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Ukraine

Dima. 2018.

Oselyata

In a western Ukrainian town, a homeless community that served people for decades has taken on new meaning during the war.

Illustration by George Butler

War Stories

The laws of war make for a brittle pact at best, and can seem like a tragic fallacy up against an army’s nihilistic impulses. Russia’s tactics in Ukraine prove as much: atrocities in Bucha; the bombing of a maternity hospital in Kharkiv; imprisoning and terrorizing children in Yahidne; the shelling of civilian evacuees fleeing Irpin.

Cover illustration by Agostino Iacurci

Ways of Attention

June 27, 2022

Joy seems hard to sustain these days if you’re paying close enough attention to the world around you. A somber mood with which to kick off a Summer Fiction issue, but it lands amid crises both familiar and new.

Push Factors

By the time we finalized the layout for Ara Oshagan’s photo essay about the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon, his decade-long project comprising memoir and documentary, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was underway, with horrific consequences.

Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit, at the Crimean Academic Russian Drama Theater, three days before Crimeans voted to break away from Ukraine and join Russia.

The Theater Tsar

Gogol’s play sounds strangely familiar, as if art and life were indistinguishable from each other. Two performances seem to be taking place in parallel: one inside the theater and another one in the streets outside, where soldiers in green balaclavas and no recognizable insignia—incognito, so to speak—have just arrived.

Victoria Semykina

My Midwestern Soviet Childhood

It may sound incomprehensible—senseless, Constance Garnett would have put it, as she did in her translation of The Brothers Karamazov—but while the rest of the world may dread the return of the prolonged hostile stare-down known in the last half of the last century as the Cold War, in some ways, I welcome the refreeze.