Book Reviews

5 March 2025

by Clem Cecil

Clem Cecil reviews One Ukrainian Summer: A Memoir About Falling in Love and Coming of Age in the Former USSR by Viv Groskop [Hardback, £16.99, 192pp., ISBN-9781804184868, Ithaka Press, London, 2024]

Linguistic humour and a sense of the absurd are veined through this coming-of-age memoir set in early 1990s St Petersburg and Ukraine, when Viv Groskop was spending a year learning Russian. A continuation of Groskop’s part-memoir, part-primer on Russian literature, The Anna Karenina Fix, this is a labour of love driven by the author’s desire to understand her younger self in the context of a Russia and Ukraine in flux – and to find the seeds of today’s conflict. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Groskop wanted to find a way to write about her year in both countries, believing that at some point the two sides would have to start talking to each other again. However she didn’t want to profit from such an endeavour, especially knowing how much Ukrainian writers are suffering due to the ongoing war. So she made an agreement with PEN International that 100% of proceeds from the book, including the advance, would go to their Writers at Risk Programme. 

Men become obsessed with the young Viv Groskop regularly in this book, but she has eyes for one man and one man alone – Bogdan Bogdanovich, a beautiful young Ukrainian and lead singer of a rock band called Colney Hatch, named after the English lunatic asylum. A sense of breakdown pervades the text: Viv finds herself in sketchy places in St Petersburg as she follows the swoonsome Bogdan from nightclub to kommunalka to squat.

Groskop records the confusion and loss that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union: ‘People were anxious and sad and humiliated all at once, but also over-excited about Uncle Ben’s and Bounty.’ She notices the political apathy and the reluctance of Russians to discuss their political views with her: ‘The people I knew had intentionally cut themselves off from politics completely,’ she writes, ‘When I tried to talk to older people, I sensed they thought something, but not anything they wanted to get into with me. Either way, none of the conversations reassured me.’ Viv cannot understand why nobody is interested in having a conversation about the KGB and whether it still exists or not. 

Groskop is careful to demonstrate the differences between Russian and Ukrainian throughout the book. Whilst one of Viv’s  more aggressive beaus is happy to call her new boyfriend a khokhol – a denigratory Russian term for a Ukrainian – Viv’s other friend, a Ukrainian called Misha, teaches her some Ukrainian, although like her Russian friends, she doesn’t really see the need to learn it. At that time Russians saw Ukraine as an extension of their own country; Viv picks up some surzhyk – a term for a mixed Ukrainian-Russian language that means ‘with added rye’, referring to the great rye fields of Ukraine. 

As the year progresses, and the young Viv goes through trials in work and love, the prospect of a summer in Ukraine represents a reward for living through a gruelling winter and spring in St Petersburg – Ukraine as a shimmering dream.

Entering Ukraine Viv feels happy: ‘Finally I had come to a place where the sun was going to shine. For the first time in months, I felt as if I could breathe. The whole of me unknotted.’ She goes to stay with Bogdan and his parents in Krivih Rih, which also happens to be Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s birthplace.

The book is also a meditation on being a foreigner in Russia that many who have had that experience will appreciate. Misha and Viv have a word for a westerner- a yoghurt – because of the inane yogurt adverts from western companies that appeared in St Petersburg at that time. Like a happy shiny yoghurt advert, the young Viv often feels she doesn’t fit in – her reactions differ from those around her. She also has a period of blending in so effectively that she begins to lose herself. This is followed (she is more sensible than me) by a realisation that she is drinking and smoking too much, and then by wondering if she wants to fit in at all, as the rose-tinted scales fall from her eyes. 

The book ends with a sombre reflection on Russia that intertwines the personal and the political: ‘People always say that if you are in a certain place at a certain time then you have a ringside seat to history. But that’s just not true. You can be right in the middle of history happening and not be able to make head or tail of it.’ She admits that she didn’t foresee Russia’s increased aggression, let alone its invasion of its neighbour.

Groskop tells her story with a light touch, leaving us hopeful that there will be a day when the two sides of this terrible conflict will be able to talk to each other once again. But will this only be possible through an interlocutor? If so, let us hope it is as sensitive a one as Groskop.