Books from Ukraine

The war in eastern Ukraine is a war at the centre of Europe. This was finally made clear when a...

The war in eastern Ukraine is a war at the centre of Europe. This was finally made clear when a civilian airliner was shot down over the battle zone. But nothing was done that could have arrested the violence and the rapid disintegration of civilian life, and ultimately the demise of the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, home to millions of people. In just a few months, the events that followed the Maidan revolution in Kyiv, from the annexation of Crimea to the invasion of Novoazovsk by Russian troops, shook the foundations of the post-war European order. Territorial integrity, sovereignty, security and peace all seem to be on hold. Russia and the West are once again hostile to each other. How could it come to this? And what does it mean for future coexistence in Europe? Here, writers and publicists look for some answers. With contributions by Alice Bota, Andreas Kappeler, Kateryna Mishchenko, Herfried Münkler, Serhij Zhadan, and others.

They have names like Svetlana, Lena or Xenia. They work in a nail salon, chat in a café or prepare...

They have names like Svetlana, Lena or Xenia. They work in a nail salon, chat in a café or prepare the revolution. In the cities as in the countryside, Beloruset's Ukrainian protagonists go about their lives. Only rarely and secretively do they enter the outer edges of the field of vision filled by everyday life – the vigilantes, the soldiers, the blood.

In 2017, Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev was arrested in occupied Donetsk and sentenced to 15 years in prison for "extremism"...

In 2017, Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev was arrested in occupied Donetsk and sentenced to 15 years in prison for "extremism" and "espionage". Among other things, this was because he had put the words "Donetsk People's Republic" in quotation marks in his reports from the war zone. He spent two and a half years in detention, most of it in the so-called "Isolation", a Donetsk torture prison with the address Light Path 3. To be able to survive in the hell that was the camp, Aseyev would write whenever he could: on scraps of cardboard and paper. His mission is to survive, to be able to report. Stanislav Aseyev has worked since 2020 at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future (UIF) in Kyiv as an expert on the occupied territories of the Donbass.

A picture catches the viewer's eye and doesn't let go. The photo of a ghostly plant in a book about...

A picture catches the viewer's eye and doesn't let go. The photo of a ghostly plant in a book about Chernobyl. The smoke-fogged face of a miner in a Kiev exhibition. Or a Syrian refugee couple landing on Lesbos, printed in the New York Times. What is it that makes up the present? Items hanging in exhibitions, weathering on billboards, or running across our screens? How is it possible to transform intimate moments of dismay or astonishment into language? With the photo columns that she began writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in 2015, the author created her own genre: short prose, condensing landscape, biography, contemporary history and form into a minimal space. It is precisely because Katya Petrowskaya takes everything personally, be it the photo of an old woman carried skywards in a chairlift in the Caucasus, or the sight of a wall in Brussels after the terrorist attacks, that her texts attain the power to distil truth from a fleeting moment.

The lovers of justice comprise crimes and criminals, both real and alleged: Bohdan Staschynskyj, for example, a KGB agent and...

The lovers of justice comprise crimes and criminals, both real and alleged: Bohdan Staschynskyj, for example, a KGB agent and contract killer who murders the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera in his Munich exile but then, because in love with an East German hairdresser, he flees with her to the West and turns himself in. Or Mario, the colonial goods merchant from Kolomea in the eastern hinterland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: He is young, successful and devoted to his wife Maria in a beautiful, wild love – but his secret encounter with a Molfar diviner in the Carpathians will prove so fatal that not even Emperor Franz Joseph himself will be able to help him.

"I'm going to the Maidan. Who’s coming with me?" wrote Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Najem on Facebook in November 2013. What...

"I'm going to the Maidan. Who’s coming with me?" wrote Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Najem on Facebook in November 2013. What began as a local demonstration against the autocratic decision by President Viktor Yanukovych not to sign the Association Agreement with the EU became a nationwide protest movement: the Euromaidan. More than a hundred people were killed when the peaceful protest turned violent.

For Yuri Andrukhovych, internationally the best known of Ukrainian authors, the limited knowledge of Ukraine among his readership in Western...

For Yuri Andrukhovych, internationally the best known of Ukrainian authors, the limited knowledge of Ukraine among his readership in Western Europe and the United States is a serious matter, so in this series of brilliant essays he familiarises them with the region. He describes the post-Soviet reality of his country in a refreshing tone, with colourful details and rich in irony: Lviv and Kyiv, traces of the vanished Galicia and the disaster at Chernobyl, the westward exodus of the population, and the government’s repressive media policy, but also the strange existence of artists, writers and intellectuals living in a ”country that people leave".