s food and water. On the Ukrainian side there’s nothing.” n+1 has published a dispatch by Elena Kostyuchenko, translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavesse, about crossing into Poland.
For the New Yorker, Masha Gessen writes about Russian public opinion of Putin and his attempts to control what Russians think of the invasion of Ukraine, which Putin’s officials are calling a “special operation.” Gessen sums up the impression given by official state TV news channels: “The world is ganging up on Russia, which is busy saving people, who are forced to flee both to Ukraine and the European Union.”
Jimin Kang writes about giving up speaking English for Lent in an essay published by the New York Times Opinion section: “As I worked to express myself fully in multiple tongues, the power that a single language held in my life began to weaken. If I had the willpower to eschew English for 40 days, I could channel the same energy into intentionally enriching other languages and other relationships.”
At The Atlantic, Apoorva Tadepalli reviews Julie Otsuka’s new novel, The Swimmers, and reflects on the rhythms of everyday habits. The swimmers of the novel—“a second-rate fashion designer, an undocumented immigrant, a nun, a Dane, a cop, an actor who plays a cop on TV,” per Otsuka—crave routine, and are deprived of it when the pool closes for repairs.