Earlier this year, we had the honour of a visit of delegates from Mariupol State University.  After their UL tour and showing them a display of Ukrainian material – among them many brand new publications, including books about Mariupol – I was very touched to be presented with a copy of a book of photographs of Donetsk (the region of Ukraine where Mariupol is situated) during the ongoing 2014- Russo-Ukrainian war.

Published in 2020, the book is not held by any other library in the WorldCat catalogue, so Cambridge is incredibly lucky to have been given this copy.  All the work of photographer Serhii Vahanov, it provides images that remind us of the shocking abnormality of war in normal lives.  Some pictures show the Donetsk Region before the war touched it at all (eg a photo of the Donbas Arena used in the Euro 2012 only two years before the war started).  The ones I have chosen for this blog post are from the war period and show that mismatch – the cover image with a soldier walking across a ploughed field, an elderly man shown carrying rocket detritus out of his property, a soldier reading an Agatha Christie with weaponry hanging behind him.

Of course, our Mariupol visitors experience this mismatch all the time.  The university is currently based in Kyiv because their home city is occupied by Russia, largely ruined and with large amounts of its population lost to the war.  Cambridge must feel like a bizarre dream world to people whose normality is now war rather than peace, so it was particularly important to make a point of demonstrating the University’s ongoing interest in Ukraine through the UL’s expanding holdings.  The addition of Litopys rosiĭsʹko-ukraïnsʹkoï viĭny (Chronicle of the Russo-Ukrainian War) is a great boon for our readers.

Mel Bach