AGNI magazine has published “Dispatches from Ukraine“, a series of writings and reflections by mostly Ukrainian writers, filmmakers, journalists, professors and more. It starts off with a powerful piece by novelist Yuri Andrukhovych, “After Bucha”:
However, what we see testifies to dehumanization. The population of Russia successfully dehumanized itself. This is an anti-world. This is a part of humanity that willingly crossed into anti-humanity.
Other contributions come from writer Serhiy Zhadan, director Marina Stepanska and many others.
Ukraine at home and abroad
The newly released issue of Asymptote also offers some Ukrainian thought on the war as well a wide range of cultural insights relating to Ukraine. Apofenie publisher Kate Tsurkan interviews the founder of the Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature, Zenia Tompkins who talks about the Ukrainian diaspora, founding an agency and translation collective to promote Ukrainian literature and the reception of Ukrainian writing by foreign publishers. The issue also includes an excerpt from the powerful “As Bombs Fall” by Andrii Petrovitch Krasnyashchikh.
The Executed Renaissance
Culture.pl has an account of a 1959 Ukrainian literary anthology that collected the work of the generation murdered or forced into silence and submission by Soviet terror. It goes into the history of these still far too-little-known writers and their almost universally tragic ends. It also covers the difficulty of compiling the work when so much of Ukrainian culture had been made to disappear as well as the reception the book was given by Soviet critics, where it was often smuggled in in pocket editions.
Photo – from an anti-war demonstration in Prague, April 2022, Michael Stein
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