French Prize-Winning Memoir by Ukrainian War Medic Seeks Local Translation as War-Book Interest Cools

Anastasia Fomitchova left her university studies in Paris in February 2022 and volunteered as a medic with Ukraine’s Hospitallers corps. Her seven months of service took her from the streets of Bucha after the massacre to trench fighting on the front lines and the counteroffensive that liberated Kherson. ” The book won France’s André Malraux Prize last year.

Fomitchova now teaches international humanitarian law at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and hopes the work will be translated into Ukrainian and used as evidence in future war-crimes trials. Fomitchova says the book has two purposes.

“Over the months I spent as a medic in this war, I served alongside so many young, talented, compassionate, even humorous Ukrainians who had dropped everything and left their families to fight for the security and future of our country,” she said.

Her account places personal experience inside Ukraine’s longer history. She writes of the Holodomor famine engineered by Stalin in 1932-33, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident that prompted her mother to move with her to France, and the 1960s killings in Moscow of her grandparents—her grandfather had served as security chief to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Volia is one of more than 1,300 war-related books published in Ukraine since Russia seized Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014.

Publishing of all kinds surged after the February 2022 full-scale invasion, as readers sought both escape and insight into national identity. Kharkiv publisher Oleksandr Savchuk says recent interest has cooled because of war fatigue and winter power shortages, yet demand for historical works on Ukraine’s past and cultural heritage remains steady.

Savchuk Publishing has just released the Ukrainian translation of the wartime journal of German medic Savita Wagner, who was killed while serving in Ukraine.

Wagner’s mother approached Savchuk at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair to arrange the edition, which was presented at the Kyiv International Book Arsenal Festival in May. Fomitchova recalls both the darkest and most humane moments she witnessed.