‘The Prettiest Beetle of Eastern Europe. Book of Colours’ (Найкрасивіший жук України. Книга кольорів) is a hybrid visual/literary experiment presented in the form of intergenerational autofiction that reflects on everyday life in Eastern Ukraine (and in its contemporary parts — in Eastern Europe as well) from the 1930s to the present, spanning the Holodomor, World War II, Soviet industrialisation, Independence, and the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Written in the first person, the project blurs the boundaries between fiction and archive, combines historical trauma with humour, and human drama with close attention to mundane, everyday details, mixing my own writing with the memoir of my late grandfather, a mining engineer who was born in a tiny Ukrainian village in 1932 and spent most of his life in Donetsk.
Organised by a colour structure, the project presents a fictionalised multivocal diary, with every story marked by a specific color and an image. While looking innocent and deeply personal on the surface, ‘The Prettiest Beetle of Eastern Europe. Book of Colours’ guides its readers through the historical turmoil of the 20th century up until today, presenting human life in all its beauty and fragility, vulnerability, and resilience.
