Artem Chapeye: love, war and happiness in (the) Ukraine

Blog series European studies

Author Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections

A collection of short stories under the title The Ukraine is Artem Chapeye’s debut in English. Translated by Zenia H. Tompkins, the book was named a Best Book of 2024 by The Telegraph (UK). And no, one doesn’t have to be embarrassed for the editors noticing the definite article in the book title. As the publisher explains, ‘in the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article ‘the’ in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners’. This might be a credible explanation, although in my view, Artem Chapeye, a Ukrainian writer, journalist, translator, activist – and from 2022 a military serviceman – is talking primarily to his compatriots. Written between 2010 and 2018, these 26 short stories are funny and romantic, humane and complex, strange and empathetic. Mixing fiction and non-fiction, Chapeye offers his readers travelogs, essays and vignettes showing compassion and love to all the people who live in the country that used to have this strange definite article in its title for so many years. In his opinion, ‘everyone has a universe inside, a vast cosmos filled with internal seas’.

Interest in people and openness to the world are the features that the reader can see in all Chapeye’s books. ‘The overwhelming love’ to every person, a single blade of grass, a brick in an old nine-story apartment block, a tiny brown sausage-dog and an impudent stripy cat – this is how Chapeye talks about his feelings in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in his book Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, included in The Washington Post list of 50 notable works of nonfiction 2025. This was first published in French as Les gens ordinaires ne portent pas de mitraillettes (Paris, 2024). Of course, the feelings have dramatically changed since then, and the book might be called an honest revelation about the internal transformation of people, which contributed to the choice of military status. In his interviews, the author says that he wrote the book largely for foreign readers. This explains why the book appeared in Ukrainian only in 2025 under a slightly different title: Not Born for War.

In the first months of the war, Chapeye contributed to the book Viina 2022: shchodennyky, esei, poeziia (Lviv/Warsaw, 2022; YF.2023.a.12694). Having been a supporter of nonviolent resistance, Chapeye joined the Ukrainian army in the first days of the war. It was a conscious decision, although reflecting on it, he wrote: ‘Suddenly I asked for a pseudonym ‘Pacifist’’. His diary ends with the entry dated 10 April 2022: ‘It is worse than nightmares to dream that you are hugging your children and saying: ‘Hope this is not a dream’. And then you understand that it was indeed a real dream and you wake up to sadness’. Four years later, the war is still going on, and Ukraine and its people are still standing strong. As Chapeye wrote in his dystopian novel Vyvitriuvannia (Chernivtsi, 2021; YF.2022.a.1683) published just a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ‘we will not be blown away’. One can also translate it as “we will not be eroded”. (An English translation of Vyvitriuvannia is hot off the press: The Weathering, translated by Daisy Gibbons. London, 2026).

In an interview given to the website Chytomo, Artem Chapeye said: ‘I now understand that The Ukraine was written too precisely. People are imperfect but beautiful. The last sentence of the book is ‘People are beautiful, even if they don’t realize it’. I see all the same things now, but under different circumstances and in different situations, the circumstances are much more tragic. Everyone is becoming legendary in their own way’.

With this attitude to life, it is not surprising that his new book that is due to be published soon, is about happiness, or as the author himself puts it on his Facebook page about happiness in difficult times’ and ‘what it means for everyone’, because ‘for everyone it means a different thing’.