Modern Animal, a sort of anti-autofiction, knots together humans and animals, retelling interviews, folktales, memories, and visions of the people—bourgeois, urban, rural, Roma, working class—encountered on a multiyear journey through Ukraine.
There are few traces of animals in cities: footprints are registered most clearly not on hard surfaces but those which are soft and malleable, creating a sequence, a track. Modern Animal is a track of its own, made by the thirty-nine year old journalist from Ukraine, Yevgenia Belorusets.
Working between Berlin and Kyiv, Ukrainian and Russian, Belorusets defies typical definition and strict political boundaries. Her writing, grounded in years as a photojournalist, is exuberant rather than premeditated. It brings together the stories of many to form its identity and, in doing so, is the antithesis of—and what comes after —autofiction and its attendant narcissism.
Modern Animal rearranges the relationships of humans and animals, retelling interviews, folktales, memories, and visions of the people—bourgeois, urban, rural, Roma, working class—Belorusets encountered on her way. The result is not a collection of short stories, but a string with various knots. It is a revolutionary approach to anthropology, what it means to study, become, and behave like something else.
A lecture format, following the Soviet style, disintegrates; as do logic and language. A different kind of knowledge emerges, growing from the crucible of lives lived with others—suggesting that, in inhabiting or changing our environments, we establish the parameters for all life, both human and animal.
In conversation, Belorusets uncovers the lost and forgotten remains of something pagan, but still irrepressibly modern.
To date, Belorusets has been recognized outside of Ukraine primarily for her first work of fiction, Fortunate Fallings, which documented the Donbass War and won Germany's Internationaler Literaturpreis. It is forthcoming with New Directions Publishing. Her isolarii, Modern Animal, is her next step but first work in English translation.
Yevgenia Belorusets (born 1980 in Kiev) is an artist and writer living and working in Berlin and partly Kiev. She is co-founder of the journal Prostory, the journal for literature and art, and a member of the interdisciplinary curatorial collective Hudrada. She works with photography and other forms on the intersection of art, literature and social activism. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society—queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma, people living in the war zone in the East—and was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th and 59th Venice Biennale.
Lucky Breaks, her first work of fiction, was given a 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany. For her work on A Wartime Diary she received 2022 Schering Stiftung Special Award for Artistic Research and Horst Bingel Prise for Literature. She has been documenting full-scale Russia's invasion of Ukraine since 24th of February 2022.
