Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 28, 2025 to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a book talk by Danielle Leavitt. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
In February 2022, after years of saving money, Vitaly opened a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb. But his dreams of owning a coffeeshop came to naught when, three weeks later, a convoy of Russian tanks plowed through town and rockets destroyed the coffee bar and split his apartment building in two. Meanwhile, across the country, eighteen-year-old Anna drops out of police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she met online. Nearby, a family copes with the aftermath of a brutal train station bombing. Across the world, Polina abandons her career in fashion and returns home to Ukraine to organize relief efforts.
Over the past three years, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shaken the world order. But Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years has also affected countless individual lives. In By the Second Spring, historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. As battle lines shift, her subjects’ relationships, livelihoods, and loyalties are put to new and dramatic tests. How do you keep living when your home is destroyed, when your family is separated, when your body is wounded, or when the enemy lives a few doors down? Can you believe in the future while destruction rages on? To illuminate the complex and contested resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who led a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag.
An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of lives interrupted, rearranged and sometimes shattered in the midst of war.
See more about the book here.
Danielle Leavitt holds a PhD in history from Harvard University. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. In Fall 2025, Danielle will be a postdoctoral fellow and instructor at the University of Michigan’s Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia. She is currently working on a second book entitled When the New Soviet Man Grew Old: Generation, Gerontocracy, and the Aging of Socialism. By the Second Spring is her first book. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
