An Archive Drawer or the Granite of a Tombstone? We Explain (and Show) How Jona...

Forwarded From Meduza — Books

An archive drawer or the granite of a tombstone? We explain (and show) how Jonathan Littell and Antoine d’Agata’s book “An Inconvenient Place” is устроена

“An Inconvenient Place” is the first translated book published by Meduza. Its authors, writer Jonathan Littell (The Kindly Ones) and photographer Antoine d’Agata (Magnum Photos), explore the distorted and fragmented memory of Babi Yar in the context of the current war in Ukraine.

Littell and d’Agata’s book is a monument to everyone at once. In meaning, it is an impartial account of the dark pages in 20th-century Ukrainian history, the crimes of the OUN and the Germans in the 1940s, and then the Russians in 2022. In form, too: the book has a rough, textured cover whose color and feel recall the granite of cemetery gravestones.

It can also evoke an archive drawer, a metal box with a contrasting label used to store archival documents. On the label of our book are the authors’ names; they lead into an archive of testimony about mass killings in Ukraine. Littell does so through narrative, and d’Agata through a visual sequence that complements the text.

A third of the book is made up of photographs. Some of them are surviving portraits of Ukrainians from the Second World War era: Ruven Shtein, who survived Babi Yar; the poet and antisemite Olena Teliha, shot by the Nazis; and, ultimately, Stepan Bandera himself, whose followers Russian propaganda sees in nearly all Ukrainians.

But most of the photographs in the book are d’Agata’s own shots, taken in Babi Yar in the early 2020s and in Kyiv Oblast after the withdrawal of Russian troops. As the narrative unfolds, they help the reader switch between historical layers and geographical points: from the ravines of Kyiv in the last century, which became mass graves for tens of thousands of people, to present-day Bucha and other places where traces of Russian crimes are visible at every turn.

The authors of “An Inconvenient Place” hide neither the victims nor the villains; they show and tell everything in order to enrich our memory. Uncomfortable? Definitely. In this book, even the typeface, with its spike-sharp corners, reminds us that memory is not meant to be comfortable.

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You can buy “An Inconvenient Place” at this link. And if you want to learn more about it, read what Jonathan Littell himself says about the book.