Video: "This is war — Ukrainian authors and authoresses on living through catastrophe," Lviv BookForum

On 3 October 2024, the Krytyka Publishing House and Journal, together with the Krytyka Community NGO and the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), held a presentation of the collection of essays This Is War: Ukrainian Writers on Living Through Catastrophe. Essays and Photographs. The presentation took place at the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts (Lviv, 15 Svobody Avenue).

The authors of the collection that took part in the presentation were Vitaliy Portnikov, publicist, political analyst, and writer and Oksana Forostyna, author and publisher. The event was moderated by Andriy Pavlyshyn, translator, historian and journalist, and Natalia A. Feduschak (UJE), curator of the project War is.... A video of the event is below.

The essays collected in this book were published as part of the project War is... launched at Krytyka on the initiative and with the support of the Canadian charitable non-profit organization Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE) in 2023, after the first year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Twelve authors, both civilians and army people, from different generations, communities, and regions of the country, reflect on what this war is and seek ways to live through the catastrophe that are suitable for an individual, a society, or even humanity.

Stanislav Aseyev, Oksana Forostyna, Maksym Hon, Iya Kiva, Váno Krueger, Andriy Lyubka, Bohdana Matiyash, Kostiantyn Moskalets, Svitlana Oslavska, Vitaliy Portnikov, Volodymyr Rafeenko, and Olena Stiazhkina bear witness to the war and share their own experiences of it. They amplify the voices of other witnesses, dead and alive, measure the pulsation of the present day and the degree and extent of apocalyptic horror, raising their voices in defense of humanity, looking for signs of trouble and signs of hope, peering into the overflowing abyss of the other that emanates death, summarizing the interim results of the movement through rage, fear and evil, and looking beyond the horizon of future victory. They sketch out the visions of life that will continue in the Ukrainian space and worldview. In this exercise in being both together and apart, they are accompanied by documentary photographer Anna Ilchenko, whose photographs from the de-occupied territories of Ukraine do not illustrate individual essays, but create a continuous visual narrative alongside verbal texts, revealing the silent catastrophe of everyday life in the land just liberated from war.

The collection was edited by Iuliia Bentia (Krytyka), Oleh Kotsyuba (Krytyka/Harvard), and Natalia A. Feduschak (UJE).

The event took place in the Ukrainian language.

"This is war — Ukrainian Authors and Authoresses on Living Through Catastrophe," Lviv BookForum, 3 October 2024