Hearing the voice of Donbas: art and literature as forms of cultural protest during war

Abstract

This paper analyzes literary, visual, and street art works of writers and artists from Eastern Ukraine produced during 2014. Two Donetsk artists, Serhii Zakharov and Anzhela Dzherikh, and two Luhansk writers, Serhii Zhadan and Olena Stepova, play with the myth of the proletarian Donbas, on the one hand, and debunk the popular perception of Donbas people as being in consent with the politics of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, on the other. They explore familiar tropes and images of Donbas and use guerrilla tactics (shock effects, provocativeness, and deception) to initiate public reaction to the war. Their works are united by their search for a shared communication space and direct access to the audience on occupied territories. These artists challenge the accepted perception of Donbas as a free but uncivilized space and participate in the creation of a new Donbas text. The interaction between politics, art, and activism makes their voices and vision powerful and infectious and can help achieve civic consolidation in Donbas.

Keywords:

• art
• Ukraine
• war in Donbas
• ethnic conflict
• artistic citizenship

Notes

1. In the early spring of 2014, when the separatists seized the regional administration in Donetsk and the central Ukrainian government started the antiterrorist operation (ATO), one of the richest Ukrainian oligarchs and the “owner of Donbas” Rinat Akhmetov made an appeal to the Ukrainian government to stop the operation and to “listen to the voice of Donbas people.” http://narodnarada.info/news/ahmetov-podderjal-separatistov-sozdaet-svoi-news-1567.html. Accessed 17 March 2016.

2. For further reading, see Mykola Ryabchuk’s “Two Ukraines?” In his 2002 paper “Ukraine: One State, Two Countries,” Ryabchuk carved the space for a “third Ukraine” that has emerged out of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the contest between the Soviet and European legacies of Ukraine. However, his main argument of the bilateral structure of Ukraine has remained unchanged.

3. In his interview for L’vivs’ka hazeta on 5 January 2006, Andrukhovych said that he only tried to produce an “artistic condensation of ideas and images connected to this region.”

4. All translations from Ukrainian are mine, unless otherwise stated.