Oksana Zaboezjko in conversation with Alicja Gescinka

Oksana Zaboezjko (Lutsk, 1960) is one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary writers. She studied philosophy in Kyiv and earned her PhD with a dissertation on the aesthetics of lyric poetry. When Russian missiles struck her home city of Kyiv in 2022, she wrote the essay The Longest Journey about the Russo-Ukrainian war. Her literary work, including the short story collection Sister, Sister (2022), has been translated worldwide.

At Crossing Border, she will discuss her latest novel, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets.

Television producer Daryna accidentally discovers a photograph from the 1940s showing a woman in uniform among four members of the Ukrainian partisan army. Her investigation into the story behind the photograph develops into a gripping panorama spanning more than sixty years of Ukrainian history. Along the way, Daryna discovers that many documents have disappeared from the archives. But in the present day, too, it seems that much is being swept under the rug. Was the death of her artist friend really an accident? And what happened to her missing paintings?

Secrets -- facts erased from official histories, such as falsified election results and deals with the Kremlin -- shape the history of the country. Oksana Zaboezjko spares no one, criticising both the decades of Russian rule and the subsequent period of independence, in which machismo, cynicism and corruption continue to thrive.