Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the war has often been illustrated in broad strokes. In “By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine,” historian Danielle Leavitt zooms in on the intimate and often overlooked details of life during wartime. Through the stories of seven Ukrainians, drawn from a trove of online diaries and fortified with frequent text communication, Leavitt captures the uncertainty, resilience and emotional complexity that define daily existence in wartime. An American who grew up in Ukraine and the United States, Leavitt holds a doctorate in history from Harvard University, where she has been a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute. She uses her familiarity with the country and its people to offer a vivid, human-centric chronicle with empathy and insight of Europe’s largest land war in 75 years. “By the Second Spring” comes out Tuesday, and Leavitt speaks that night at Harvard Book Store. We interviewed her Thursday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
What made you want to write this book, and specifically to focus on the human experience aspect of the conflict?
At first, I was not looking to write a book. I was finishing my Ph.D. at Harvard, so I was deep in the work of finishing my dissertation. I gained access to a unique set of online diaries that were kept by Ukrainians, participants in a humanitarian aid project that my parents were involved in. I was the only one reading them at the time, and I was so blown away by the material in these diaries. They were by people that had been displaced, or who were at the major hot points of the war, so they were experiencing all sorts of artillery fire and violence. Like I said, I didn’t know I wanted to write a book, but I knew that I had to read these diaries, which I did obsessively. I was looking for connection and understanding, and the diaries were insightful and vulnerable. Over time, I began to sense that the stories people were writing in their diaries really mattered, and that somehow those diaries were actually central to what this war is and how we might make sense of it. The longer I read, the clearer it became that I needed to write this book. I reached out to several of the diarists, and those conversations grew, eventually turning into months of back-and-forth correspondence and relationships of trust. We corresponded via text for basically the first two years of the war, and they kept me up to date on what they were experiencing, where they were living, what it looked like and felt like to live in a modern war. Their voices brought a human depth that was so often missing from the headlines, and I felt a sort of responsibility to serve those voices in a form that would last longer than a social media feed or a fleeting news cycle. I would say overall, the choice to write the book was more of a quiet realization that this was something I had to do. This was a responsibility, I felt like, not just a project for me.
How did you find the people you chose to follow?
Choosing the seven was really hard, because there were a wealth of stories from the hundreds of people who were keeping diaries. It was really important to me that there was a cross section of Ukrainian society represented, so I wanted to make sure that different kinds of people were represented at different stages of their lives. I wanted people who were living in different parts of the country – some in the east, some in the west, some in the south, some in Kyiv or near Kyiv – and I wanted people with different lifestyles – some were farmers, some dealing with war in the middle of their cities – and I wanted people with different political convictions, because that’s a salient issue in Ukraine and very central to this war. I also needed to make sure that within those parameters, the people were willing and able to express their stories and committed to this idea of sharing their day-to-day experiences with me. I feel so grateful to have found the right seven people to tell their stories, with all of the uncertainty, humanity and vulnerability that they encompass. It was difficult to choose these seven, but I feel like I found seven incredible people who were each committed to sharing their lives openly and vulnerably, and it came together in this moving, braided story.
What were the common threads that came up?
The first is that human beings seem to possess this enormous capacity to choose for themselves how they will respond to circumstances that are thrust upon them or the situations that they find themselves in. Many of the people I followed chose deliberately to respond optimistically or hopefully, not to despair, not to give up on their country, on their families, on their bodies or on their communities. It was remarkable to see that capacity in them. The second is that there is no single or correct way to live through a war. Some people stay, some leave, some resist, some survive quietly. All of those choices are shaped by circumstance and identity, obligation, fear, love and so on, and I hope readers come away with a deeper respect for the complexity of the civilian experience. I hope they stop looking for purity or heroism and instead see the human weight of these decisions that people are making. I think the stories that I told ask us to hold contradictions without rushing to resolve them.
What else do you hope American readers, in particular, take away from this book that they might not get from news headlines or political commentary?
That Ukrainians are not actually that different from us. We’re made of the same stuff; we hope for similar things. We want children to grow safe and happy. We want our families to thrive. We want our society to be fair. The fact that war has come to them is simply an unlucky, unfair twist of fate that happens often in this world. The fact that it’s happening to them and not to us means nothing about them, and it means nothing about us. Our obligation is to support those who war comes to, rally behind those who war comes to and do our best to end war wherever it arises.
How did your own background, being American and Ukrainian, influence how you approached writing this book, emotionally and journalistically?
As a historian, I’m trained to step back and prioritize the voices of others, but in this case, I wasn’t an invisible observer, because I was in conversation with the people I wrote about. And since this is also a very personal story for me, the stakes felt high. I’m familiar with the places I was writing about and with the types of people who are central to these stories, so it blended the professional and the personal, the scholarly and the intimate. Throughout the writing process, I battled with the question of how much of myself to include in the book. I certainly didn’t want to overshadow the people at the center of the book, but I also didn’t want to pretend I wasn’t there, because this is a place I really care about and am deeply familiar with. In the end, I decided to include glimpses of myself throughout the book, and I hope this is a rich part of the book for readers. I think readers deserve to know how a story was shaped, who was asking the questions and what dynamics existed behind the scenes. This wasn’t a detached research project for me. Including moments from my own life, sparingly and carefully, was my way of being transparent about my relationship with Ukraine, and about the relationships that I had with my subjects. I think it helps show how storytelling can be mutual.
Danielle Leavitt reads from “By the Second Spring” at 7 p.m. Monday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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