Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books Publishing, 2025) is
a unique reflection on the much-mythologised Donetsk and Luhansk
regions of the Ukrainian east, the old and recent history of the region
as seen by an esteemed academic multi-disciplinary scholar Victoria
Donovan in her numerous travels to the region prior to the full-scale
invasion. Seen through a deeply empathetic lens of conversations with
local curators, historians, museum workers, and artists, the region is
shown in its complexity, with the uniqueness of its landscapes,
endangered biodiversity, entangled colonialisms of its past and a
threatened future.
Since start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in
2014, its eastern region—Donbas—has been synonymous with conflict. With
the escalation of that war in 2022, its, cities such as Bakhmut and
Lysychansk have become familiar to us through the images and reports of
brutal devastation. Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural
history of this area, and paints a radically different picture.
Travelling
from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of
Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the
physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought
to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives are
embedded there now—curators, artists, railway workers, young people who
have grown up amidst instability and destruction—Donovan amplifies local
voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.
Victoria
Donovan is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and
Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Southeast, Central
and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Viktoriia
Grivina is an independent anthropologist and writer, author of Kharkiv,
a War City (Ibidem, 2025), and Kharkiv is a Dream: Public Art and
Activism, 2013–2023 (Ibidem, 2025).
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