Tales from the Ukrainian East: Life in Spite of Everything with Victoria Donovan

We're joined by two esteemed guests, Victoria Donovan & Vlada Vazheyevskyy to offer a cultural portrait of Ukraine, and mark the launch of Donovan's new book Life in Spite of Everything - an urgent, essential read.

Since the 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.

Revelatory, evocative and deeply humane, Life In Spite of Everything is a celebration of a country’s past and present, and its people’s tenacity, creativity and independence.

Donovan is joined by Vlada Vazheyevskyy (part if Dvijka Collective) for a discussion that will also bring in activist life in eastern Ukraine and the way that communities there were resisting the imposition of hyper-patriarchal “Russian World” propaganda before 2022.

‘This land and life are so beautifully remembered! . . . An emotional and engaging requiem for Eastern Ukraine.’ Andrey Kurkov