6 June 2025
Teresa Cherfas reviews Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War by Julian Evans, Scotland Street Press; November 2024; Hardback; 353 pp; £24.99; ISBN: 9781910895986.
There’s something thrilling about sitting down to review a book about Ukraine titled Undefeatable in the aftermath of shock and awe inspired by Ukraine’s “Spider’s Web” drone strike deep inside Russian territory.
Up until now, Julian Evans’ choice of title read more like wishful thinking, an aspiration, or an epithet, a description of Odesans’ sense of place and belonging, their love for this city with its unique history; Odesa’s indefatigable instinct for survival and reinvention, even in these toughest of circumstances.
Evans first set foot in Odesa in 1994, arriving by river boat down the Dnipro. Ukraine was newly independent, and he was smitten:
It was unlike any place I had visited, a world made of different materials, and unrelated story, in both senses of the word: unknown to me and not set forth. In the space of a single afternoon and evening it had shown me just enough to make it feel secret, half dreaming, romantic, improvised, held together by the theatre of life that was being lived here. It was the country beyond the back of the wardrobe. It was the magical costume party in a lost domain, one not without hazard. Anything could happen here.
He returned to Odesa five years later to report on the bicentenary of Pushkin’s birth for the BBC. Exiled by Tsar Alexander I, Pushkin had completed his most famous work, Eugene Onegin, in Odesa.
At a new German-style restaurant on Odesa’s main drag, Deribasovskaya, Evans got into conversation with the waitress: “pale-skinned, her face as round as an apple, black hair tied back. Her badge said ‘Natasha’. She looked like a Goth painted by Botticelli.”
Even before that point, in the very first few pages of Undefeatable, datelined November 2022, we learn that Evans is looking for his ex-brother-in-law. In Evans’ telling, his own Odesan love story ended before it had even begun, but not before Odesa itself had invaded every fibre of his being.
The structural device of alternating between the present war and recapturing his thoughts and emotions during previous visits works as a perfect foil. Evans inserts captivating diversions, recounting episodes from Odesa’s history, anecdotes about its people, mythical and real, and jaw-dropping stories about its mafia-style rackets during the wild early years of Ukrainian independence, and not least his own very personal feelings in describing his intimate relations.
His involvement with Odesa is fascinating and leads to crescendos of pure poetry about the city and its people:
A theatre that keeps me alive, hopeful and entertained, between its clean-washed sea coast and its forgotten tracts of steppeland, between its whisper of unfurling wheatfields and its glitter of ship-dark roads and come-hither beaches amid the wrecks of former Soviet pleasure domes, whose rotten iron spars remain while their fake Balearic successors gush up out of laundered dollars in plain sight. An untrammelled place of monasteries and pulverised dust, pawn shops and Strip Bars, brutalism and big-eyed children, chess tables on the beach and self-drawn tattoos, lovers with nowhere to go, urgent dancing, oblivion. A state within a state that needs Ukraine around it and pays its subscription annually in grain exports, raki, raw beauty and sarcasm. I can spin this saucer for ever. (…)
His marriage to Natasha provides him with an insider’s access to the city. He becomes family, and through his Odesan family observes the old rituals of personal networks and favours that open all doors. He describes his parents-in-law, and how the war impacts their relationship, he becomes party to the transformation that the war brings to his brother-in-law and his mates, beginning after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014. His writing is suffused with tenderness and compassion, but also a steely insistence when he points out the mistakes and misapprehensions of the West in the trajectory that led from Crimea in 2014 to all-out war in February 2022.
Evans doesn’t flinch from describing the less appealing episodes in Ukraine’s emergence as a Europe-leaning fledgling democracy, with the kidnap and murder in September 2000 of the journalist Georgiy Gongodze, who was investigating corruption among Ukraine’s ruling elite, and the small protest that just four years later erupted as the Orange Revolution. For Evans, this back story is essential to an understanding of the root cause of today’s war with Russia:
Before Putin started his war in 2014, the main division in Ukraine was not between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. The division was not between nationalists and not-nationalists. It was not between western Ukraine and Donetsk, Luhansk and the rest. (…) The main division in Ukraine in peacetime was between the super wealthy and the working people.
He offers a very convincing interpretation of how Donbas became separatist in 2014. Using a methane explosion at a mine in the centre of Donetsk in 2001 as a starting-point, Evans describes the corruption of Ukraine’s businessmen and the pressures on the press not to report it. Conditions at Ukraine’s mines were terrible, and the lives of miners were cheap. This was not the first accident at the Zasyadko mine and it wasn’t the last.
Talking about oligarchs such as Rinat Akhmetov, whose financial base was Donetsk, but who also owned the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol (made famous during the siege of Mariupol, when it served as the base for the Ukrainian Azov Regiment), Evans remarks that the only places with fine roads, for example, were where Akhmetov’s, and other oligarchs’, business interests lay. They were treating the local working men with contempt:
In short, it was the Donbas’s oligarchs and their similarly powerful friends in Kyiv and Moscow who created the conditions that sparked Russia’s garbage fire in Ukraine and set it smouldering.
In 2015, through a friend of his brother-in-law, Evans had volunteered as a member of the Hospitaliers to bring medical aid and equipment to Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Eastern Ukraine. In a chapter titled ‘Shell Shock,’ he first describes an episode, dateline 6-7 December 2022, in which he visits a hospital, where patients have come with kontuziya, which he understands to mean ‘concussion’, but soon realises is shell-shock: “Blank, de-animated, with irradiated eyes, their faces look as though their circuits have been switched off, as if someone simply pulled a plug out of the wall.” As I read on, I was stunned by his description of a mortar attack: “When a mortar explodes, its casing breaks into razor-sharp fragments travelling in an explosive shockwave moving at between 6,000 and 10,000 metres per second. If this piece of metal doesn’t kill you, at least it is red-hot, so the wound is sterile.” Something made me turn back the pages to see where I was. I had not noticed that the section was datelined June 2015, so seamless was the transition from 2022 back to 2015. This has been a continuous war, which the Ukrainians have fought since 2014. The only difference now is that it is wider and with an open declaration by Putin.
Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, 14,000 Ukrainians had been killed and two million internally displaced. Evans has spent these years listening to Ukrainians, and we are fortunate enough to eavesdrop on those conversations. In 2015, on a journey to the frontline with the Hospitaliers, a sniper called Kostya with the looks of Robert de Niro, told him:
‘Last year, I took my family to Germany. I saw many wind turbines there, so I asked about the economics of wind-farming. I was amazed. The return on your investment starts after twenty years. Ukrainians don’t have this mentality. They used to plan, maybe a year ahead. Now they only look at next week, because they know that one Russian rocket can destroy all their plans.
‘Europe doesn’t understand that this is its frontline. It has forgotten that a single enemy rocket can destroy all their plans.’
Odesa, Odesa – it’s an intoxicating brew. It’s a city of myth and fable, its characters larger than life, but it is also a prism through which to look at how the war is changing both the city itself and Ukraine. In the early days of the full-scale invasion, Odesans were still majority Russian speakers and identified with Russian culture, even if they did not like Putin. At a social gathering, Evans’ implication that Russia was inferior, produced a “courteous silence”. But as the war progresses, Evans observes a rallying effect on Ukrainians of all stripes, and the reorientation of Odesans to identify their future with Ukraine. Odesa stands at the centre of a controversial and ahistorical plan of ‘ukrainiansation’. Evans is wary of its 2023 inclusion in the list of World Heritage sites, and what it could herald:
Make a building as beautiful as it was when it was new and you cover up the memory it stores in its ruined state, you undo the worn-smoothness, the not-fittingness, the tilts, scuffs, cracks, you erase them with sealed-clean and righted surfaces and the head- turning tang of paint, and the new version is timeless museum-fodder, its human message expunged.
Is this a criticism of the ukrainianisation of Odesa too, the expunging of its Russian associations? It’s not entirely clear. Arkady Ostrovky argues that what happens in Odessa (note the spelling) will shape what kind of country Ukraine becomes.
Drawing on a multitude of far-ranging and often obscure literary references, he fills his writings with wise aperçus and vivid imagery. He quotes from Orwell, Kundera, Kazantzaki, Paustovsky, Norman Lewis, Ayn Rand, Babel, Akhmatova, Tolstoy, Shevchenko; the painters Courbet and Sorolla get a mention, and one I’d never heard of, Bessel van der Kolk and his landmark book, The Body Keeps the Score. A landmark I’ve yet to discover. In a chance meeting with a beguiling Russian woman called Tatiana, in the apartment building where he is renting a flat, she’s holding a shopping bag, whilst he’s holding a copy of Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian Novel. What else?
Evans is given to cod psychology, not only of Tatiana, his post-Natasha love interest (or as he describes her, “Natasha the remake”), but of the entire Russian nation: “Mass historical happenings affect every individual. Tatiana’s abuse as a girl mirrored the abusive habits of a nation, whose leaders called their citizens heroic while creating political and social conditions that subjugated them to being the state’s raw material that they could do what they wanted with.” And this extends to why Russians don’t protest against the war: “They’re used to the younger sibling being punished by the abusive parent.” Therapy-speak features in descriptions of Odesa itself: “What it’s for is to be my therapist, the place that has given me what I need for more than twenty-five years, that gives me the understanding that there’s somewhere to go. A permeable place that lets me drain away and vanish.”
Odesa is my discovered heart – war or peace – in a world where England no longer has that possibility (…) It’s taught me about love, made me a husband, made me a father, made me capable of whole object relations, because the city does not know how not to be human. It has the confidence to understand that perfection is trivial and that when things get bad, the opera afterwards will be better. The truth is, belonging is something I long for and will never achieve, but in Odesa I get as close to the heart of my longing as you can in this world.
In this marvellous, informative and very personal account, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, Julian Evans’ love of Odesa and Ukraine infuses his writing, and as a reader you have a privileged ringside seat beside him. His writing is beautifully descriptive and cogently argued, even if, at times, a bit too heart-on-sleeve. But even that works to his advantage, because his personal involvement and investment in Ukraine is palpable and sets his knowledge and analysis in a dimension simply not accessible to most reporters.
Along the way, Evans introduces us to Ukrainian writers little known in the West. Their cultural legacy will also play a significant part in shaping Ukraine’s future:
The ashes of empire can smother everything, but there’s still the eternal wind, the movement of air, currents in the ozone… Listen to your blood, for blood is the state. Respect each blade of grass, for grass is the nation, it is hope. (Yuri Andryukhovych, Recreations)
In the aftermath of operation “Spider’s Web”, Ukraine’s windswept grasslands will surely endure, the life force of an undefeatable nation.
See also Teresa Cherfas’ podcast Now & Then #31 in conversation with Marina Sapritsky-Nahum (pictured left), a social anthropologist and author of the book Jewish Odesa, published in 2024 by Indiana University Press.
