The Ukraine

Kate Tsurkan is the founding editor of&nbsp;Apofenie&nbsp;magazine.

Kate Tsurkan

A Beautiful, Diverse Country: On Artem Chapeye’s “The Ukraine”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

Reading with the Children of War: A Conversation with Khrystia Vengryniuk

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

What Is the Secret of Chernivtsi?: A Conversation with Ihor Pomerantsev

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

“Writers Are the Middlemen Between the Human Race and Immortality”: A Conversation with Yuri Andrukhovych

I Named My Dog Pushkin (And Other Immigrant Tales): Notes from a Soviet Girl on Becoming an American Woman

Where Coca-Cola Is Synonymous with Freedom: On Margarita Gokun Silver’s “I Named My Dog Pushkin (And Other Immigrant Tales)”

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Stanislav Aseyev (b. 1989) is a writer and journalist from Donbas, Ukraine, who for two years following Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine authored unbiased reports about the on-the-ground reality in occupied Donbas for media outlets in Ukraine under the penname Stanislav Vasin. In June 2017, Aseyev disappeared, having been kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned by militants from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Sentenced to fifteen years on trumped up terrorism charges, Aseyev spent thirty-two months in unsanctioned Donetsk prisons, where he was brutally and routinely tortured. The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, a memoir of his imprisonment and an exposé of the DPR’s unground prison system, was published in Ukrainian in 2020 and is excerpted below. In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas, a collection of Aseyev’s reportages from war-torn Donetsk, will be available in English in late summer from The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Aseyev is also the author of the novel The Melchior Elephant, or the Man Who Thought, a collection of poetry, and a play. He is the recipient of the 2020 Free Media Award, the 2020 National Freedom of Expression Award, and the 2021 Taras Shevchenko National Prize for his journalistic writings.

Stanislav Aseyev

Violence and Hope in Ukraine: Stanislav Aseyev’s “The Torture Camp on Paradise Street”

The Wife Who Wasn’t

The So-Called Greatest Country in the World

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Carbide

From Sakharov Peace Prize-winning Ukrainian film director, writer, and dissident Oleg Sentsov comes a timely collection of stories.

The stories in Ukrainian film director, writer, and dissident Oleg Sentsov’s debut collection are as much acts of dissent as they are acts of creative expression. These autobiographical stories display a Tarkovsky-esque mix of nostalgia and philosophical insight, written in a simple yet profound style looking back on a life’s path that led Sentsov to become an internationally renowned dissident artist.

Sentsov’s charges seemingly stem from his opposition to Russia’s invasion and occupation of eastern Ukraine where he lived in the Crimea. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in August 2015 on spurious terrorism charges after he was kidnapped in his house and put through a grossly unfair trial by a Russian military court, marred by allegations of torture. Many of the stories included in this collection&nbsp;were read during international campaigns by PEN International, the European Film Academy, and Amnesty International, among others, to support the case for Sentsov across the world. Sentsov’s final words at his trial, “Why bring up a new generation of slaves?” have become a rallying cry for his cause. He spent 145 days on hunger strike in 2018 to urge the Russian authorities to release all Ukrainians unfairly imprisoned in Russia, an act of profound courage that led to the European Parliament awarding him the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Sentsov was released from prison in September 2019.

Life Went on Anyway

The Soul of Post-Maidan Ukraine: On Andriy Lyubka’s “Carbide” and Oleg Sentsov’s “Life Went on Anyway: Stories”

Kate Tsurkan is the founding editor of&nbsp;Apofenie&nbsp;magazine.

Kate Tsurkan

Articles