Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina review – a precious and powerful work of literature

It is expected that a book review will be written with some degree of critical distance, but, in this case, distance is not possible. On 27 June, 2023, Victoria Amelina, author of Looking at Women Looking at War, was in a restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. She died of her injuries a few days later, leaving the book she was working on unfinished. Shock and grief at her killing continues to reverberate among those close to her, and among her wider circle of friends, of whom I was one. She was 37 and the mother of a young son.

The full-scale Russian invasion transformed every aspect of Amelina’s life. At the beginning of the war she threw herself into humanitarian work, as refugees from the east and south arrived in her home city of Lviv. But she soon began to realise that she could do something bigger through writing.

Amelina had previously been a writer of fiction – her most celebrated novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, published in English translation next year. But a full-scale invasion was not a time for novels. She began to write poems – the form that could best deal with the fragmentation of meaning and language wrought by war. Above all, though, it was a time for hard-headed documentation.

In this book, her only work of nonfiction – written in English to reach the widest possible audience – she set down a personal account of the terror of unfolding events. But she also wanted to tell a wider story. Into her diary she wove portraits of other extraordinary women and their work – including a soldier, a human rights activist, a librarian, a curator. The effect is of an ensemble of female voices, not a solo aria. After she trained as a war crimes investigator with the NGO Truth Hounds, her missions to recently de-occupied territories became part of the diary, too. She wanted her book to work as hard as possible: ultimately, to play its part in efforts to obtain justice for the outrages committed on her country and compatriots. She was inspired by Raphael Lemkin, the fellow citizen of Lviv who had coined the term “genocide”. Unlike Lemkin, she was no lawyer. But she used the tools she had.

She had sent her latest draft to a friend some days before she was killed. In the weeks after her funeral, an editorial group was assembled, consisting of writers Tetyana Teren, Yaryna Grusha, and Sasha Dovzhyk; as well as Alex Amelin, her husband. She had, they estimated, written about 60% of what she had planned. The typescript had a beginning and an end, and many gaps in the middle that existed as rough notes. The editors did not “complete” the book, but rather assembled the best and most readable version they could, occasionally inserting material from earlier drafts, adding footnotes, and making the status of the fragmentary sections as clear as possible. The book is illustrated with resonant photographs by Julia Kochetova, a regular contributor to the Guardian’s Ukraine coverage. The editors write in their afterword: “Life has taught us that there is only one way to deal with the pain: to continue the work of the people we love.” Their efforts are to be saluted. It has been no ordinary task of editing, but an emotionally demanding act of love, mourning and resistance.

The book begins in Amelina’s apartment in Lviv in mid-February, 2022. She knows war is probably on its way, but not precisely when. She is packing for a trip to Egypt with her son. On her bed, with the summer frocks and swimming costumes, is her new gun. It’s a shocking beginning, a foretaste of the perversions of “ordinary” life that war brings, delivered with the kind of deadpan, coal-black humour of which Amelina was a master. She folds the clothes into a suitcase and locks the gun into a safe. In the event, she is in the Egyptian desert when the Russians invade. She feels an unexpected, perhaps shameful emotion: relief. She quotes the Polish-Lithuanian writer Czesław Miłosz, writing in 1939: “The long-dreaded fulfilment had freed us from self-reassuring lies, illusions, subterfuges; the opaque had become transparent.”

Having delivered her son to relatives in Poland, she returns to Lviv to evacuate her mother and other family members; they all live close to a legitimate military target, a tank repair plant. In one of life’s historical ironies, it is where her grandfather, a Soviet fighter pilot, had been allocated an apartment after the second world war. She herself then returns to Ukraine, a solitary figure heading east across the border when, in the other direction, a crowd of refugees masses that resembles “a giant moaning creature with hundreds of hands, mouths and eyes”. She wants to turn away but makes herself look. “I have to stop seeing the suffering creature and start seeing individual human beings.”

Seeing individual human beings, not turning away: that is the underlying programme of the book, and what she demands that its readers do, too. The tone darkens – though there are always flashes of humour, optimism and light – as she heads east and starts work as a recorder of war crimes. Just short of halfway through the book, the manuscript begins to crumble and become less complete. Reading her fragmentary notes and sources, rather than what would have become polished prose, is a constant and terrible reminder of her death. At times the sheer rawness, though, is oddly powerful. One section consists of unedited testimony from a lab technician in Izyum, the town in eastern Ukraine she visited with Truth Hounds soon after the Russian withdrawal from the area in autumn 2022. The woman tells of the shooting of her colleague of 40 years, a 70-year-old pathologist, by a young soldier who described himself as a relative of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. It is unadorned, unsoftened – and devastating.

The scene then moves to her trip to the nearby village of Kapytolivka, where she interviews the parents of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a poet and children’s author. He had been arrested by the Russians and never came home, his distraught mother searching for him that whole terrible summer of occupation. (His body would later be identified in exhumed graves outside Izyum, shot with a Makarov pistol.) In his garden, under a stand of cherry trees, Amelina dug up his diary of life under occupation that he had buried, sensing trouble, just before his arrest. It ought to have been a climactic moment in the book, but at the time of her killing she had not yet fully written this scene. She had, though, described it to me in detail when I interviewed her about the Vakulenko case for the Guardian. I was celebrating the completion of the article, which she had suggested I write, at the moment she suffered her fatal injuries.

Soon after that passage in her account comes a cut-and-pasted quotation from a book on the fate of those who kept diaries during the Holodomor, the manmade famine caused by Stalin’s forced collectivisation of farms in 1932-33. Amelina was clearly using it as a placeholder, reminding herself that she was planning to weave together certain historical strands that connected the 1930s to the 2020s. She would doubtless have offered, here, an elegant meditation on the importance – and dangers – of truth-telling and documentation through diary-keeping.

She did not have time to flesh out all these suggestive connections in her own “war and justice diary”. But what she did achieve is to be greatly treasured. Looking at Women Looking at War is an important piece of testimony and a precious, powerful work of literature: a steady beam of light born amid darkness and violence.

• Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina is published by William Collins (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply