In his selection of essays, Serhii Plokhy provides his analysis of the key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Using an elegant style and a comprehensive approach, these essays uncover the causes of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, Europe’s largest country.

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow brings together a selection of Natalka Bilotserkivets poetry written over the last four decades. Having established an English language following largely on the merits of a single poem, Bilotserkivets’s larger body of work continues to be relatively unknown. Natalka Bilotserkivets was an active participant in Ukraine’s Renaissance of the late-Soviet and early independence period.

Now, nearly thirty years on, much has changed in the land of her birth, but the lyricism and urgency in Bilotserkivets’s poetry remain; her voice still speaks about movement and restricted movement, even symbolic movement. Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow endeavors to go back to shed light on the missing history.

Volume 8 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine’s industrial east, Lyuba Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014, when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants, and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting the complex emotional experiences of a civilian witnessing a gradual disintegration of her familiar surroundings, Apricots of Donbas is a versatile collection, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of child-like babbling about the tools and toys of military combat.

Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk’s voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems’ artfulness goes hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.

Volume 7 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This timely book is the first English-language biography of the doctrine’s founder, Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Organizing his research of the period around Dontsov’s life, Erlacher has written a global intellectual history of Ukrainian integral nationalism from late imperial Russia to postwar North America, with relevance for every student of the history of modern Europe and the diaspora.

Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book tells the stories of Ukrainian women who were sentenced to the GULAG in the 1940s and 1950s.

With this book, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.

It details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences.

In 1994, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in exchange for security “assurances” from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Two decades later, in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and launched a war in eastern Ukraine, breaking those very promises.

Kostenko provides an insider’s view of the negotiations, revealing the internal debates, international pressures, and strategic crossroads that Ukraine faced in the early stages of its independence. Based on documents previously unavailable in English, this book questions the decisions made and the consequences that followed. Was the complete and immediate destruction of Ukraine’s vast nuclear arsenal the strategically right decision for Ukraine? Could history have played out differently?

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the roots of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the lessons the world must learn.

This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection brings together the most interesting experimental works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the major Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. As he moved from futurism to neoclassicism, symbolism to socialist realism, Bazhan consistently displayed a creative approach to theme, versification, and vocabulary.

Many poems from his three remarkable early collections (1926, 1927, and 1929) remain unknown to readers, both in Ukraine and the West. Because Bazhan was later forced into the straitjacket of officially sanctioned socialist realism, his early poetry has been neglected. This collection makes these outstanding works available for the first time.

Donetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe‘s east: the reader is sent onto a double Odyssey of two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose.

A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city, Donetsk.

Mountain and Flower is Mykola Vorobiov’s second book in English translation, presenting a selection of poems spanning more than fifty years of his poetic craft. The book begins with early poems from his first collection, Remind Me for the Road, to his most recent works. One of the founding members of the nonconformist literary group known as the Kyiv School of Poetry, early Vorobiov is known for his preoccupation with metaphor and surreal imagery. In his more mature poetry he reveals himself as a master of miniature, with considerable affinity to Japanese haiku where the perception of a fleeting moment constitutes the essence of his poems’ rationale. Nature reigns supreme in Vorobiov’s poetic oeuvre and it provides him with endless opportunity for creating startling images.

His intuitive connection to the surrounding environs is so penetrating and organic that his visions, however strange, come across as convincing and justified. There are hardly any references to Ukrainian realities (past or present) in his poetry. Vorobiov’s concerns hover around the issues of existence on all possible levels—plants, animals, humans, inanimate objects, and the universe. The poet is not interested in conveying the past; rather, he trusts his imagination as the ultimate source of creativity. Mountain and Flower attempts to penetrate the invisible that has no beginning and no end, and invites the reader to plunge into this mysterious unknown.

Volume 6 in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This bilingual collection of essays celebrates Marko Pavlyshyn’s outstanding contribution to the study of modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture. With its many methodological approaches and the variety of periods, authors and texts that it analyzes, the book reflects and builds on Pavlyshyn’s willingness to modernize our understanding of Ukrainian literature as an instrument of communication between authors, readers and the nation from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

Hopefully these essays will inspire readers and scholars to continue their journey through Ukrainian culture, in a context profoundly marked by the role of literary texts as agents of nation building and social evolution.