Whether I teach contemporary literature of eastern Ukraine or contemporary Ukrainian war prose, I tend to concentrate on the same two writers: Olena Stiazhkina and Serhiy Zhadan. In 2014, Russia’s war first came to the east of the country, and the writers of eastern Ukraine have experienced it viscerally from the start. Moreover, they have already managed to turn their experience into literature.
Before delving into the prose of Stiazhkina and Zhadan in my next dispatch, it is worth briefly discussing some of the stereotypes which have for a long time prevailed over our perceptions of the part of the country at the forefront of Russia’s invasion for almost a decade. What do we actually recognise as the east of Ukraine?
It is, of course, an imagined category most often comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where Olena Stiazhkina and Serhii Zhadan come from, respectively. The name which has stuck to this area is the ‘Donbas’. It is, however, a purely geological term invented by the geographer Yevgraf Kovalevsky in 1827. It designates the basin of the river Donets which contains a large coal basin. The term Donbas is criticised by scholars like Iryna Sklokina and Olena Stiazhkina, for it reduces the diversity of the region to the extractive coal-based economy. (Read also Kateryna Iakovkenko’s piece ‘Black, white, and colourless’ for Ukraine Lab published in The Ecologist).
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