In order to emphasize the intellectuality and poetics of the above-mentioned areas, we took a symbol created by the modern poet Lyuba Yakymchuk, who published a collection called "Apricots of Donbas" back in 2015. We spoke with Lyuba to better reveal this ingenious metaphor. "Donbas in the minds of people both in Ukraine and abroad is associated with something negative, with industry, machines and the war that started there. Even before the full-scale invasion, I had to defend the place where I was born, namely Luhansk Region, and explain certain obvious things, for example, why it is Ukraine. It annoyed me terribly, and solutions were always born out of annoyance. It had to be some kind of positive image and at the same time true as apricots. There are a lot of apricot trees in the east of Ukraine: entire plantations of trees that turn green in the spring and turn yellow in the summer, stretching to the border with russia. It is where apricots do not grow that Russia begins. The Ukrainian East is deep, talented and original. Full of hard struggle for his life and prosperity. We want our East to bloom like apricots.
