Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, beginning with the war in Ukraine’s east in 2014, has permanently altered the landscape of modern Ukrainian literature. Themes of war, trauma, resistance, and recovery have become central and soon dominated Ukrainian literary production as the war affected more lives across the country, challenging and transforming society well before the full-scale invasion in 2022. The new wave of authors from the temporarily occupied territories in Ukraine’s east came to the forefront of the Ukrainian literary scene. They appeared as trusted spokespersons of the conflict-ridden Donbas, voicing the experiences of those affected by the Russian invasion of 2014.

Lyuba Yakymchuk, Iya Kiva, Olena Stiazhkina, Volodymyr Rafeyenko, and Stanislav Aseyev are among the most prominent representatives of this new generation of Ukrainian authors, with Serhiy Zhadan being a pioneer in this group. Yakymchuk’s Apricots of Donbas (2015) and Kiva’s The First Page of Winter (2019) were the first poetry responses to the war in their lost, occupied home, Donetsk.Footnote ¹ Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2017) was one of the earliest novels about the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Donbas in 2014, telling the story of a schoolteacher on his nearly impossible quest to rescue his nephew from the city surrounded by the Russian troops. Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a Russophone author from Donetsk who escaped Russian occupation twice—first from his hometown Donetsk in 2014 and then from Blyzhni Sady near Kyiv after two months under the occupation in 2022—tells the stories of his occupied hometown and its people with a touch of magical realism in his two novels, The Length of Days (2017) and Mondegreen (2019). The latter is the author’s first novel written in Ukrainian, exploring how language determines memory in his transition from Russian to Ukrainian. For this generation of authors from Ukraine’s east, most of whom come from the historically Russified urban centers and were initially Russophone, the switch to the Ukrainian language after 2014 is a dominant trend. “The Ukrainian language becomes the language of safety and life, … it is the only indicator of something living,” Olena Stiazhkina Olena Stiazhkina comments on the new significance of Ukrainian amidst death brought by Russians.Footnote ² This linguistic shift serves as these authors’ primary means of distancing from the enemy, rethinking their colonial past, and engaging in self-exploration, self-decolonization, and self-reclamation, mirroring the linguistic shift sweeping across Ukrainian society.Footnote ³

The three books under review: Serhiy Zhadan’s play A Harvest Truce, Olena Stiazhkina’s novel Cecil The Lion Had to Die, and her war diary Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary)–have recently become available in English translation in the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature series by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Each book highlights different aspects of life under occupation, and together they offer a comprehensive view of the events and human experiences that have unfolded since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014. They expose Russian atrocities and the devastation of millions of lives in eastern Ukraine, while at the same time offering an aesthetically refined and captivating reading experience. These books would serve as valuable case studies for historians, anthropologists, scholars of culture and literature, and the general public interested in understanding the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and the people of Donbas. They are also essential additions to university courses and broader academic and public discussions on war and resistance in contemporary eastern Europe, with Russia and Ukraine serving as case studies, adding a human face to the political science and historical studies of the Russo-Ukrainian war.Footnote ⁴

A globally recognized poet and writer, Serhiy Zhadan, has been a leading figure in the contemporary Ukrainian literary scene since the 2000s. A hooligan of Ukrainian literature, Zhadan has earned a place alongside national bard Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian popular culture for his lyrical and evocative poetry, drawing tens of thousands of people to his poetry performances in Ukraine’s largest arenas. He is also a pop star and a cultural icon as the frontman of the bands Zhadan i Sobaky (Zhadan and the Dogs) and Liniia Mannerheima (Mannerheim Line), whose musical style can be defined as post-proletarian punk. He cemented his position as a leading figure in society and the spokesperson for the entire nation by recently joining the Ukrainian Armed Forces, sharing updates about his life on the frontlines on his social media.Footnote ⁵ “The bard of Eastern Ukraine, where things are falling apart,” Zhadan is the author of a book of autobiographical essays, Anarchy in the UKR: The Luhansk Diary (Kharkiv, 2005); a pathbreaking novel, Depesh Mode (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2007); and the novel Voroshylovhrad: Roman (Kharkiv, 2010) that portray a young male generation caught in the brutal transition of the 1990s.Footnote ⁶

A Harvest Truce: A Play, first published in 2020 by Meridian Chernowitz, is Zhadan’s excellent debut as a playwright. The play continues to explore the topic of the war in Donbas in 2014, a theme examined earlier in his novel The Orphanage (2017). However, the play contrasts with Zhadan’s verbose novels by adopting an economical, captivating style. Each line deepens the characters and advances their relationships, propels the plot, or intensifies the atmosphere of distrust among the characters, revealing poignant truths about a society torn by war. Rooted in the situational absurdity caused by war, the play masterfully intertwines comic and tragic elements into a gripping dramatic action, filled with extreme psychological tension and uncertainty. Typical of Zhadan’s prose writing, the play is written with a strong use of surzhyk, the intricate mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, spoken in most rural areas of eastern Ukraine as a result of the centuries of Russification of the region. Nina Murray, a prolific and award-winning translator of Ukrainian literature, accomplished the challenging task of translating the surzhyk and spontaneous colloquial speech of Zhadan’s characters into English.

The events of A Harvest Truce take place in the summer of 2014. In four acts, the play portrays one day in the lives of the brothers Tolik and Anton, who reunite at their family home on the front line of the war to bury their deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual becomes an impossible task in the circumstances of the war. Isolated without power, running water, or means of transportation in the area occupied by Russians and Russian-backed separatists, the brothers’ best chance to carry out the burial and survive depends on the declared ceasefire—a harvest truce. However, their hopes are quickly shattered due to the destruction and chaos of the war and yet another broken ceasefire: the bridge to the mainland was destroyed overnight, and they are trapped in the house encircled by the field fires. As more local residents gather at the brothers’ house overnight, seeking help and ways to escape, distrust and fear among them escalate as no one knows who has sided with whom in this war or who might report to the separatists. This total distrust, as a psychological backdrop of the play, reveals one of the main tragedies of the Donbas war: an alienated, atomized society. All became strangers to one another, even the closest people, even brothers. The language is broken, as is people’s ability to communicate. “We ran out of [words] first. Everything broke down, everyone talks their own way, no one’s listening to anyone. No one understands anyone. Just like us here,” Aunt Shura summarizes their communication and understanding failures.Footnote ⁷ Betrayal is everywhere: the local priest is roaming the village with an RPG, and Russian tanks are parked inside the church fence. “I tithed. Apparently so that they can burn me down now together with my combines,” complains Kolya, the farmer, whose harvest is set on fire.Footnote ⁸ Lawlessness and death govern. “What rules are you talking about?” asks Rinat, the postmaster, whose post office burned down along with his past life and identity. The old photograph of the local school soccer team from Tolik’s family photo album epitomizes his lost, murdered generation: out of the twelve boys in his class, only Rinat and Tolik are still alive. The others have been killed or disappeared since the war started. As the field fires approach the house overnight, the characters confront a grim truth: the house is their tomb. No one will return their calls, no hearse or ambulance will come. Although they briefly rekindle their deep-rooted care for each other, the play ends with a symbolic embrace of death as, after the failed escape, everyone in the house enters the room where the body of the brothers’ deceased mother lies.

The bilingual, half-Russian, half-Ukrainian novel Cecil The Lion Had to Die: A Novel by Olena Stiazhkina was first published in 2021 by the Staryi Lev Publishing House and appeared in English translation by Dominique Hoffman in the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature series in 2024. The translator and publishers conveyed the recurrent linguistic shifts in the novel by printing the Russian text in white on a black background and the Ukrainian text in black on a white background, thereby emphasizing the two distinct universes represented by the two languages. The Ukrainian language in the novel signifies the characters’ most important transition point: the spiritual connection with their Ukrainian ancestors, expressed through appearances and conversations with the good-natured, Ukrainian-speaking ghost of Baba, and the choice to be who they truly are. Like Zhadan, Stiazhkina voices the transitional generation in eastern Ukraine. Unlike Zhadan’s male-centric perspectives, however, Stiazhkina emphasizes women’s experiences during the 1990s and beyond. Echoing Oksana Lutsyshyna’s novel Ivan and Phoebe (Lʹviv, 2019), Stiazhkina’s book exposes the crisis of masculinity in the generation from the late Soviet era and the traumatized, dysfunctional, and disoriented post-Soviet society. Young adults and parents, Stiazhkina’s characters found themselves in a world completely different from the one they had been prepared to live in, which was the Soviet universe that collapsed. Facing a dramatic societal change, they had a choice to reinvent themselves, navigate the new system, largely create this system, and build their new identities—all while remaining in a constant post-Soviet hangover that weighs heavily on their lives. Some of the characters accepted this choice; others refused to adjust. The development of post-Soviet personalities from the collapse of the USSR up to the Russians’ war in Donbas is the focus of the book, explored through a set of characters: single mother Angelina Pahutiak, widowed father Bohdan Korniyenko, and two couples, Petro and Maria Lischke and Andrey and Tatiana Nefyodovy and their children, whose stories became permanently interwoven in a Donetsk maternity ward in 1986. The war in Donbas serves as both a catalyst and a culmination in the development of Stiazhkina’s characters, revealing how different personal choices and character traits led people of the same generation to opposite sides when the Russians invaded.

The book follows a puzzle-like, mosaic structure. Each chapter is a fragment of the collective portrait of this generation, telling part of a character’s story before breaking off and resuming it later. The reader must piece together these individual fragments to trace the narrative line and perceive the larger mosaic of the novel. Readers meet the main characters as young parents in a maternity ward in 1986. “In honor of the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Thalmann, new mothers in the Lenin District have chosen to name their children after that heroic German Communist viciously murdered by the Fascists in Buchenwald,” says the opening line of the book that serves as a caption to the photograph in the local newspaper celebrating the atrophic communist “Soviet-German partnership.”Footnote ⁹ Practical Soviet citizens, the new parents were enticed by this “big idea” with promises of receiving a TV, a carpet, financial support, or possibly even an apartment from the Regional Party Committee. In the course of the novel, we learn how the parents’ choices of names reflected their own mindsets, shaping their children’s experiences and even foreshadowing their futures. Thelma, named after Ernst Thalmann, grew up a chronic thief and one day disappeared, possibly killed. Les (Lyosha) joined the Ukrainian Army to fight the Russians on the front lines after the invasion in 2014. Haska (Halyushka) became a Ukrainian author. Their children, who grew up during Ukraine’s independence in eastern Ukraine, represent a completely new generation, often in deep conflict with their parents who are stuck in the Soviet past.

Stiazhkina’s characters develop through a whole variety of bizarre experiences typical of the early post-Soviet era. These shared experiences are tightly linked to new economic enterprises and goods that swiftly entered the east European market from the west, such as network marketing or gambling. Petro Lischke, a decent, good-natured man and a trolley driver in Donetsk, turns into an addict-gambler, jeopardizing his life and his family with his debt. “He owed a thousand dollars. You could get killed for five hundred in Donetsk in the 90s. One hundred was considered serious, big money. But a thousand was a terrifying pit he could never dig his way out of.”Footnote ¹⁰ An iconic businessman-racketeer from the 1990s, to whom Petro owed the money, soon became a deputy of the district council, a common plot twist with criminals becoming deputies in Ukraine’s east at the turn of the new millennium. The Ukrainian former president and Putin’s puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, is an eloquent example that could perfectly fit Stiazhkina’s story.

In an amalgam of post-Soviet phenomena sharply captured in the book with Stiazhkina’s signature irony, women’s experiences surface most intensely. Superior in all regards, Stiazhkina’s women carry on in dysfunctional marriages with pathetic husbands and abusive mothers in the traumatized and traumatizing post-Soviet society. Maria Lischke, an elegant, talented, sweet, and committed young woman is constantly belittled by her family and society. She is the only provider for her family thanks to her success in the Mary Kay cosmetic sales business. Meanwhile, her husband Petro, the abovementioned trolley driver and a gambling addict, who never went to the market and did not know the cost of basic food items, “with all his unpaid salary, was considered the breadwinner and foundation of the family.”Footnote ¹¹ Maria was ashamed to say how much she earned, and her parents were embarrassed to tell their neighbors what she did for a living, scorning her for “knocking on doors” and dragging people “into the cult” instead of settling in for a “normal” job in an office. The war complicated things even more “because even at home the value of a profession was assessed on its usefulness for the war and on what people would say.”Footnote ¹² Maria’s life choices to respond to the changing world with the highest dignity and integrity culminate in her service at the frontlines as an excellent sniper, training Ukrainian soldiers, working with the same accuracy and precision that she practiced with her magical make-up brushes before the war. Symbolically, her husband, Petro Lischke, who never attempted to change his Soviet life habits and remained in the occupied city, died from a Russian rocket on his trolley route in the war zone.

A comment on the western democracies’ inadequate response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 appears only once in the book, in the chapter “Cecil the Lion Had to Die,” but is emphasized in the book title. The poignant description of the nonsensical war in Ukraine’s east, with its everyday casualties and destruction, is juxtaposed with western newspapers reporting the tragic death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe. The chapter concludes with a summary of the remarkable events of 2015 featured in western newspaper headlines, in which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remained unacknowledged.

Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, written between March and August 2014, was first published in translation by Anne O. Fisher in the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature series in 2024. The book is the diary of a witness to Russia’s day-to-day takeover of Donetsk in 2014, also offering glimpses into life in Slovyansk, Luhansk, Horlivka, Mariupol, Kyiv, and even Moscow during Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine. Individual diary entries are interspersed with brief factual summaries of events, political and cultural notes, providing readers with an essential historical context. Stiazhkina’s survivor account is a trusted and valuable source that amplifies the voices of the pro-Ukrainian individuals, silenced during a long-unacknowledged war in Donbas and overshadowed by Russian propaganda efforts to present the Russian invasion in 2014 as a civil war and “a crudely cobbled-together ‘suffering people of Donbas.’”Footnote ¹³ “A diary of descent into hell,” as Stiazhkina calls her book, transcends the scope of a single-person diary and does not limit itself to the genre of autobiographical writing. Its entries range in style—from academic writing to fiction, from journalism to short story—featuring the many participants in the Donbas events and creating a compelling multi-vocal, variegated, and gripping narrative. Intimate in her treatment of her characters, as noted by Anne O. Fisher, Stiazhkina uses her psychological precision and insight as well as her ear for dialogue to document the unfolding occupation of Donbas through a series of psychological portraits of its participants.Footnote ¹⁴ She calls things by their name with exceptional wit and erudition, steeped in her knowledge as a historian, while oscillating between humor, irony, and bitter sarcasm.

Stiazhkina portrays three different parties involved in the events in Donbas in 2014—the separatists, the Russians, and the pro-Ukrainian people of Donbas. In the entry “How to Hold a Referendum: A Methodological Handbook for New Invaders,” she wittily explains the collective psychology of the local separatists by unpacking the pejorative vata, which literally means cotton and refers to individuals inclined toward Russian propaganda, revealing her frank attitude towards this social group that played their miserable part in Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine. This group included local thugs and alcoholics with assault rifles, handed to them by Russian “tourists,” along with “grandmas dreaming of sausages for two twenty a kilo, and … ideologically-driven losers whose lives were better the day before yesterday than today” and who consider the USSR as the country of their golden age.Footnote ¹⁵

A somber, unsparing portrayal of the separatists appears in her excellent cultural essay on Shakespeare and Hieronymus Bosch about the grotesque reality in occupied Donetsk—a place awash in senseless cruelty–captured in a condensed expression, “Titus Andronicus on board the Ship of Fools”: “The perennial nobody, the perennial zero grabbed a Kalashnikov and became a somebody, a ten. A boss. A commander. Screaming death made manifest. Ready for service … They only have their screaming, which holds the pain of their poverty, their bad schools, the impossibility of like so-and-so’s son.”Footnote ¹⁶ A more intimate, individual portrait of the “separ” appears in the entry “Us and Them.” It recounts Stiazhkina’s experience of being taken captive by the “armed ‘peaceful protesters’” and brought to the NKVD quarters of the enemy-controlled government in Donetsk, commonly called among pro-Ukrainian locals “The Donetsk People’s Asylum.” The “captain,” who was supposed to decide her fate, turned out to be her student, Vasnetsov. His father, a former miner, had worked in an illegal private mine, a kopanka, enduring inhumane labor conditions since the closure of the state-run mining industry in the region. Never having reinvented themselves after the collapse of the USSR, the family suffered from poverty and longed for a universe with “our own astronauts, our own Gagarin.”Footnote ¹⁷ Stiazhkina’s psychological short stories about the people of Donbas, marked by her penchant for situational absurdity and intimate treatment of her characters, resemble Miljenko Jergovic’s wartime masterpiece Sarajevo Marlboro, which depicts the participants of events in Sarajevo during the 1990s.

Stiazhkina’s “us” or “passionate people” appear at the pro-Ukrainian demonstrations, which were extremely dangerous to attend, as no one could guarantee they would not be killed. The young generation, who grew up during independent Ukraine, such as her daughter, were the first to come out to the streets without fear, despite the danger. As Stiazhkina prepared to join the pro-Ukrainian demonstration, she wrote her blood type on a piece of paper, along with the phone number of someone who can identify her. Her precautions turned out to be justified. The entry “After the pro-Ukraine Demonstration” from March 14 records the violence of the mob of the Russian-backed separatists, armed with guns and knives: “… twenty-two years old. Died in the ambulance from a knife wound. We don’t know his name yet. Pro-Russian protesters killed him. Ten more people are having brain surgery. They made children get on their knees; they tore down Ukrainian flags; they beat people with rebar they got out of some big car while the police were right there, watching.”Footnote ¹⁸

Stiazhkina clearly distinguishes between the chaos in March and a well-planned Russian military assault in April. In May, when the Chechens, Ramzan Kadyrov’s men, joined Russian soldiers, the torture and kidnapping in the city escalated to a new level, turning Donetsk into Chechnya. The horrors of the Russian custom of waging wars, documented in Anna Politkovskaya’s The Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, have entered Ukrainian soil. As the war progressed, Stiazhkina’s diary comments on the battle over the Donetsk airport, fake cease-fires, the Malaysian airplane shot down by a Russian missile system, the battle of Ilovaisk, among other horrific events of the Russians’ occupation of eastern Ukraine.

The last line highlights the identity transformation experienced by many people in Donbas, including the author herself, triggered by the Russian invasion.

Stiazhkina’s diary—including her foreword, written in 2022—records the author’s transformation in her attitude toward Russians, her native Russian language, and the Russian culture she grew up with. From her travel to Moscow in May 2014, when Russians had already occupied her hometown, to deliver a speech at a literary award ceremony for presumed members of Russian civil society, to the clear realization that talking to Russians is a meaningless endeavor since the civil society she had imagined does not exist there. From speaking, thinking, writing, and loving in Russian, to embracing Ukrainian as “the language of safety and life, … the only indicator of something living” amidst the death brought by the Russians.Footnote ²⁰ Stiazhkina moved from admiration of Russian culture to the stark recognition that the so-called “great Russian culture” has produced—and continues to produce—“monsters who rape children and steal washing machines.”Footnote ²¹ Likewise, she went from speculating about how a Russian soldier might feel when shooting a Russian-speaking Ukrainian in Donbas to the realization that “a Russian soldier is capable of anything: theft, rape, torture, lies, robbery, dismemberment, beating, bombing. And of doing all this not just to me. The Russian soldier has come to Ukraine to show the entire world, the world he scornfully describes as “civilized,” what the price of civilization really is. If Ukraine does not prevail, the “Russian world” will kill and rape adults and children far beyond the borders of Ukraine. But Ukraine—we, all Ukrainians—we will prevail,” Stiazhkina affirms in the foreword to her book.Footnote ²²

The three books under review draw long-overdue international attention to Russia’s war in Donbas. Zhadan’s and Stiazhkina’s literary works offer western audiences an opportunity to learn about the Russians’ invasion of Ukraine in 2014 from the witnesses of those events and the natives of Ukraine’s east. Their books give a human face to those historical events and illuminate the turmoil and transformations in the society torn by war with great psychological precision and detail, while keeping a record of the Russian atrocities committed in the occupied Ukrainian territories. Zhadan’s The Harvest Truth: A Play exposes the helplessness of Ukrainian civilians caught between fighting forces, abandoned by everyone and doomed to death, as well as the tragedy of a society fractured by war, where mutual distrust ruins communities and families. Stiazhkina’s Cecil the Lion Had to Die: A Novel offers a broader historical perspective, tracing the development of the Donbas population from the collapse of the USSR and the transitional 1990s to Russia’s war in Ukraine’s east, with an emphasis on women’s experiences in the dysfunctional and disoriented post-Soviet society. Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary records, in real time, Russia’s gradual takeover of Donetsk in 2014, offering a nuanced psychological portrait of three different groups involved in those events—the separatists, the Russians, and the pro-Ukrainian people of Donbas. The two books of documentary prose by Stanislav Aseyev, In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (2022) and The Torture Camp on Paradise Street (2023), recently published in the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature series in English translation, would complement the cluster of the books under review, providing further insight into Russian strategies for dealing with the Ukrainian people in the occupied territories. Together, these books contain an implicit yet nuanced answer to why Ukrainians persist in resisting Russian aggression and why the de-occupation of Ukraine’s east and the rescue of those still living there remain imperative.