War Diary

The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin's "special military operation" against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: "I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future." The War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine as it unfolds on the streets and on the Internet, as she walks through her neighborhood in Kyiv, visits an art gallery or a bomb shelter, shops for food. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and posted online by the subscription-based press Isolarii and at Artforum, the War Diary melds an inner and outer life compressed by violence with a power and clarity reminiscent of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks or Riverbend's Baghdad Burning. New Directions is proud to co-publish War Diary with Isolarii.