The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. The 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” heralded a tremendous transformation of Ukrainian politics and society that has continued to ripple and reverberate throughout the world. These unprecedented events also wrought a remarkable cultural revolution in Ukraine itself. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the presidency of the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review, focusing on newly emergent trends in film, literature, painting, design, and fashion. The journal became an East European cultural institution, publishing outstanding writers in the region and beyond. From his vantage point as a journalist and editor, Davidzon came to observe events and know many of the leading figures in Ukrainian politics and culture, and to write about them for a Western audience. Davidzon later found himself in the center of world events as he became a United States government witness in the Ukraine scandal that shook the presidency of Donald Trump. From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Academica Press, 2020) tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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