How was the book "A House on the Line of Fire" created? Its author, journalist D...

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How was the book "A House on the Line of Fire" created? Its author, journalist Dmytro Durnev, tells the story

The guys from the StraightForward Foundation came up with this idea: they would support and edit books that could never be published in Russia.

At some point they found me and suggested making a book. It so happened that I was always working on the edge, on the edge of the line of contact, on the edge of the front line, on both sides of the front line. Since 2015, I was probably the only journalist who managed to do that.

This hybrid nature of my work ended up affecting me in the most unexpected way. I was writing here, in Riga, for Delfi, for Spektr... and at the same time I was writing from Donetsk. I worked in the occupied territory for about six years, until 2020. I was arrested and deported from there in December. And it so happened that a series of my reports about life in the self-proclaimed republic received the Redkollegia award. I had to reveal my pseudonym, and then it suddenly turned out that the Russian Redkollegia award for the best Russian-language text of the month had gone to a citizen of Ukraine.

The guys [from the StraightForward Foundation] said: "Why write a book? You'll just put it together from your reports." And they added: "Let's make a book for Europeans" - meaning broad context. To explain what Donbas is, how it all started there. And so for a whole year I simply immersed myself in it and wrote.

My grandmother was taken to Germany together with her cousins - they were amazing people. One of them had a husband, and when he got drunk, he sang "La Marseillaise." Later I accidentally found out that he had fought "in the maquis" (that is, he was part of the French Resistance during World War II and belonged to partisan units). That man wrote memoirs, but to this day I don't know where they are. Apparently, they were lost - after all, everything is written in Debaltseve.

I kept thinking that this was a terrible loss. That is why I wanted my grandchildren at least to have the chance to read about the place where we lived, about our roots, about our cemeteries, about our cities, about Kramatorsk. It seemed to me that Kramatorsk would no longer exist. But now almost five years have passed, and it is still standing. My mother is there, and life goes on - cafes and gyms are operating. So it turns out that my book goes on too.

And this astonishing world goes on as well - the world of the people from Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Marinka, Volnovakha, who have now been scattered all across Ukraine, all across Europe. But we are alive. And our book is alive, and our experience is alive. And what it says is that you must always live. Even in war, you must find your place in war and live.

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Dmytro Durnev's book "A House on the Line of Fire" tells in detail the history of Donbas from the early 1990s up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops in 2022. At this link you can buy the book, and here you can read an excerpt from it.