Nothing goes anywhere

"You're trying to get away? It's no use! I too was trying to get away, to ride away, to move to Lviv, or to Kyiv, to anywhere else. But you can't get away. There's a moment when cars stop driving out of town, and later you find out that commuter buses and jitney vans haven't been running for a long time, and then it dawns on you that you have remained forever where, in fact, you had been lingering merely in order to leave that place at some decisive moment. You are now stuck, you've become a hostage, a prisoner of people and circumstances, just like in the movies you used to watch, except that now you've become an unwilling actor in that movie, only to discover, to your astonishment, that there isn't and never was an art more petty, more heartless than contemporary cinema, all contemporary cinema without exception, including of course documentaries. Because when you wake up inside a work of whatever genre — comedic, heroic, documentary, military — the movie, to your astonishment, turns out to be unmoving, an infinitely protracted, monotonous, corrosive nightmare. And I would have really liked, with utmost sincerity, I would have liked to believe, as with any normal film, that this nightmare followed a plot development with a climax, an ending, and even an epilogue, but, from my observations, nothing of the sort takes place. Nothing goes anywhere. Nothing ever come close to this supposedly ancient, time-tested formulaic plotting."

— from Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets.

Written in Russian, but with a Ukrainian title, by a Ukrainian in Ukraine, and released by a Ukrainian publisher in 2018. 

Excerpt.

Translator Eugene Ostashevsky writes:

My first paper copies of Lucky Breaks came in the mail last night. I sent a photo of them to Yevgenia in Kyiv, with the words "The book is out!" She wrote back an hour later: "We are under fire!" I am writing these sentences on the morning of February 24th, 2022, the day that Russia — the country I was born in — has perfidiously invaded Ukraine, the country of my ancestors. 

Artforum: Letters from Kyiv: A wartime diary by Yevgenia Belorusets 
The Atlantic: Her World Began to Collapse, So She Started Keeping a Diary