Yevhen Shyshatskyi: Journey to the Beyond. Mariupol

Yevhen Shyshatskyi is an editor and journalist. He was born and raised in Mariupol. Now he lives and works in Kyiv since 2014.

On February 24, 2022, Yevhen’s world turned upside down, as it did in case of every Ukrainian. In Mariupol, his mother and friends, with whom he lost any contact, were living under intense shelling. Yevhen decides to go to the occupied eastern part of Ukraine to help evacuate people.

Journey to the Beyond. Mariupol is the confession of a volunteer driver who managed to escape from the Russia-occupied outskirts of Mariupol and to return to the Ukraine-controlled territory. The author describes a real journey to the ”frozen-time land,” as he talks about people whose life choices and fate brought them exactly to that place; as well as about his own choice—so ”not-thought-through, yet conscious.”

It is a journey in search of his own folks. Also, in search of his own self. With a fatalistic willingness to get new experiences. It is a no-frills-story about people living in wartime, whose destinies affect a pattern of life they share in common.

Yevhen Shyshatskyi shaped his writings in a thoughtful and deeply meaningful way. He inserts his young age memories about living his life in the peaceful Mariupol. The book is filled with writer’s reflections on the events in Ukraine back in 2014, which affected his feeling of ownership of his Native Land. Even at the time when the asphalt under his feet is all pierced with holes.