This week, Professor Victoria Donovan of the University of St Andrew’s spoke in Cambridge about her new book, Life in spite of everything : tales from the Ukrainian East. In her talk, co-sponsored by CamCCEEES and MMLL’s Slavonic Section, Professor Donovan spoke about the people she met and worked with before (and since) Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine whose stories are woven into her book.
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.
[from the publisher’s site]
Her many visits to eastern Ukraine fell between the outbreak of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of 2022, with a frontline always present if sometimes further away and sometimes closer. One of the photos she shared showed a 2014-era trench in a nature reserve that had been reclaimed by grasses – yet the war would have moved back over the same territory since.
Readers can find other material about the area called Donbas, essentially covering the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions, by searching for Donbas* in iDiscover. At the time of this blog post, that search provides results for over 270 books as well as other resources. Among these is the 2025 translation into English of soldier and poet Oleksandr Mykhed’s I︠A︡ zmishai︠u︡ tvoi︠u︡ krov iz vuhilli︠a︡m – I will mix your blood with coal : snapshots from the east of Ukraine which we have as an ebook. We also have the Ukrainian original in print.
Towards the end of her talk, Professor Donovan spoke about initiatives celebrating their home regions by people who had been forced to move from the east since February 2022. Among these was the Mariupol Memory Park, a Ukr-Eng bilingual site that describes itself as “not the city’s burial ground. It is a park where we grow and develop, where our political and artistic ideas evolve.” The site contains essays, pictorial works, and video and audio recordings about the city, its history, present, and future. It’s a fascinating, varied and important source. Among the essays, for example, is one about the North Azovian Greeks and their languages. If you’ve never heard of Ukrainian Greeks, find out more here! And if you would like to give funds to the people behind the site, who also use the money given to provide practical help (eg provision of food for pets) close to the front line, Professor Donovan has confirmed that you can do so via PayPal using the details here, making sure to specify “NGO for Freefilmers”.
Mel Bach
Languages across Borders 