Lia Dostlieva

The Most Beautiful Beetle of Ukraine: Book of Colors is a hybrid intergenerational visual/literary experiment that aims to reflect on everyday life in Eastern Ukraine from the 1930s to the present, spanning the Holodomor, World War II, Soviet industrialization, Independence, and the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Written in the first person, the project blurs the boundaries between fiction and archive, combines historical trauma with humor, and human drama with close attention to mundane, everyday details. It interweaves my own writing with the memoir of my late grandfather, a mining engineer who was born in a tiny Ukrainian village in 1932 and spent most of his life in Donetsk. Structured through colours and images, the project presents a fictionalized multivocal diary organized by a colour structure, with every story marked by a specific color and an image. While looking innocent and deeply personal on the surface, The Most Beautiful Beetle of Ukraine guides its readers through the historical turmoil of the 20th century up until today, presenting human life in all its beauty, fragility, vulnerability, and resilience.