Artem Chapeye – författare

In Ordinary People Don't Carry Machine Guns, Artem Chapeye reveals his war, intimate and senseless, withholding nothing about his motivations, his nightmares, his new relationship with the world. Here one man, a pacifist turned fighter, a story writer turned soldier considers the reasons for and reactions to war on a very personal level. Chapeye investigates his role in the Ukrainian people's defense against the Russian army and his responsibilities as a father, a writer, a soldier, and a man of conviction. An avowed pacifist until 2022, Chapeye joined the Ukrainian army in the first days of the invasion. He tries to understand the large-scale decision-making that has a defining impact on both individual citizens and society-at-large: many of his fellow soldiers never considered enlisting before finding themselves at war; others fled the country. He wonders what his young children at home are doing and what they're feeling. The book has three parts, offering historical analogies and literary references throughout. 'When Darkness Comes' relates the first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 when lives and the peace were shattered. 'It's Necessary to Cultivate Your Garden' details the experience of the everyday people of Ukraine, workers and peasants, who look forward to returning to simpler lives. The last section, 'People Aren't Divided into Brands,' critiques the elitism of those who consider themselves above those who 'simply' fight. Deeply thought-provoking, intelligent, and heartbreaking, this is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the ways that war can change everything.

The Ukraine is a collection of twenty-six pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications. In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article 'the' in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places. In 'One Soul per Home' an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town; in 'The Unscrupulous Spirit of the provinces,' a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in 'False Premises,' a man romanticises his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin's Russia.