ABSTRACT

This innovative and important book explores how war imprints on culture and the psychosocial effects of war on individuals and societies, based on the first few months after the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022.

The book approaches the conflict in Ukraine through the prism of creative and artistic material alongside scholarly analysis to highlight the multiplicity of subjective experiences. Essays are complemented by material from the ‘war diaries’, which comprise day diaries, dream diaries, artistic and poetic material composed by students and academics in February and March 2022. With chapters focusing on fear, ruptures and resistance, the book examines different aspects of subjective, cultural and embodied experiences of war. It examines elements that dominant perspectives of war often overlook; the quotidian, personal and emotive ways that war is registered individually and collectively in societies and cultures.

Highlighting different narratives that illuminate the complex effects of war, this book is highly relevant for postgraduate students, researchers and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of cultural psychology, psychosocial studies, peace and conflict studies and cultural history.

Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 7 and Chapter 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

To read the online archive of Two Months of War, please visit the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History (Lviv, Ukraine): https://uma.lvivcenter.org/en/collections/178/interviews

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

part I|89 pages

Recording Lived Experiences of War through Diaries, Images and Dreams

chapter 2|14 pages

‘The Production of Fireflies’

Searching for Truth and Truthfulness in the Diaries and Images of War, Conversation with Bohdan Shumylovych

chapter 3|7 pages

The Emotional and Psychological Registers of War

Conversation with Natalka Ilchyshyn

part II|149 pages

The Ruptures and Ruins of War

chapter 4|16 pages

Dreaming of War

chapter 5|14 pages

‘The word remains’ 1

War Diaries in Ruptured Time and Space

chapter 6|31 pages

The Image in Ruins

part III|38 pages

Resistance, Endurance, Testimony

chapter 8|10 pages

Unexpected Shapes of Courage

Emotions of Resistance in Ukraine

chapter 9|13 pages

The Determination to Resist

Dumky by Young Ukrainians

chapter 10|13 pages

Testimony, Endurance, Tryvoga

A History Open to Shivering Bodies 1