Heterotopia and One’s Own Territory

Abstract

The Donbass has played a central role in Serhii Zhadan’s work from the very start. In his most recent novel Orphanage (Ukr. – Internat, 2017), as well as in Voroshilovgrad (Ukr. – Voroshylovhrad, 2010), Ukraine’s eastern borderland provides both setting and subject. Zhadan depicts it as a territory of emptiness, a geographical and historical space of transition – but not as a no-man’s-land. Real and mental migration mould this region, and that is what makes it a genuinely European territory. Defending it as one’s own territory – this literary message from 2010 has taken on a very concrete and extremely urgent meaning twelve years later.