Donbas as a Metaphor. Kateryna Yakovlenko

In her new book, writer and visual culture researcher Kateryna Yakovlenko writes about cinema, works of art, literary works, and images that unfold before readers the metaphor of Donbass — a place that does not exist, but is filled with names, birds, plants, and ghosts of past and present events. The Donbas that the author looks at is the landscape of Donetsk and Luhansk regions with its own stories, with a language that can sometimes be heard, reconstructed, and sometimes only come across traces of events and phenomena that are no longer accessible, and have always been difficult to access.

Archives, artifacts, myths, earth and wind, steppe, burial mounds, and what remains of them form the author’s special view of the Ukrainian east. Kateryna Yakovlenko turns to her interlocutors, to many sources, but also to gaps. This book has its own rhythm, in which scientific exploration moves alongside literary writing and is attentive to the empty spaces that exist between them.