The Literary Genesis

Who’s afraid of Disinfolklore? Perhaps I was predisposed to associate scenes in Arcadian rural Central Europe with folklore. Until this unasked-for war against Ukraine came to visit, the biosphere reserve which surrounded the bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska was as idyllic a place as you are likely to find on Lugh or Donn’s earth… Before the Russian invasion, this narrow and forgotten thoroughfare that ran to and from the bridge had divided only peaceful meadow steppe, woods and riverbanks overhung by willows. Trolling and fly fishers baited prey in the Donets…

Maybe it was inevitable that I would be the first to notice the patterns of Disinfolklore swimming in the mesmerizing ocean of Disinformation that began to lap against all our lives from 2015 onwards. Much of the art I loved had folkloric echoes… My mother had read Tolstoy’s ‘Village Tales’ to me when I was a child.

Source: Twitter Note (2024)

Occasionally, the similarity between the Donets and the ancient Greek rivers of the Acheron and Styx which separated the afterlife from our world manifested with ridiculous clarity…

Source: Twitter Note (2024)

The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska was simultaneously a real place and a mythic crossing — the Donets as Styx, the biosphere reserve as locus amoenus, the daily dramatis personae as stock characters in a long-running folk tale.

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