Born in the city of Zaporizhzhia in Eastern Ukraine, Sasha Dovzhyk is a writer and the founder of INDEX, an organisation that documents Ukrainian experiences of Russia’s war and facilitates international exchange through fellowships and residencies. Her book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War has just been released in the UK.
I was lucky enough to meet Sasha in Poltava. In this conversation, Sasha reflects on the search for the right language in the darkest times and delivers unforgettable portraits of contemporary Ukrainian resistance fighters.
A direct, honest, and poignant testimony.
O.R — In the opening of your book Apocalypse Baroque, you describe some of your Western interlocutors as being fascinated by “their own all-too-human weakness”. In front of you, they do not hesitate to declare: “I lack the patriotic fervour necessary to take up arms”. Is your book an answer to the dandies of the so-called “post-heroic age”?
S.D — The book tries to navigate the gap between my peers abroad who often feel entitled to safety and my communities in Ukraine who must fight for what they love, unless these things will literally stop existing. I am not sure I offer any answers to that imagined group of English-speaking readers who inhabit the world of post-heroism – but I do attempt to describe a reality in which freedom is not a lofty word but a difference between debating such things in a university hall and rotting in the occupiers’ torture chamber.
Since Russia’s invasion in 2014, my personal chances of ending up in such a torture chamber have not been negligible. My home region – Zaporizhzhia – is partly occupied by the Russians, the city itself having turned into a frontline of Russian terror with drones attacking bus stops and pharmacies in broad daylight. Russian occupation spells death quite literally. In Oleshky, a village in the occupied Kherson region, residents are treated as moving targets for Russian drone pilot training; there’s no food, medicine, or running water in the village, and all the roads in and out are mined. It is the thankless and dangerous daily labour of Ukrainian defenders that holds the line between my experience of life and this horror. Those tired Ukrainian defenders who had to take up arms against Russia in our post-heroic age are also holding the line for the rest of Europe.
I guess I wanted to drive this point home when I started writing my book in 2023.
O.R — The title Apocalypse Baroque is both enigmatic and explosive. As we gradually discover the tales of heroes who underwent transformations under the state of war, we understand what the baroque means for you. It is intimately shaped by the idea of metamorphosis. Did you have this baroque perception of life before living through this war?
S.D — I was teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses to first-year students at Birkbeck for four years. However, before the full-scale invasion, it was just a text, a foundational cultural source to play with. Since 2022, the transformations I witness around me are so radical – men turning into beasts, forests into deserts, fellow citizens into epic characters – that the Ovidian scale seems not out of place.
The ground is shifting under my feet. Seismic experiences such as war release a lot of energy – the powerful emotions of rage and grief and love and defiance. They change us, and they also possess a baroque ability to condense reality to contrasting states: it’s all about pitch-black darkness and blazing light, and very few things in the middle.
Baroque is also a fascinating era in Ukrainian culture – the one Russia has been attempting to erase for centuries by destroying baroque architectural heritage, wiping out or smearing the memory of Ukrainian state builders of the seventeenth century, appropriating those figures that were too important to be forgotten. Contemporary baroque blooms with bomb craters all over Ukraine. We stand by the side of those bomb craters and look for the right language to speak of this experience so that it is not easily forgotten or silenced.
St. Barbara and St. Catherine, Ukrainian Baroque, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine
O.R — The stories collected in the book were written between 2022 and 2025. Some of them take place before the full-scale war. In search of a suitable way to convey the atrocities of war and the testimonies of Ukrainian resistance, did you know from the beginning of this project that fairy tales would be the right medium?
S.D — Finding the fairy tale metaphor was the origin of this book and the reason why I believed it should be a book rather than a never-ending chain of angry op-eds. Fairy tale is timeless – it persists regardless of breaking news cycles and diminishing attention spans. I wanted a longer life for the stories I was entrusted with in Ukraine. Rereading them through the prism of myth and fable allowed me to tell a tale that remained specific and true to its context yet also tapped into universal plots.
After I saw a Little Red Riding Hood in my hairdresser Milana who had escaped from the woods of Bucha with her granny and her mother, I started seeing those fairy tale metaphors everywhere.
O.R — The tale about Yahidne, “The Berry Village”, is one of the most powerful and poignant. The 27 days of Russian occupation and the atrocious conditions of detention of the population are told following the structure of a chain tale where “the living made room for the dead”. Your friend Anna says about the people of Yahidne: “Their experience is so extreme that there is no way it can be shared outside of the community”. “And yet”, you add,” by the logic of the chain tale, we are bound to pass the knowledge on.” To you, does the power of tales, and more broadly the power of literature, reside in this “and yet”?
S.D — And yet / in spite of / against all odds, we must tell the tale — or someone else will tell it instead of us. Ukraine has a long history of erasure, of colonisers or external observers under the spell of Russocentrism telling the stories about this land and its peoples. I hope the tide is turning because of Ukraine’s defence, which has put our country on the mental map of people around the world. Ukrainian defenders have given us a chance for an open conversation with global audiences, conducted in the first person.
O.R — From your teenage years in Zaporizhzhia to the composition of this book, how would you characterise your own metamorphosis when confronting the apocalypse?
S.D — Professionally, I’ve turned from an aspiring academic to a disappointed one, from a freelance curator in the UK to a fixer and then founder of a cultural institution in wartime Ukraine.
On a personal level, I have been lucky to witness what felt like a miracle twice in my lifetime – the miracle of people rising against injustice – first during the Revolution of Dignity, then at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Miracles are transformative, they set a very high bar for how to move forward through life. What you can do then is try to reach that high bar and fail and try again. So my life is an endless disappointment in that respect, but I’ll keep trying!
Lviv-London, September 2026
Sasha Dovzhyk, Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War, Extraordinary Books, September 2026, 152 pages
Cover photo: Portrait of Sasha Dovzhyk by Iryna Sereda
Index (Institute for Documentation and Exchange) website: https://www.index-ukraine.org/en
Sasha Dovzhyk will take part in the event “Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War” alongside Charlotte Higgins, Olia Hercules, and Olesya Khromeychuk. The event is organised by The Guardian in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute London (UIL), on Wednesday, 30 September 2026, at 19:30.
https://uil.org.uk/events/ukrainian-lessons-art-in-a-time-of-war-with-charlotte-higgins-and-guests/
Leave a Reply