There’s a joke that people who study Eastern Europe like to tell. An old man in a small town is talking to a foreign dignitary about his life: “I was born in Galicia, went to school in Poland, worked in the Soviet Union, and am retired in Ukraine.” The dignitary marvels at how well-traveled the man is, to which the man, confused, replies, “I’ve never left my village.”

This idea that the ground underneath your feet can shift suddenly — that your life can be upended and your identity obliterated overnight — has run through Ukrainian history, up to and including today’s perilous situation. Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty is also at the center of Kalani Pickhart’s debut novel, I Will Die in a Foreign Land. The novel takes place during the heady and terrifying days of 2014 Maidan revolution, during which Ukrainians marched and fought to overthrow a corrupt and incompetent leader aiming to deliver Ukraine into the arms of Putin’s Russia. This revolution, which divided the nation and led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, was a pivotal moment in a long and painful history.

It’s through this history that Pickhart’s characters are living. There are four of them: a Ukrainian-born American nurse who finds herself having drifted to the revolution following the death of her young son; an older man with a strange past who reviews the wreckage of his life; a young widower who finds strength in solidarity; and an artist and activist whose passion for freedom threatens to be crushed by grief.

Living in history, being both a protagonist shaping the future and a minor character in the grand arc of nations, doesn’t lead to simple stories. Fittingly, Pickhart’s characters tell their stories in complex, narratively challenging ways. Short chapters bounce from character to character, through driving narration and obsessive reflection. There’s even a transcript of an audiotape in which the old man tells his story to a daughter he has never met. Moving between the present and the past, the novel unfolds the forces that led all four characters to Maidan Square, the heart of the revolution.

These personal stories are interspersed with news reports giving insight into what is happening on the ground. The names of those who have been killed are listed without commentary; as their names become a litany, they are briefly alive again. Perhaps the most inventive of Pickhart’s devices is her use of Ukrainian kobzari. The kobzari are — or rather, were — traditional storytellers, oral historians and singers of folk songs. Pickhart includes their lamentations, explanations, and evocations throughout the book, submerging readers deeply in history and reminding them that nothing comes from nowhere. The kobzari are guides who refuse to look away. Like a Greek chorus, they sing to us, but plainly, with voices plaintive with pain, as they bring us through the terrors of Ukrainian history.

They even sing about their own liquidation, when Stalin had them all killed.

Pickhart’s characters are rich and real, flawed and scared, brave and noble. They betray and they are betrayed, sexually and politically and in every other way. They are shaped by individual choices and the terrible choices forced on them by history. They’re humans caught in a current.

A really interesting way in which Pickhart demonstrates this current is through evocations of Chernobyl, the doomed nuclear plant. Misha, one of the characters, was born in Pripyat, the town built to service the plant. Its explosion mutates his life; his tragedies multiply. Chernobyl’s disaster arose from neglect, negligence, and the cruel indifference of distant powers. This cruelty, especially from the Soviet center, has crushed Ukraine for generations, from constant liquidations to the terror-famine of the Holodomor, which killed millions in the 1930s, to today’s occupation and saber-rattling.

Against such abuses of power Pickhart’s characters fight, mourn — and fuck. Sex figures throughout the book, a human connection that lights a fire against a darkness that seems to be everywhere. Pickhart captures this intertwining of sex and history in a chapter with the simple, beautiful title “How To Make Love To A Man Not Your Husband”:

The quiet comes, and you look at one another, tears in your eyes, in his eyes. And you say nothing, and he says nothing, because neither of you know, in his radioactive bedroom, on his radioactive sheets, with his radioactive semen, and your now radioactive womb, if you will ever make love like this again.

Instead, you hum him a song they would sing in the fires of Maidan.

In the story Pickhart is telling, the powerful make decisions that render a homeland suddenly foreign. Under these circumstances, individuals are treated as little more than cannon fodder. By telling stories of those who live in history but refuse to fully succumb to it, Pickhart recuperates the humanity of the people of Ukraine and celebrates their lives as human beings, not as footnotes to someone else’s history.

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