Apocalypse Baroque - by Sasha Dovzhyk (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A genre-bending anti-memoir from inside Ukraine

In seventeen tales, Sasha Dovzhyk evokes and documents the lives of Ukrainians transformed by Russia's war. She speaks with everyday citizens, from weavers making camouflage netting to librarians turned combatants, and documents the collapse of rural towns and the threat to Ukrainian traditions.

Blending lived experience with the folklore of a culture under siege, Dovzhyk chronicles the war in Ukraine through the lens of fable, and asks with devastating clarity: when faced with brutality, what do we become?

Review Quotes

'Raging, tender and utterly singular, Sasha ... fuses fairytales to memoir and passionate argument to create an extraordinary lightning bolt of a book'

Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian

'Dovzhyk is fighting language in her book ... fighting easy polemical highs, fighting readymade forms of witnessing and testifying, fighting the nonfiction tics and tricks, so as to approach Toni Morrison's vision of language as "an act with consequences'''

Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic, Fitzcarraldo

'Sasha Dovzhyk's spellbinding, elegant book, comes to us as a voice for a generation ... she knows tales can save, and words can ensure a people "is not destined to forgetfulness"'

Natalie Nougayrède, The Guardian

About the Author

Sasha Dovzhyk lives in Lviv, Ukraine, and is the director of INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, which promotes Ukrainian culture and documents Russia's war. She holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, where she also taught. She has also taught Ukrainian literature at UCL. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian. She is Editor-in-Chief of the London Ukrainian Review and formerly worked at the Ukrainian Institute London.