Anfang des Krieges / War Diary

"It was a spring day, the sunspots played on the walls of the houses and on the white walls of St. Sophia Cathedral."

Since the beginning of Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yevgenia Belorusets has kept a diary in which she reports from the embattled capital. She talks about her parents, about the air-raid shelters, about the images in the media and the images on the street. Frightening images, but also familiar images: because everyday life can also be found in the most horrifying. The author and artist Belorusets writes and photographs - she refuses the omnipresent war language and sets the loving attentive gaze against combat rhetoric and philanthropy against polarization.

Yevgenia Belorusets was writing a war diary from Kyiv, updated in real-time and published by Spiegel (DE) and ISOLARII (EN). It was released daily from 24.2. till 5.4.2022. Each day of the diary included one to five photos. This project has formed the basis for the exhbition works A Wartime Diary, One Day More and Nebenan, as well as for collective edition In the Face of War and for this book.

cover 9783751808064   Знімок екрана 2023 01 09 о 19.07.31

Editions

 

Awards

Horst Bingel Prize for Literature 2022


Connected works

 

Press

Sophie Pinkham, Invasion, Day by Day [ENG], The New York Review, 07.12.2023
Benjamin Shull, War Diary Review: Bearing Witness in Ukraine [ENG], The Wall Street Journal, 07.03.2023
 

Review

"How do you remain an artist at such a moment of terror? One answer might come in the form of Belorusets’s war diary which she began publishing as the invasion started and which has gained the appreciation of writers like Margaret Atwood and Miranda July. Through this act of documentation, in words and photographs, she is processing the total collapse of her world and keeping alive her openness, her powers of observation."
― Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

"Belorusets said the practice of photographing her day has been helpful in fighting the fog of war. That at the end of the day she'll start to write, and look at her collection of pictures from the day, and suddenly, things will come back to her―things she'd completely forgotten. . . . And if taking pictures helps remembering the un-rememberable, the writing helps believing the unbelievable."
― Andrew Limbong, NPR
 

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