After Russian forces took control of his village in 2022, Volodymyr Vakulenko, a well-known Ukrainian author, sensed he might soon be arrested. So he buried his new handwritten manuscript in his backyard, under a cherry tree.
Best known in Ukraine for his cheerful and lyrical children’s books, Mr. Vakulenko was seething with anger at Moscow’s occupying forces. As his village lost cellphone service and news from the outside world dried up, he filled his new work with reflective, sometimes morose, descriptions of life under Russian control: people neglecting their flower beds, cooking on campfires as utilities failed, and even fraternizing with the Russians.
Soon enough, Russian soldiers indeed arrested Mr. Vakulenko, and his body later turned up in a mass grave.
Six months later, a fellow Ukrainian author, Viktoria Amelina, learned of the buried book, dug it up, wrote a foreword and sent it to a publisher. But she too was killed, in a missile strike on a pizza restaurant.
In May, in a final blow, Russian missiles blew up the printing plant in Kharkiv that had published the work. That strike killed seven employees, wounded 22 others and took out about a third of Ukraine’s overall book-printing capacity.
Despite the anguish that accompanied it, the book, “I Transform: A Diary of Occupation and Selected Poems,” ended up on shelves of Ukrainian bookstores and is on sale today. Rescued from the dirt, the book stands as a symbol of an enduring Ukrainian literary life even as Russian forces try to snuff it out.
The deaths of Mr. Vakulenko and Ms. Amelina, and the scene of mayhem at the destroyed plant — with burned bodies and books strewed about — have galvanized Ukraine’s publishing community.
“Now, under shelling, there’s an experience of creating under pressure,” said Olena Rybka, an editor at Vivat, the publishing house that printed Mr. Vakulenko’s book. She compared the burst of creativity with an earlier era when Ukrainian authors risked Soviet repression to publish their works.
“Even people who were bored by it in school are interested now,” she said of Ukrainian literature, in an interview at a book reading in Kharkiv, held in a basement for safety.
The demand for books in Ukrainian has persisted, even increased, since the war started, Ms. Rybka and others said. New Ukrainian fiction, nonfiction about the war, translations of global best sellers, popular history and self-help books have all done well, said Serhiy Polituchyi, the founder of Vivat and owner of the damaged printing plant.
Vivat published 279 new Ukrainian-language titles last year, up from 198 in 2021, the year before the invasion. During the war, while other businesses shuttered, new bookstores opened in Kyiv, the capital, and other Ukrainian cities.
Last month, a book fair in Kyiv drew overflowing crowds and included a display of burned books from the printing plant strike in Kharkiv. The Literary Museum in that city runs two writers’ residency programs, which have been filled throughout the war.
But unfortunately for Ukraine’s book market, the hub of both publishing and printing is in Kharkiv, only about 25 miles from the Russian border and at risk now from bombardments and a nearby front line. Some in the literary community believe Russia targeted the printing plant as a means to erode Ukrainian culture.
Mr. Polituchyi’s plant printed about 40 percent of the country’s school textbooks. Textbooks in particular, he said, were a likely target for Russia, which has been sharply critical of Ukraine’s history curriculum in schools.
The tale of how Mr. Vakulenko’s work made it to stores underscores the resolve of Ukraine’s book industry — and the perseverance of Ms. Amelina.
She did not know Mr. Vakulenko before his disappearance, according to Ms. Rybka, the book editor, who knew them both. But Ms. Amelina shared her fellow writer’s passion for the Ukrainian cause and took personal risks to advance it. She promoted awareness of the war in writers’ circles internationally and assisted a nongovernmental group, Truth Hounds, that documents Russian war crimes.
Deeply troubled by Mr. Vakulenko’s disappearance, Ms. Amelina became fixated on his fate, agitating for rights groups to ascertain if he was in Russian captivity.
Ms. Amelina found the manuscript by chance after the Ukrainian Army reclaimed Mr. Vakulenko’s village, Kapitolivka, southeast of Kharkiv, in September 2022. She visited the author’s father, Volodymyr, to document the writer’s abduction for Truth Hounds. The father told her of the buried manuscript, and the two dug it up together.
In her foreword, Ms. Amelina described looking at the bundle of papers in a plastic bag and thinking of Ukrainian writers murdered in a Soviet crackdown in the 1930s. Those rounded up in mass arrests and killed in gulags became known as Ukraine’s executed renaissance.
“My biggest fear is coming true,” Ms. Amelina wrote in the introduction. “Like in the 1930s, Ukrainian artists are killed, their manuscripts vanish and memories about them fade.”
“It was a sign of her humanity,” Ms. Rybka said of Ms. Amelina’s determination to have the manuscript published. “She was always fully engaged. She always wanted to help. That is why we are so sorry she died.”
Before the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Mr. Vakulenko had written children’s books like “The Sun’s Family” and “Three Snow Stories.” He also published poems, some for children. His buried manuscript, “I Transform,” chronicled the arrival of Russian soldiers in his village at the outset of the invasion. The title refers to a poem he wrote before the invasion foreseeing his work as “doomed” by the war that would sweep over his country.
Living with his father and his young autistic son in a brick house with a shady, overgrown back yard, he had watched the Russian soldiers rumble into the village, setting up checkpoints, looting abandoned houses and arresting anyone suspected of pro-Ukrainian views.
Throughout the book, he wrote of the hardships and trauma of war for regular Ukrainians, who had to deal with the Russian occupation on top of the challenges and vulnerabilities of their everyday lives. He wrote of teaching his son, Vitaly, to drop to the ground during bombardments.
“Vitalka and I had repeatedly practiced the command, ‘Get the heck down!’” he wrote. “Children with his autistic makeup cannot understand why one is not allowed to lie prone in the dirt one minute, and the next it’s the opposite. Actually, Vitalka was the one who made it positive, as reaction to indirect fire became a fun exercise to him.”
Mr. Vakulenko tried to help the Ukrainian Army. He wrote of walking to Ukrainian lines together with his son, when this was still possible, to hand out cigarettes and food.
Later, he worried about being arrested for his pro-Ukrainian views despite efforts to keep them secret. “In case I get taken prisoner: I don’t know anything, my telephone has been wiped and I don’t discuss these topics on social media with anyone,” he wrote.
But he worried about the fate of his new work, “I Transform.”
“I realize that these manuscripts may end up in the hands of the F.S.B.,” he wrote, referring to the Russian intelligence agency.
Soldiers questioned Mr. Vakulenko after a fellow villager informed on him, the father said. Worried they would find his manuscript and destroy it, or rewrite it and use it as Russian propaganda, he buried it under the cherry tree. “He knew he would be taken,” the father said.
Mr. Vakulenko was arrested on March 24, 2022. That May, a villager found his body in a forest, his father said. The Russian occupation authorities eventually retrieved it and put his body, along with more than 400 others from the area, in a site of mass and unmarked graves in the eastern town of Izium.
After the Ukrainian Army drove the Russians out of the region, war crimes investigators excavated the site and found Mr. Vakulenko in a grave marked number 319. His remains were identified by DNA analysis. An autopsy found that he had been shot at close range with a pistol and that bullets hit his left arm and torso, according to a report by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office.
Later that fall, after ensuring “I Transform” was published, Ms. Amelina was mortally wounded in a missile strike on the pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, while guiding Colombian writers on a tour of frontline areas. She died later in a hospital.
Mr. Vakulenko’s father is grateful that Ukrainians can read his son’s book, but acknowledged his pride was tempered by the string of tragedies that led to its publication.
“I read it and cried,” he said.
