One of American fiction’s core preoccupations, these days, seems to be the question of what causes unhappiness. Many of our major writers are earnest anatomists of discontent and its social, psychological, and existential causes. This kind of fiction can be very powerful. Reading about loneliness when you’re lonely can provide both diagnosis and solace; encountering a character trapped by student debt or patriarchal expectation can inspire a sense of camaraderie in a reader facing similar frustrations. But more often than not, contemporary novelists handle their subject matter with immersive seriousness and sincerity—and sincerity, after a while, gets tiring. Misery may love company, but sometimes a miserable person wants cheering up too.

If you’re looking to make a little light of sadness, as I have been, the work of Diana Athill might be the perfect place to turn. The legendary writer and editor is one of a loose cadre of 20th-century English and Irish women authors gaining resurgent attention for their brilliantly drawn characters and sharply witty prose; others in this camp include Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, and Molly Keane. These novelists are brisk and mordant stylists who treat sorrow and disaffection not as problems to solve or as states to submerge oneself in, but as conditions to be lived with and sometimes laughed at. This unsentimental approach could turn into a stiff-upper-lip denialism, but it instead intensifies the profound currents of emotion running through their work. Reading any of them is like cracking open a sea urchin: spiky outside, soft within.

The queen of the sea urchins is, without doubt, Athill, who died at age 101 in 2019. Athill grew up in shabby rural gentility and, after going to Oxford—unusual, at the time, for a girl of her background—helped launch the publishing house André Deutsch. There she edited writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and Keane, whose novel Good Behaviour she swiped from her colleague Esther Whitby: “In our firm,” Athill recalled in a 2017 Guardian essay, “the person who first read and loved a book usually became its editor. In this case, however, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Esther, but I am going to pull rank. I am going to edit this novel.’”

A similar decisiveness shines through Athill’s own writing. In her 40s, she began writing short fiction, followed by one novel and several memoirs in which she chronicled her life as an editor and a single woman unafraid of either adventuring in or candidly discussing the realms of sex and love. Don’t Look at Me Like That, the novel, and Instead of a Letter, her first memoir, have recently been reissued in the United States. Both are beautiful examples of Athill’s refusal to romanticize feelings.

In her afterword to Don’t Look at Me Like That, the writer Helen Oyeyemi describes being captivated by the “acidic crackle” of the book’s “novelistic I.” It’s a perfect turn of phrase. Athill writes in a series of miniature explosions: of meanness, of insight, of stark confrontation with loneliness or brutality or grief. She doesn’t shy away from any of this. Both reissued works dump readers into dark emotion with their first sentence. The memoir’s is “My maternal grandmother died of old age, a long and painful process.” The novel’s: “When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me, and it wasn’t far from true.” For Athill, death, pain, and being disliked are not subjects to duck—or, for that matter, subjects to mine. They’re natural parts of life, and, in fiction, sources of plot rather than of extended interest. It’s a tack that creates room for spite, surprise, and humor, and lifts her prose brightly from the page.

Don’t Look at Me Like That is especially acerbic. Its heroine, Meg Bailey, looks back with unsparing clarity on an adolescence and young adulthood defined by her cool-blooded view of unhappiness. Meg is breezy about the financial mismanagement that ruins her family’s fortune and affectionate toward the parents she disrespects for their naivete. As a teenager, she is already gimlet-eyed about her role models: She looks up at her friend Roxane’s mother, Mrs. Weaver, whose effortful glamour Meg realizes she’ll “one day, see … as a joke.” The knowledge that her admiration has an expiration date doesn’t seem tragic to her; it lets her more fully enjoy Mrs. Weaver in the moment. Meg is even jaunty about her first great disappointment, when she’s told at art school that she won’t succeed as a painter. After less than a paragraph of mourning for her ambitions, she jumps into professional illustration, at which she succeeds quickly while maintaining a sanguine, win-some-lose-some attitude.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meg’s apparent comfort with loss comes back to bite her. Much of the novel’s momentum comes from her ill-fated affair with Roxane’s husband, Dick. Meg feels passionately about Dick; her love for him is the one thing she can’t move promptly past, and, as their relationship falls apart, she descends into misery. Still, Meg makes a point of treating her grief spryly. Indeed, dwelling on it strikes her as nearly inhuman. “Why must you face facts when almost all of them are intolerable?” she wonders, recalling the dissolution of the affair. “Apart from the obvious ones like war and the bomb and concentration camps … how could I stay alive if I spent much time facing them? Even the tiny corners of cruelty and hopelessness which stick into my own life: what would have happened to me, during the time I am remembering, if I had faced them?”

The haste with which Meg pushes through the “intolerable facts” of her life has additional repercussions. Meg is congenitally unable to feel sexual pleasure, a condition that she talks about in brief, barbed terms: “I suppose,” she tells the reader, “that I am a freak.” But her lack of introspection about the effects her sexual detachment might have on others winds up causing hurt: Late in the book, Meg forms a bond with Jamil, an architecture student and her housemate. Although he has a girlfriend, Norah, Jamil yearns for Meg; she brushes his desire off, announcing that “in spite of the misfortune of his having fallen in love with me, Jamil and I remained friends.” She can’t see the complexities of having a friend and neighbor who is in love with her. When it blows up in a humiliating way, though, she feels shame and makes no excuses for herself.

Meg’s capacity to admit fault comes from her relationship to loss. She assumes that some badness, in herself and others, is natural. The novel ends with a confrontation between Meg and Norah in which Norah is genuinely, shockingly cruel—far crueler, in fact, than Meg would ever be. Still, in the book’s blazing last sentence, Meg shrugs it off. “There’s something almost enjoyable,” she tells the reader, “in having one person in the world I can truly hate.” Her crisp observation underscores what could be interpreted as the book’s thesis about pain: Just because you have to feel it doesn’t mean you have to wallow.

Athill’s memoiristic I has a warmer tone than her fictive one, though it’s no less sharp-tongued. Instead of a Letter opens on her grandmother’s deathbed, where Athill, in her mid-40s, sat and wondered that the idea of dying with no heirs did not cause an “icy wind” to blow through her: “I would like to know why. Which is my reason for sitting down to write this.” Questions about aging and legacy can invite sentimentality—think of Pixar’s Up and Coco, kids’ movies on those themes that double as tearjerkers for adults. Athill’s blunt curiosity is refreshingly straightforward in contrast. She is surprised herself, and just wants to know more.

Like her novel, the memoir covers its heroine’s childhood and roughly the first decade of her adulthood, in which she establishes herself as an editor and falls in love. On the latter front, Athill is at once strikingly emotional and strikingly unromantic. In the memoir’s best scene, she has unintentionally gotten pregnant and goes to a counselor to discuss her options. The counselor begins spouting pieties about how badly women suffer after ending pregnancies, which, Athill writes, “clarified my mind in a flash. I knew, now, that I must get on with the job of finding an abortionist.” Walking down the street afterward, she feels confident not only in her decision, but also in her scorn for the counselor—the “old blackmailer,” she calls her—that helped her arrive at it. She would love to have a baby, and feels that she “got pregnant by subconscious intention”; she knows herself, however, to be totally unprepared to raise one, and so she will not.

[Read: The calamity of unwanted motherhood]

Athill’s matter-of-factness about the decision to have an abortion is especially notable considering the question of posterity that she asks herself at the book’s outset. Another memoirist might have turned the counselor scene into a lengthier meditation on her feelings about maternity. Athill pins those feelings down swiftly, then moves on. She doesn’t return to the issue until the book’s final pages, at which point she reaches an answer, then instantly undermines it. “I have written a little, and I have loved,” she begins, and though she finds literature and romance enough in her 40s, she expects that “if I do not die until I am old, those things will have become too remote to count for much. I shall remember that they once seemed worth everything, but quite possibly the fact that by then they will be over will appear to have wiped out their value. It ought to be a frightening thought, but I am still not frightened.”

Athill underestimated herself. She kept writing memoirs—many about love and sex—for decades, and her final memoir, Alive, Alive Oh!, came out in the U.K. when she was 97. But maybe her icy wind did not show up because dying, no matter what she might or might not leave behind, just didn’t scare her. In her work, death, like love, loneliness, or humiliation, is more than natural: It’s too real and too human to fear.

The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions—the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms. Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much of the literature about intergenerational trauma focuses on the reappearance of symptoms in the next generation, though they may, indeed commonly do, persist into the third and beyond. Here they seem dormant in the children and resurface in a grandchild.

In Forgottenness (the first novel originally written in Ukrainian to be published by a major U.S. trade house), a young woman mops compulsively, finally driving away her fiancé. She is the narrator, a writer who is never named. The time is the present, which seems to mean about a decade ago; the novel came out in Ukraine in 2016. As a child, she learned how to wash a floor—really wash it—from her maternal grandmother, Sonia, a cleaning woman who is now barely clinging to life. You have to do the floor at least twice, Sonia taught her. Go over it once, and you’ll leave streaks of dirt. Sonia used to grab the mop out of the narrator’s hands when she didn’t apply enough force. “Why are you washing as if you haven’t eaten in three days?” she would demand.

Sonia’s reproach is not the innocent hyperbole of a babushka. Nothing is innocent in zombie history. Sonia is the one who didn’t eat for three days, likely more. Her mother died soon after she was born, and when she was 3 or 4, she tells the narrator, her father left her on the steps of an orphanage and said he’d be right back with some pampushky, garlic rolls. Instead he walked to the gatehouse of a factory and died. It was 1932, the first year of the Holodomor, a horrific famine in which close to 4 million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin’s monstrous agricultural policies, possibly deliberately. The orphanage took Sonia in but soon could manage to feed the orphans only three beans a day. She ran away and somehow made it home, to a large farmstead that had been turned into a commissary for the Communist Party elite. For lack of anything better to do, she went to the cemetery, lay down on her mother’s gravestone, and screamed for three days. Thereafter she spoke “almost inaudibly, her voice more like the rasp of an old wooden door.” How she survived is unclear. She had “an incredible, innate strength,” the narrator says.

Transmuting raw experience into symbols, and symbols back into raw emotions, is a basic operation of psychic processing. We do it in our dreams. Literature does it for us, as does, of course, religion. Wafers and wine conjure up the real presence of Christ; ritual is how we reconnect with the miraculous. It’s no coincidence that Sonia spent her working life cleaning a music school that had once been a Catholic monastery, lugging around a mop with a giant handle “that looked more like a cross awaiting a crucifixion.” After crucifixions come resurrections, and the narrator is getting ready to perform one. She scrubs the floor, once, then twice, day in and day out, refusing to leave her apartment, until Sonia’s long-repressed terror finally reemerges and takes hold of her. “A fear stronger than I had ever felt gripped and paralyzed me, and my mop fell to the floor with a clunk,” the narrator says.

Resurrection is the great theme of Forgottenness. Maljartschuk never uses the word, but reading between the lines, we understand that the exhuming of memory is meant to be a miracle. So much militates against it. History, for one, which she compares to the soot that coats an old painting. To restore color and detail—life—to the canvas, there must be a scrubbing, an undoing. Or, you might say, a mopping and a nervous breakdown. A mightier enemy of memory is time itself. “Time consumes everything living by the ton, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance,” the narrator says. “It wasn’t the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it.”

That whale, monstrous and deadly, swims through the novel like a biblical leviathan. We and all that we are made up of, “billions of minuscule, almost invisible worlds,” the narrator says, begin disappearing into its maw from the moment we’re born. Meanwhile the whale endures “in its own whale-space, absolute and immutable, where the need to think about something or remember anything doesn’t exist.” Maljartschuk doesn’t say this outright either, but we understand that the only memories that have a chance of outlasting oblivion are the ones written down.

Maljartschuk was born in 1983, eight years before the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Ukraine. She is one of her country’s best-known and most prolific writers, the prizewinning author of several short-story collections and one other novel. She has lived in Vienna since 2011, and also writes in German. When Maljartschuk came of age, at the turn of the millennium, Ukrainians were engaged in what Milan Kundera called “the struggle of memory against forgetting,” revisiting the history of violence and terror under Russian czars, Soviet Communists, and German Nazis, and rehabilitating characters who were erased from memory when the history of the Ukrainian nation was suppressed.

Viktor Yushchenko, a democratic reformist and the Ukrainian president from 2005 to 2010, was particularly preoccupied with the Holodomor. He embraced the view that it was an attempted genocide and erected Holodomor monuments throughout the country, incorporated it into curricula, and initiated government-sponsored research. And then, in 2010, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych defeated Yushchenko in a presidential election that had partly turned on Yushchenko’s uses of history. The public reckoning with the past came to an end.

Two years before Forgottenness was published, the Maidan Revolution drove Yanukovych out of Ukraine; shortly thereafter, Russia invaded the Donbas region, claiming it was Russian. The novel was presumably in process during this fraught period. In her earlier work, Maljartschuk availed herself of satire, absurdism, and fable to depict Ukraine’s mutating reality. One of her favorite tropes is having animals stand in for people and vice versa, blurring the lines between bestiary and human society. In her first novel, A Biography of a Chance Miracle (2012), set during the chaotic, impoverished Ukraine of the 1990s, a town starts paying its residents to round up stray dogs; a young, idealistic protagonist discovers that they’re being sold to restaurants and wages a quixotic campaign to save them: “Dogs of the world, unite! We won’t let ourselves get eaten!”

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Forgottenness is more rambling than A Biography of a Chance Miracle—memoiristic (maybe) and realistic-ish, with a heavy overlay of metaphor. The tone is distraught rather than wry, at times oppressively so. Human bodies do more of the work of social critique than animal bodies—with the exception of the stupefying bulk of the whale.

The novel weaves together two stories: the narrator’s and that of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, who was a political thinker and influential theorist of Ukrainian statehood at the turn of the 20th century. The narrator comes across an obituary of him when she begins taking old newspapers out of the library as part of her mission to revive the past. Three words are splashed in huge type across the front page of a 1931 issue of the Ukrainian American newspaper Svoboda, “VIACHESLAV LYPYNSKYI DEAD.” Here’s an obviously important man she’s never heard of. She decides to research his story, because it seems somehow bound up in hers.

The broad outlines of the narrator’s account of Lypynskyi’s life are factual; Maljartschuk makes up the details and the dialogue. Lypynskyi was an unlikely Ukrainian hero, Ukrainian by choice. He was born in 1882 in the town of Zaturtsi in Volhynia, a region then in the Russian empire (now in western Ukraine) and predominantly populated by Ukrainians (then known as East Slavs). Lypynskyi came from a small elite of wealthy, aristocratic Poles. Maljartschuk imagines how he announced his decision to identify as Ukrainian to his family: at the dinner table, at the age of 19. “Don’t call me Wacław. I’m Viacheslav,” he says.

In another scene, likely fictional, set in his professor’s house near Jagiellonian University, in Kraków, he tells fellow Polish students that he’s “a Ukrainian Pole.” To his family and friends, the statement makes no sense. Hybrid identity hasn’t been conceptualized yet, and anyway, as far as they’re concerned, “Ukrainian” is barely an identity; it denotes an illiterate peasant or a “peasant tongue.” In czarist Russia, the printing of Ukrainian books is illegal. In Kraków, which is Austro-Hungarian, Ukrainian is tolerated but considered ridiculous. Lypynskyi’s professor of Ukrainian has only one outdated high-school grammar book to teach from and must supplement the lessons by reciting poetry and singing folk songs. Antiquated, tradition-bound, “the stateless Ukrainian society increasingly resembled a dust-coated stage set that someone had simply forgotten to strike,” the narrator says.

Undaunted, Lypynskyi makes the rebirth of a Ukrainian nation his lifelong cause. In the novel, Polish friends call him a traitor. For a while, he does little besides study the life and career of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the leader of the great Cossack revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648 that led to the establishment of a free Ukrainian state that lasted 100 years. Ukrainians now hail Khmelnytskyi as a founding father, their George Washington. Lypynskyi points out to his critics that Khmelnytskyi was the son of a Polish courtier, therefore also a Ukrainian Pole. (I have to add that, all my life, I’ve been aware of a very different Khmelnytskyi: the leader whose uprising unleashed the slaughter of perhaps as many as 20,000 Jews. How much blame he deserves is now in dispute, but he is not absolvable. Maljartschuk doesn’t mention this Khmelnytskyi; to be fair, Ukrainians almost never do.)

Perhaps to show other Poles from Ukrainian areas how to imagine themselves as Ukrainian Poles, Lypynskyi eventually comes up with what the narrator calls his “best political idea,” territorialism: Citizenship should be determined by residence on a common land, regardless of ancestry, language, politics, or creed. This is true. Territorialism was Lypynskyi’s most original contribution to Ukrainian political thought. In a 1925 book not cited in the novel, he explained how his land-based concept of the nation differed from then-prevailing European views that grounded national identity in race. “Such a notion, in our colonial conditions, with periodic migration of peoples on our territory … is a complete absurdity,” Lypynskyi wrote. “There have never been and never will be ‘pure-blooded Ukrainians.’ ” Today what seems notable is how pro-immigrant he is: “Whoever settled in our country … and became part and parcel of the Ukraine is Ukrainian, regardless of tribe or cultural origin, of ‘racial’ or ‘ideological’ genealogy.”

Lypynskyi is to Maljartschuk what Khmelnytskyi was to Lypynskyi: a prophet and warrior for a better Ukraine. For the rest of his life, in the novel and in reality, Lypynskyi fought bitterly against Ukrainian ethno-nationalists. He also opposed Ukrainian socialists, who considered nation-states reactionary and obsolete. By the mid-1920s, he had lost both battles. The Bolsheviks absorbed the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a book by Lypynskyi’s nationalist nemesis won a following among Ukraine’s youth. They “would flail between socialist and nationalist ideologies like between the banks of a swift mountain river onto which few manage to clamber alive,” the narrator says. (The translation, by Zenia Tompkins, can get choppy.)

The portions of the novel devoted to Lypynskyi’s political evolution are straightforward and lively, even inspiring. Lypynskyi is a little pallid, though, compared with the narrator’s grandparents, who tromp through the novel like damaged giants. Bomchyk, the narrator’s paternal grandfather, is a toothless, joyous farmer. The narrator lived with him for a year when she was little, a period she associates with “the happiest times of my life.” Bomchyk weighed 330 pounds when he died. Before he got so fat, he laughed constantly. Now, as an adult, the narrator understands his transmogrification. Bomchyk laughed because he had the gift of being easily amused, but also because he had nothing besides laughter to call his own. He’d handed over whatever the Communists demanded when they established a collective farm in his village; resistance would have meant Siberia or worse. To avoid conscription, he’d played the idiot in front of the recruiters. Friends who melted into the woods to fight the Soviets wanted him to join them, but he pulled a comforter over his head and pretended not to hear them. The friends were shot and their bodies put on display as a warning, and villagers averted their eyes as they went by. Bomchyk’s laughter hid shame and powerlessness, and as life got sadder, he smothered the urge to giggle with food.

Symptoms circulate freely among the narrator and her characters: Zombie history would appear to operate on a principle of mimetic contagion. Right before she tells Bomchyk’s story, she goes through a phase of pathological overeating. This comes in the middle of a longer-lasting phase of agoraphobia, so when she runs out of food, she can’t leave to go shopping. Her parents bring over potato dumplings and cabbage rolls, which she stuffs into her mouth while they watch. “Look, don’t eat so much or you’ll end up like Grandpa Bomchyk,” her father says.

Lypynskyi is more vivid when his psychic crises hijack his body the way the narrator’s problems commandeer hers. He contracts tuberculosis and struggles to breathe, an apt malady for a man squeezed between inimical identities and mass movements that have no room for nuanced thought. His erotic impulses are bizarre. He meets his future wife under extremely unpropitious circumstances: During a lecture he gives on Ukrainian history, he claims that Polish nobles in Ukraine had fought on the side of the Cossacks during the Khmelnytskyi uprising, rather than for Poland, and a blond Polish student, a woman, stands up and screams, “Shame!” He is chased out of the building—and becomes obsessed with the woman, Kazimiera, whom he ultimately persuades to marry him. The marriage, of course, is a disaster; she can barely read Ukrainian, has no interest in Ukrainian independence, and won’t live with him on the family estate in Ukraine. This fixation on a woman who rejects him so thoroughly is a telling pathology. In a part of the world left bloody by ethnic wars, dual identity may pit the soul against itself.

You can’t rethink the past—your past, a nation’s past—without a radical shift in perspective, and sure enough, angles of vision get very strange in the novel. Drafted into the Russian army at the start of World War I, Lypynskyi narrowly escapes a massacre and ends up in a military hospital with a curious neurological condition. “Every person he encountered appeared to him to have only one eye—right in the middle, at the bridge of the nose,” Maljartschuk writes. “The human world had become a world of Cyclopes.” Shortly after the narrator tells that story, she starts standing on her head so that she can see the world upside down. Her head throbs; noise rings in her ears. “World War I has broken out in my chest,” she tells her fiancé, who thinks she’s gone mad.

The real question is: Is madness the sane response to history? Maljartschuk thwarts the urge for an answer. There turn out to be no denouement and few big revelations. One occurs during the narrator’s visit to Lypynskyi’s family estate, now a museum. The great man was buried in a nearby cemetery, but where is no longer known. The Soviets turned the property into a collective farm, and the cemetery was razed and the gravestones used for flooring. Afterward, the narrator waits for a bus that never comes, and she weeps. Too many bones have been bulldozed, too much memory excised. The dead will never be raised. We who walk unaware over their now-unmarked graves will never realize that life in their absence is a lusterless shadow of what it could have been, “just a branch growing green on a withered tree.”

And yet the novel itself pushes back against despair, simply by virtue of existing. Which means that Maljartschuk exists. She could so easily not have been born. What do we owe the ancestors who survived, notwithstanding ignominy and torment? Just that. To survive. Every single one of them had to survive for the line of descent to arrive at us, and now we must too. And maybe record a memory or two. “Through the generations, considerable interest had accrued,” the narrator says. “Little by little, I had to start paying off my debts.”

Maljartschuk’s repayment is a novel, haunted and haunting, that is disorienting and less than perfect but does what it has to do: It’s memorable. I worry, though, that she might not be doing much debt-paying at the moment. Two months after Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, she told the German public-broadcasting company Deutsche Welle that she could no longer imagine writing poetry or fiction. Though she lives in Austria, far from the front, she said she felt “as if Russian tanks were attacking my body, my organs, my heart, my kidneys.” Watching that interview, I thought of the whale. Toward the end of Forgottenness, Maljartschuk has her narrator say, “I can hear how the gigantic blue whale is slapping its tail against the surface of the sea somewhere not too far away. Very soon, it will open its mouth and begin to suck in everything and everyone.” Far be it from me to deny the leviathan its status as the cosmic principle of death and destruction, but, I thought, it might also be Putin’s Russia.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Zombie History Stalks Ukraine.”