A seminar with Sasha Dovzhyk, lecturer and Special Projects Curator at Ukrainian Institute London. Ukraine prose of war: contemporary literature of Eastern Ukraine. Fiction and prose from 2014 onwards. Two texts in response to Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.
Two popular contemporary writers. Serhiy Zhadan and Olena Stiazhkina. Zhadan is a rock-star and poet. Stiazhkina’s text was In God’s Language, translated by Uilleam Blacker and Larissa Babij. This was an excerpt of a full text and alongside this, one full novel.
Zhadan’s 2019 novel in translation is The Orphanage. An account of one man’s journey through a war torn town in Ukraine to collect his nephew. A visceral, raw, emotive account of responses to war. One striking element of this text is a sense of disorientation. Dislocation from past and future, disorientation in both time and space. A tangible and literal fog covers this story. A difficult and evocative read.
The Orphanage, 2019. Translated by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes.