The reserve in twenty three volumes

The reserve's own journal site returns an error, which is the sort of thing you learn to read as news rather than as a technical fault. The mirror at the national library in Kyiv still works, and only if you leave the three letters off the front of the address, which cost me twenty embarrassing minutes. Behind it sit the volumes: yearly, from 2000 onward, twenty three of them, in Ukrainian, the last one from 2022.

This is the station where Ivanov did his crossings, and I finished that book more than a year ago. I am not going back for plot. I am going back because the region has been occupied since the first days of the war, because the occupation administration took the institution in March 2023, and because the people who ran it left, went on working somewhere else, and kept publishing the journal anyway. A journal is a strange kind of survival. It is also the last set of numbers that anybody outside can check.

I read three papers about grazing plots and understood perhaps half of each. That is fine. What I wanted was the tone of an institution keeping its own minutes: dry, seasonal, entirely unbothered by anybody's plot. The novel is finished and the archive around it is not, which is the part readers never see and the part I like best. I saved the volumes and backed them up twice.