By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine
Date and Time
Location
A book talk by Danielle Leavitt, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
Moderated by Yevhenii Monastyrskyi, Ph.D. Student at the Department of History at Harvard University.
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
About the Book
An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered.
Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chornobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years. [Source]
The book is available for pre-order here.
About the Speaker
Danielle Leavitt received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2023. Her work centers on the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space, with a particular interest in Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian relations, human age, generation, and gender. Her research works to integrate the stories of underrepresented populations, such as the elderly and women, into consequential debates about stagnation, cultural life, Soviet collapse, post-Soviet economic and political development, and the Russo-Ukrainian war. From 2025-2027, Danielle will be a fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan. By the Second Spring is her first book. It's available for pre-order here.
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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series.
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