Yevgenia Belorusets in conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky

The Mark Twain House and Museum invites to online coversation between Yevgenia Belorusets and Eugene Ostashevsky on 16th of March 2023.

In War Diary, Ukrainian artist, writer, and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets sets the loving attentive gaze against combat rhetoric and philanthropy against polarization. She talks about her parents, about the air-raid shelters, about the images in the media and in the streets. There are frightening images, but also familiar ones: because everyday life can also be found in the most horrifying: “It was a spring day, the sunspots played on the walls of the houses and on the white walls of St. Sophia Cathedral.”

Virtual: $5 non-members and members. Admission price will be deducted from your copy of the book with purchase. REGISTER HERE.

Copies of War Diary are available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so.

About the Author:

Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian artist, writer, and photographer born in Kyiv in 1980. In her works, she calls attention to the most vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society.

Yevgenia is co-founder of the journal Prostory, member of the interdisciplinary curatorial collective Hudrada, author of the photo series Victories of the Defeated and books Lucky Breaks (International Literature Award by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020), Series of Lectures on the Modern Life of Animals and Anfang des Krieges (Horst Bingel Prize for Literature 2022). Twice her work was presented in the Ukrainian program at the Venice Biennale — in 2015 with Victories of the Defeated and in 2022 with A Wartime Diary. 

Her works meet at the intersection of visual art, literature, journalism, and activism making a solid connection between document and artistic language. The most recent work is a multidisciplinary exhibition Nebenan / Close by taking place in German Bundestag. 

She lives and works in Kyiv and Berlin. 

About the Moderator:

Eugene Ostashevsky was born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, grew up in New York, and now lives mainly in Berlin. His Feeling Sonnets, published in 2022 by Carcanet in the UK and NYRB Poets in the US, examine the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Its German translation by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink won the City of Münster International Poetry Prize. It was also the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the 2019 Venice Biennale. His other books of poetry, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza and Iterature, were published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008 and 2005. As translator of Russian avantgarde literature, Ostashevsky is best known for his OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006) and Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (with Matvei Yankelevich; NYRB Poets, 2013), which won the National Translation Award. His translations of contemporary Russophone writing include F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (co-edited with Ainsley Morse and Galina Rymbu; isolarii, 2020) and Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions, 2022).

More detaiils are under this link.