Sasha Vasilyuk interviews Yaroslav Trofimov about his debut novel, “No Country for Love.”
By Sasha Vasilyuk
February 20, 2025
Los Angeles Review of Books
YAROSLAV TROFIMOV IS as close to an international man of mystery as I’ve ever met. As the chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where he’s worked since 1999, Trofimov can be seen in Ukraine one week and in Syria the next. Two days after our Zoom interview—which he conducted from Damascus, I from San Francisco—he was sitting on a peacock-colored stage at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India. His biography is just as colorful. Born in Soviet Ukraine, Trofimov grew up in Madagascar speaking French. After moving back to Kyiv and serving in the Soviet army, he pursued a journalism degree at New York University. He’s written two nonfiction books about the Middle East and, more recently, one about the war in Ukraine.
And yet, this life of an international correspondent is in many ways the opposite of the one captured in Trofimov’s debut work of fiction, No Country for Love (2025). The novel, which tells the story of Debora, a young Jewish woman in Stalinist Ukraine, often reads—in the best sense—like reportage: it’s a well researched story brought to life by a skilled correspondent who not only has clearly seen his share of world conflicts but also understands what the drive to survive does to the human psyche.
No Country for Love was inspired by Trofimov’s grandmother. He felt an urgency to tell her story in 2014, when the conflict in Ukraine began—the same reason I began writing my own first novel, which was similarly inspired by my grandfather in Ukraine and his lifelong secrecy. Though Trofimov and I were both born in Ukraine and finished our debut novels at the same time, on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we weren’t aware of each other’s work until more recently. As we spoke, I was surprised to discover that we reached a lot of the same conclusions about the important connections between the past and the present in Eastern Europe. Our conversation and the release of his novel took place right before the United States and Russia surprised the world by launching a negotiation on the fate of Ukraine.
SASHA VASILYUK: You began working on this book in 2014, as a result of Russia annexing Crimea and backing the conflict in the Donbas. Why did you want to go back to the 20th century in your novel?
YAROSLAV TROFIMOV: I think it’s impossible to understand “now” without understanding “then.” And it’s impossible to understand “then” without knowing what actually happened. This is a history that was hidden and secret—it was something that people whispered about in their kitchens. There was a lot of shame because people had to do awful things to survive, and I think that period animates Ukraine’s resistance now. These terrible losses that Ukraine incurred in the last three years—so many people have died or been maimed—are because people have this
unspoken assumption: never again. We cannot go back to that past. Russia taking over means going back to the dark past that has created so much trauma. I mean, the very first thing the Russians do when they take over a city in Ukraine is raze the local monument to Holodomor, the famine, because they deny it exists.
The scenes of life during the famine, World War II, and other events between the 1920s and 1950s are loosely based on your grandmother’s story. Tell me about your decision to fictionalize this history.
I started writing the book after she passed. Before, I had sat down with her and taken notes about her past. It was a past that was hidden. The first draft was very close to reality, but it didn’t have the documentary evidence that a nonfiction book would have. I didn’t have enough documentation, and she was no longer there. If you choose to fictionalize, then the logic of the novel takes over: characters have to develop, timelines need to be kept shorter to make more sense. I was very eager to do that because [of my experience] writing a previous book [2007’s The Siege of Mecca], a nonfiction book about the seizing of Mecca by Islamist radicals in 1979. I remember, as I was writing it, thinking, Oh my God, I wish I could do this as a fiction project. Reality is so messy, it goes back and forth; if it could be just straight, it would make so much more sense. You cannot [create this linearity] in a nonfiction book, but you can in a fiction book—and I did. I think in some ways that probably makes the story resonate more.
I read that it was your agent who suggested fictionalizing it?
He said I had to choose: is it a nonfiction book that follows reality, or is it a fiction book that has the logic of a fiction book? Fiction allows you to introduce a lot of other interesting elements; it’s a vehicle for acquainting people with Ukraine and Ukraine’s history and literature. There are also layers in the novel that people who are educated in Ukraine and are younger understand right away. For example, there are Ukrainian literary figures who are introduced by first name in the book. I had a 24-year-old Ukrainian literature student moderate my book talk in Scotland, and [when one of those figures came up] she was like, “I know who that is.” It’s like a secret layer of meaning.
Were you intimidated by the prospect of writing a novel after a career in journalism?
I found it very liberating, actually. It’s a different language. If you write a narrative nonfiction book, you have to unlearn a lot of things that make you a good journalist—suddenly you have a lot more space, you can go deeper, you have to have a narrative. In journalism, we are taught to use shorthand, often clichés. It’s different writing long-form. You train a different muscle. With fiction, even more so.
Had you ever written fiction before?
I wrote a novel when I was 21 years old, and I’m extremely happy no one ever published it or I’d live in infamy.
What made you decide to frame No Country for Love as a murder mystery? Did you want to give Debora a way to take revenge against Soviet power in a way your actual grandmother couldn’t in real life?
This was part of the emotional liberation. I went back to thinking what my grandmother would have done, could have done—what she wished she had done. That also allowed me to sharpen the narrative. While I took liberties with the actual story of my grandmother, I tried to keep the historical setting as faithful as possible. I went to Ukraine and leafed through newspapers, advertisements, magazines, looking at photos—just trying to reconstruct everything as faithfully as possible, which I think gives it a degree of authenticity.
That’s why I love when journalists write fiction: the world they show feels so believable.
I read a lot of diaries of people from that time as well. The book Babi Yar (1970) by Anatoly Kuznetsov also reflects what I’ve read in the diaries of people who were there around the time of my grandmother.
Did anything surprise you in reading those diaries?
What surprised me was that, by then, the Soviet Union had already managed to annihilate the notion of truth—so even when things were true, people didn’t believe it, which had a lot of consequences. Kyiv was the place where the Babyn Yar massacre happened, which was the first major atrocity of the Holocaust and the biggest at that point. When the Germans came to Kyiv, a lot of Jews actually welcomed them because so many of them dismissed Soviet descriptions of Hitler’s antisemitism as lies and propaganda. They were saying that the Soviet Union lied to them about everything else, so why not about this? Quite a few Jews voluntarily lined up and went to Babyn Yar, thinking that they could believe German promises. And that was the tragedy of it, because in this respect, the Soviets were correct. Tens of thousands died, including my great-grandfather.
The whole theme of the book is the corrosiveness of totalitarianism on the human soul, and how the purest of people, in order to survive, have to make decisions that are immoral—that are wrong, that cause harm—because they have no choice. And also how the worst people can make lifesaving and noble gestures at different moments. Humanity is complex.
From Ernest Hemingway to Vasily Grossman, the 20th century had its share of writers who did both journalism and fiction. Were any of them, or perhaps just other novels, helpful or inspiring for you as you worked on No Country for Love?
I discovered Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist and novelist who wrote great books (1944’s Kaputt and 1949’s The Skin) that are very visceral. Obviously, Grossman too, who is from the same place as the character Samuel—from Berdychiv, the birthplace of Joseph Conrad and the place where Honoré de Balzac got married. So much of the canon of the 20th-century literature is focused on wars, I guess, because wars are moments of suffering and great cataclysms that are—in some ways—easier to describe. Everything is starker and clearer about people’s nature.
If you read Ukrainian literature—for example, the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 1920s–1930s—a lot of it is very morally complex. The most famous of this period is Mykola Khvylovy, who wrote this book called “I (Romance)” (1924), where the main character, a young revolutionary, ends up sentencing his own mother to death, and it’s kind of a true story. Unfortunately, almost nothing of the great 20th-century Ukrainian literature has been translated into English, so it’s completely unknown, such was the Soviet success in wiping out Ukrainian heritage.
You have covered the war in Ukraine extensively, including your recent nonfiction book Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence (2024). As a journalist, your role in covering a war is very clear: to inform the rest of the world on the realities on the ground. But what do you think the role of fiction is during war?
I think it’s the same, right? I mean, you educate in a different way. I think it’s really important to bring home that historical trauma, to explain what exactly happened and how it affects what people are doing today. Because this is a story of my grandma’s family, but almost every family in Ukraine has similar stories. We all descend from people who survived a terrible period when Ukraine was the deadliest place on earth. I think many Ukrainians understand that to surrender would be to return to that past, to return to this enforced forgetting of who we are and where we come from. There is a real feeling now that history is repeating itself.
Did your research change how you see today’s war in Ukraine?
I finished writing the book just before the full-scale war began, in January 2022. I found it very eerie, because I remember describing the details of Kyiv when the Nazi bombing began and how it looked. And I did it based on diaries of people who were there. Then, literally a month later, I was in Kyiv being bombed—living this experience in real life, which was very eerie. Strangely, it was as I had imagined. The similarity was shocking.
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and the author of the novel Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024), which spans from World War II through the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, The Telegraph, Narrative, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.