When war, loss, and unimaginable suffering become routine, a book can offer a kind of lifeline — especially one by a writer who has lived through such an ordeal and tried to make sense of it.
At the start of Russia’s full-scale war, some Ukrainians speculated if they’d see the rise of their own Ernest Hemingway: a writer whose books would not only capture the experience of a generation but come to define it.
Yet it soon became clear that the old paradigms of war literature no longer spoke to them in quite the same way. Among those who sensed this was Artur Dron, a young writer who, after Russia invaded, joined the fight to defend the country.
“Hemingway knows nothing about (our) war. That’s it. For a long time, I believed in what Hemingway wrote, but I got a radically different war than the one he knew,” Dron writes in his essay collection “Hemingway Knows Nothing.”
“In 2022, it became clear that Ernest Hemingway couldn’t tell me the most important thing about what had been happening in my country since 2014.”
