14 June 2026
(PHOTO: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh)
Writer Volodymyr Yeskiliev is convinced that attempts to turn Ukraine into a replica of the Soviet or imperial model are doomed to fail, because our strength lies in our poetic spirit, fatalism, and healthy anarchism.
He expressed this view in an interview with Intent.
If I were to focus on these three traits, it’s probably because there aren’t enough to talk about more of them. It’s safe to say that Ukrainian identity is based on a greater number of such markers. Thanks to which we survive, I think that the poeticism and fatalism, as well as a bit of the anarchism we possess, are helping us now, because, well, I’m traveling through Ukraine and the eastern and southern regions, and I see how people perceive the war, even these barbaric Russian shellings of peaceful cities. A city that suffers daily from drone and missile strikes, and a city that lives on at the same time, a city that smiles and creates culture. This is, without a doubt, a city of people who are poets, fatalists, and have a bit of that kind of anarchy in their heads. And that’s really cool, because that’s life.
Volodymyr Yeskiliev
Ukrainian identity, according to the writer, is incredibly vital and life-affirming. It is the identity of people who live on that frontier, on the border, for whom life is here and now.
"As if tomorrow the horde might attack again. And this sense of the immediacy of the present is very much in tune with the current discourse—the artistic discourse of hypermodernity and metamodernity—because it implies this new sincerity. Yes, when people say: ‘Don’t tell me fairy tales, just tell me what you’re going through and what hurts you.’ And actually, we do have something to say about what we’re going through and what hurts us,” the writer believes.
An Empire in Space: Why Yeskiliev’s “Farenho” Is a True Space Opera
Volodymyr Yeskiliev was born in Ivano-Frankivsk and began his literary career as a poet. He coined the cultural term “Stanislavsky Phenomenon,” which describes the emergence in Ivano-Frankivsk in the early 1990s of a group of writers and artists oriented toward the values of postmodernist discourse. He defined this phenomenon as a combination of three socio-cultural formats: mood, message, and canon.
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