Description
The Enchanted Desna, Oleksander Dovzhenko’s luminous autobiographical “film tale,” un-folds the filmmaker’s childhood along the Desna River, where memory, myth, and nature coalesce in scenes of quiet wonder. Written during years of exile and only published posthumously, it introduces us to that twilight place where opposites overlap and magic becomes possible. The silent details of childhood—the scents and rhythms—are given voice through the filmmaker’s lyrical prose. He recognizes the preordained cycle of life and death amidst nature’s beauty and bounty. In Dzvinia Orlowsky’s and Ali Kinsella’s attentive translation, Dovzhenko’s spirit returns as Ukraine’s native son, offering English readers a vital testament to memory, loss, and cultural survival.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956) was a Ukrainian filmmaker, writer, and artist, widely re-garded as one of the most original voices of early Soviet cinema. Born in the Chernihiv region, he first trained as a painter and diplomat before turning to film in the 1920s. His groundbreaking silent films, including Zvenyhora (1927), Arsenal (1929), and Earth (1930), combined visual lyricism with folk imagery and political themes, earning him international acclaim. His later autobiographical work The Enchanted Desna exemplifies an innovative “film tale” form, blending memory, myth, and personal reflection. Revered as Ukraine’s poet of cinema, Dovzhenko left a legacy that continues to influence world film and literature.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She has authored seven poetry collections from Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, reissued as part of the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series; Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read”; and Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. She’s a recipient of a New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award and a 2019 Samuel Washington Allen Prize for her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna.”
Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian for thirteen years. Her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s novel, Anna’s Other Days, won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize and was published by Harvard URI Press in Earth Gods (2025). She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war.
Lost Horse Press
$24 / 979-8-9890965-5-8 / Pbk. / 200 pages (APRIL 2026)
