Draft:Apricots of Donbas

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Apricots of Donbas

Author	Lyuba Yakimchuk
Original title	Абрикоси Донбасу
Language	Ukrainian
Genre	Poetry collection
Publisher	Old Lion Publishing House
Publication date	2015
Publication place	Ukraine
Published in English	2021
Pages	192 (first Ukrainian edition)
ISBN	978-617-679-135-5

Apricots of Donbas (Абрикоси Донбасу, romanized: Abrykosy Donbasu) is a 2015 poetry collection by the Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Drawing on family memory, the mining culture of the Donbas, displacement, and the Russo-Ukrainian War, the book combines poems written before the war with work responding to the fighting that began in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The sequence "Decomposition" is the collection's best-known formal experiment. It breaks place names, the speaker's name, and ordinary syntax into fragments, making the disintegration of territory, bodies, personal identity, and language occur within the poem rather than merely being described by it. Critics have also identified a counter-movement towards gathering, birth, return, and regrowth, in which the apricot tree remains an image of home and possible reconstruction.

Book-length translations or author-selected versions have appeared in Polish, Estonian, English, Swedish, French, Latvian, Czech, and Hungarian. The English edition was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021, and the French edition by Éditions des femmes–Antoinette Fouque in 2023. A French audiobook read by Catherine Deneuve and Yakimchuk followed in 2024.

Background and publication

Apricots of Donbas was Yakimchuk's second poetry book. Old Lion Publishing House published the first Ukrainian edition in Lviv in 2015. The collection developed over several years. Some poems predate the war, while poems added after 2014 respond to the occupation of Yakimchuk's home town, Pervomaisk, Luhansk Oblast, and the displacement of her family.

The 2021 bilingual English edition, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina, was the seventh volume in Lost Horse Press's Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry series. It includes Yakimchuk's contextual essay "Reaching a Common Language" and presents the Ukrainian texts alongside their translations. The contents and order of translated books are not always identical to the 2015 Ukrainian edition. The Estonian volume, for example, is an author-selected collection with a new preface.

Contents and themes

The English edition is arranged in five sections: "Apricots of Donbas", "Yum and War", "Decomposition", "Unfree Verses", and "Such People Are Called Naked". The poems are not arranged as a strict chronology. "Yum and War", for example, contains poems first published in 2009, while the later war poems reinterpret earlier domestic, familial, and industrial imagery.

The title sequence places apricot trees beside mines, slag heaps, coal, and industrial waste. Literary scholar Iryna Borysiuk reads the book through the interdependence of body and landscape and through the mythologising of everyday life. In her account, descent into a mine combines images of birth and death, while miners returning as apricot trees join underground labour to family memory. Coal and apricots are therefore not opposing emblems of industry and nature but parts of the same regional mythology.

Elizabeth B. Jones, reviewing the English edition in EuropeNow, similarly emphasised the contrast between damaged mining towns and the fragile natural image of the apricot. She also noted the collection's mixture of violence, fear, displacement, sensuality, dark humour, Christian imagery, and references to Cuman and Trypillian cultures. Maria G. Rewakowicz, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, situated the collection alongside Serhiy Zhadan's poetry as a form of witness and memory-making about the Donbas; she drew particular attention to the representation of violence in "The Caterpillar" and to the analogy between wounded bodies and damaged buildings in "Cloud Breakers".

"Decomposition" and the destruction of language

In the English edition, "Decomposition" is both the title of an eighteen-poem sequence and the title of its central poem. Jones described the sequence as the heart of the book. In the title poem, the names of Luhansk, Pervomaisk, and Debaltseve, as well as the name "Lyuba", are split into syllables and residual sounds. The technique makes damaged geography, the ageing or wounded body, and the loss of a stable personal identity inseparable from damage to language itself.

In his introduction to the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, poet Ilya Kaminsky compared Yakimchuk's broken speech to Paul Celan's response to historical catastrophe. Kaminsky argued that Yakimchuk refuses to use an intact language while the country is being fragmented: the wrecked word ceases to function normally but remains legible, confronting the reader both within and beyond language. He therefore treated the poem not simply as a description of war but as an event of witness.

In the same anthology, scholar and poet Polina Barskova called Yakimchuk one of the most linguistically daring poets of her generation. Barskova interpreted her use of broken or "bad" language as carrying the aphasic traces of war. She argued that techniques partly inherited from Ukrainian Futurism are repurposed to register the simultaneous undoing of speech and the human psyche by fear and pain. Yuliya Kazanova likewise analysed the dismemberment of place names and the speaker's name as the concurrent destruction of geographical space and personal identity.

French critic Marion Bevilacqua described Yakimchuk's poetic language as a form of resistance and read the collection as an inquiry into communication interrupted by war: monitored telephone lines, undelivered letters, silenced voices, and domestic space stripped of privacy. For Bevilacqua, the book replaces an abstract national image with particular parents, children, cities, and injured landscapes.

The book does not remain entirely within the logic of disintegration. Jones identified images of wonder and renewal within and after the "Decomposition" sequence. In "Gathering", water gives birth to a new sea and the sea to new creatures. In "The Return", displaced speakers imagine walking home and, if their house is gone, building another in an apricot tree. Elsewhere, an uprooted apricot tree is figured as a refugee. The recurring orchard therefore carries both the memory of a lost home and the possibility of another form of life after destruction.

Discussing poetry written after the full-scale invasion, Yakimchuk told the French literary site Nonfiction.fr in 2026 that wartime acts of mutual care had introduced more tenderness into her recent work. In the same interview, she observed that botanical vocabulary had itself been altered by war because Russian weapons bear names such as "Tulip", "Hyacinth", "Peony", and "Gerbera". She described language not as simply breaking but as adapting to a changed reality.

Critical reception

The English translation received reviews from the Poetry Foundation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the journal Slavic & East European Information Resources. The American Association for Ukrainian Studies awarded the translators an honourable mention in its 2021–2022 translation prize.

The collection also attracted academic attention in other languages. Ryszard Kupidura analysed the Polish edition as a new literary representation of the Donbas. He used the metaphor of "war as editor" to describe how war affects not only the selection and arrangement of poems but also the way earlier, non-war texts are retrospectively read. Reviewing the Estonian selection, Pille-Riin Larm discussed its combination of despair, tenderness, and hope and examined how translation choices can redirect the meaning of an ambiguous image of war.

The French translation brought the book into broader French-language cultural circulation. In 2024, Le Monde reported that novelist Blandine Rinkel had chosen an excerpt from Les Abricots du Donbas to inaugurate "Je souligne!", a project in which French writers select and comment on Ukrainian writing for the Ukrainian Institute's Lire l'Ukraine portal. The French translation was included in the first selection for the 2024 Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction, awarded by the Académie Mallarmé for translated poetry.

The 2025 Latvian edition was nominated for the 2026 Latvian Literature of the Year Award in poetry translation.

The 2021 English edition appeared shortly before the full-scale Russian invasion generated wider English-language interest in Ukrainian writing. A March 2022 report in The New York Times included Yakimchuk in its account of translators bringing Ukrainian authors to Western readers; the article discussed the rapid translation of a wartime essay by Yakimchuk rather than reviewing Apricots of Donbas itself.

Book-length translations

The translated volumes do not all reproduce exactly the same selection or sequence of poems; the table therefore lists book-length translations and author-selected versions rather than treating each as a bibliographically identical edition.

Book-length translations and author-selected versions

Year	Language	Title	Translator(s)	Publisher
2018	Polish	Morele Donbasu	Aneta Kamińska	Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna i Centrum Animacji Kultury w Poznaniu
2019	Estonian	Donbassi aprikoosid ja teisi luuletusi	Mathura	Allikaäärne; an author-selected volume with a new preface
2021	English	Apricots of Donbas	Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, Svetlana Lavochkina	Lost Horse Press; bilingual Ukrainian–English edition, ISBN 978-1-7364323-1-0
2023	Swedish	Aprikoser i Donbas	Ida Börjel, Nils Håkanson	Nirstedt/litteratur
2023	French	Les Abricots du Donbas	Iryna Dmytrychyn, Agathe Bonin	Éditions des femmes–Antoinette Fouque; bilingual Ukrainian–French edition
2025	Latvian	Donbasa aprikozes	Ingmāra Balode, Māra Poļakova, Māris Salējs	Orbīta, ISBN 978-9934-591-30-3
2025	Czech	Meruňky Donbasu	Alexej Sevruk	Fra
2026	Hungarian	Donbaszi sárgabarackok	Vonnák Diána	Prae Kiadó

Adaptations and cultural responses

Before the book appeared, Mariana Sadovska and double bassist Mark Tokar presented 2014, a work for four female voices and four double basses using poems by Yakimchuk and Serhiy Zhadan. Sadovska and the Kurbasy trio performed the vocal parts. Yakimchuk and Tokar subsequently released the digital music-and-poetry album Apricots of Donbas in September 2015. Its seventeen tracks include versions of "Decomposition", "Gathering", and "The Return". Composer and performer Olesya Zdorovetska created a separate musical setting of "The Return", released on her 2016 album Telling Sounds / Звуки сказу.

Éditions des femmes–Antoinette Fouque issued a French audiobook in 2024 as part of its La Bibliothèque des voix series. Deneuve reads the French translations, while Yakimchuk reads a short selection of poems in Ukrainian. The recording runs for 1 hour and 35 minutes.

In 2023, the Ukrainian clothing label ETNODIM released men's and women's embroidered shirts called Apricots. Coverage of the design identified the apricot motif from Yakimchuk's book as the central element of the embroidery.

Education and institutional recognition

The collection has entered Ukrainian secondary-school teaching. A ninth-grade integrated Ukrainian-language and literature textbook recommended by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2026 assigns a close reading of "Decomposition", asking pupils to analyse its theme and language. The same module includes "He Says Everything Will Be Fine" and "The Return" and asks students to compare the function of the apricot image in the two poems. The book is also listed for additional reading in a Ministry-recommended model curriculum for advanced Ukrainian literature in grades 10–12.

In September 2026, Apricots of Donbas was included in an expert-compiled longlist of 100 publications for "Landmark Publications of Independence", a Ukrainian Book Institute and MEGOGO Books project marking the 35th anniversary of the restoration of Ukrainian independence. The list was assembled by 40 literary and cultural specialists. The textbook use and inclusion in this expert longlist provide evidence of the collection's institutional reception, though neither source by itself establishes a universally agreed literary canon.

External links

• Apricots of Donbas at Lost Horse Press
• Les Abricots du Donbas at Éditions des femmes–Antoinette Fouque