Her World Began to Collapse, So She Started Keeping a Diary

War presents a unique challenge for the artist. When reality has ripped in two and extremes of emotion and opinion take hold, it becomes near impossible to do what art does best: scramble easy categories and introduce complexity into the world. The Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets, currently in Kyiv, is facing this dilemma head-on. I called her on the evening of March 23, as the sun was setting over Ukraine’s capital, a time when air-raid sirens usually start blaring, Belorusets said. As we spoke, she was crouching in the corridor of her apartment building, the safest place in case a Russian missile should land nearby. How do you remain an artist at such a moment of terror?

One answer might come in the form of Belorusets’s English-language , which she began publishing as the and which has gained the appreciation of writers like and . Through this act of documentation, in words and photographs, she is processing the total collapse of her world and keeping alive her openness, her powers to describe the Ukrainian experience is accurate, even if it might feel right: “This word penetrated deep into my mind. I still have a hard time using it. The term is the wrong size: Like many such words, it is both a little too small and much too big, like someone else’s clothes.”