Donbas as Metaphor

In her new book writer and visual culture researcher Kateryna Yakovlenko reflects on films, artworks, literary texts and images that unfold the metaphor of Donbas — a place that does not fully exist, yet remains filled with names, birds, plants and the ghosts of past and present events. The Donbas the author observes is the landscape of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, shaped by its own stories and by a language that can sometimes still be heard or reconstructed, and at other times survives only through traces of events and phenomena that are no longer accessible — or perhaps were never entirely accessible to begin with.

Archives, artifacts, myths, earth and wind, steppe landscapes, burial mounds and what remains of them all form Yakovlenko’s distinctive perspective on eastern Ukraine. She turns both to interlocutors and to absences, to numerous sources as well as to the gaps between them. The book follows its own rhythm, where scholarly research moves alongside literary writing, attentive to the empty spaces that exist between the two.