The Land of Tears and Hope

About this book

An epic, popular history of Ukraine, from an acclaimed, front-line war reporter, directly countering Putin's attempted erasure of Ukrainian identity. "Likely the best-known Ukrainian after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy" (Der Spiegel), Illia Ponomarenko, author of I Will Show You How It Was, returns with a magisterial history of his homeland, dating back over 1,000 years and bringing us right up into the fraught present of Russia's invasion. Colorful and dramatic, The Land of Tears and Hope weaves the stories of animistic Slavic tribes, the arrival of the Vikings, Cossack revolutions, Soviet repression, and the Euromaidan uprising into the urgent manifesto of a nation under attack. Ukraine lies at a major European crossroads and has seen endless cycles of conquest and liberation, subjugation and self-determination, all of which have played out on an epic scale. Ponomarenko brings us history as it lives in the popular imagination, with myth, folklore, and poetry, alongside stories of conquest, resistance, and survival. From Yaroslav the Wise, the greatest figure in Ukrainian history, to Taras Shevchenko, the peasant painter whose poems live on to this day, to Serhiy Korolyov, the Ukrainian engineer at the heart of the Soviet space program, and beyond, readers will come away with a new understanding of who Ukrainians are and why they are fighting so hard.