Editor’s choice 2025: A round-up of recommendations from the team behind Lossi 369 min read
With the start of the New Year, the Lossi 36 team has pooled its collective wisdom to curate a selection of thought-provoking reads, memorable films and captivating music focused on Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The outcome is an eclectic mix of overlooked treasures, timeless favorites, and off-the-radar finds.
We hope everyone finds something on the list that sparks inspiration for 2026!
Maya Ivanova, Editor-in-Chief
Book Recommendation
Среща с Бесарабия (Introducing Bessarabia) by Elisaveta Belobradova (2019)
Introducing Bessarabia is a compelling and heartfelt travel-documentary book that takes the reader on a journey into the heart of Bessarabia, a historic region in present-day Moldova and Ukraine that is home to a large Bulgarian diaspora. Tens of thousands of Bulgarians settled in Bessarabia between the late 18th and mid-19th centuries and founded settlements there, including Bolgrad, Taraclia, Comrat, and many others. The author travels around Bessarabia and shares her impressions and encounters with Bessarabian Bulgarians- descendants of settlers who left Bulgaria more than two centuries ago, yet have preserved their archaic Bulgarian dialects, maintained Orthodox traditions, folklore, customs and built Bulgarian schools, churches and cultural institutions. The book is historically informative and emotional, offering a close look at the challenges of the Bessarabian Bulgarians- as well as the author’s own personal transformation, as she discovers “her Bulgaria beyond the Danube” through these encounters.
In short, this is a book for readers who want to gain a deeper understanding of a little-known yet vibrantly alive part of Bulgarian history and culture- a journey that is both geographical and emotional.
Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk (2015)
Lyuba Yakimchuk’s Apricots of Donbas is a striking poetry collection that blends personal memories with the brutal reality of war. Yakimchuk grew up in Pervomaisk, in Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region, and her poems are shaped by what happened after the Russian- backed occupation began in 2014. Her family lost their home, people she loved were forced to flee, and her world started to crumble. While the poems come from a deeply personal place, they speak to a much wider sense of loss and turmoil.
Through her writing, Donbas appears as more than just a setting. It’s a place of coal mines and apricot trees, everyday routines and childhood familiarity, but also a landscape fractured by violence. Yakimchuk moves easily between dreamlike images- like apricots wearing hard hats- and raw, unsettling scenes of destruction and displacement. These shifts in tone and style push language to its limits, showing how difficult it is to express trauma directly.
Reading Apricots of Donbas while the war in Ukraine is still ongoing gives the collection even more weight. The poems show what conflict looks like from the inside, tracing how identity, memory, and a sense of home are slowly torn apart. By grounding the war in lived experience rather than abstract politics, Yakimchuk offers readers a deeper emotional understanding of what’s at stake. The collection stands as both a record of survival and a quiet, powerful reflection on resilience, dignity, and the longing for home.
Film Recommendation
Kurmanjan Datka directed by Sadyk Sher-Niyaz (2014)
Kurmanjan Datka (2014), directed by Sadyk Sher-Niyaz, is a historical epic that portrays one of the most influential figures in Kyrgyz and Central Asian history. Set in the nineteenth century, the film chronicles the life of Kurmanjan Datka, tracing her journey from an oppressive marriage within a rigidly patriarchal society to her rise as a respected political leader of the Alai Kyrgyz. The narrative follows her early resistance to social expectations, her marriage to Alymbek Datka, and her development into a skilled diplomat and leader after his death. As pressure from the expanding Russian Empire increases, Kurmanjan must make painful personal sacrifices in order to prevent large- scale violence against her people.
Beyond its biographical focus, the film presents Central Asian history from a local perspective, highlighting the region’s complex tribal politics and the tensions between nomadic societies and imperial expansion. It also challenges common assumptions about women’s roles in Islamic and nomadic cultures by depicting Kurmanjan as a legitimate and authoritative ruler.
Kurmanjan Datka serves not only as a national cultural landmark but also as an accessible introduction for anyone who wants to understand Central Asia’s historical struggles and leadership traditions. You can watch it for free on YouTube here.
Music Recommendation
Jah Khalib
Kazakh-Azerbaijani artist Jah Khalib (Bakhtiyar Mammadov) has established a distinctive voice in Russian-language hip-hop by fusing melodic rap with elements of R&B, pop, and regional influences drawn from Central Asian musical traditions. In his recent releases, he preserves his strong sense of artistic authenticity while navigating the shifting dynamics of regional music scenes and audience expectations. I think every album he ever released is worth recommending, so instead of an album, here are links to a few songs I particularly recommend: Твои сонные глаза, Медина, Лейла, Созвездие ангела, А я её, Если чё, Я Баха, Джазовый грув, Все что мы любим, Любимец твоих дьяволов.
Georgie Archer, Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Book Recommendation
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan (2018)
Voroshilovgrad, first published in 2010 and later labelled the “BBC Ukrainian book of the decade,” tells a story based in the city now known as Luhansk and is set in the period after the collapse of the USSR. The novel follows the protagonist, Herman, as he travels back from Kharkiv to his hometown to pick up the pieces following his brother’s disappearance and to run a gas station that has fallen into his hands. Working to protect this gas station from local rivals alongside his trusty misfit sidekicks, Herman follows the scent of nostalgia and becomes increasingly sucked into the rhythms and contradictions of life in Voroshilovgrad. Zhadan’s novel captures the chaotic legacies of Soviet administration with sensitivity, while foreshadowing Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, and invasion of Ukraine as a whole.
The Oak and the Calf by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1975)
The Oak and the Calf follows Solzhenitsyn’s attempts to publish his work throughout his career as a writer, from memorising prose while toiling in the gulag and squirrelling tightly printed sheets of writing away into dark corners for years to finally managing to break free and be heard – despite the immense efforts of Soviet censorship to smother any hint of dissent. The memoir details Solzhenitsyn’s challenging relations with his editor Tvardovsky and his experiences of conflict and disillusionment, underlining the trials and tribulations of jumping through hoops and alternately evading rules in the Soviet literary era. It also highlights the importance of literary dissidence as a whole, both then and now. When literature is expected to toe the line, change is dormant. Instead, by butting an oak as would a calf – persistently, that is – literary dissidents are able to evade capture and scurry to the finishing line with lines of truth clutched in their hands, exposing the public to alternative versions of reality than that proposed by the iron fist of a controlling state.
Jonas Heins, Baltics Regional Editor
Book Recommendation
Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (1990)
Being a Literature Nobel Prize laureate, Imre Kertész is certainly no hidden gem. Yet a short stay in Budapest this year prompted me to broaden my horizons and delve into the rich world of Hungarian literature, where I encountered Kertész’s brilliant Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Over a concise 120 pages, the book presents the sorrow and reflection of the narrator’s life story, sparked by the simple question of whether he has any children. His firm “No!” becomes the source of a never-ending stream of consciousness; Kertész lets his sentences meander back and forth and, throughout the almost letter-like text, reveals the autobiographical story of a Jewish life in 20th-century Hungary, complete with an authoritarian father, a sinister boarding school, and a childless, broken marriage. At the centre of it all stands the narrator’s reflection on life after surviving the Holocaust through the, for him, sheer inexplicable kindness of other camp inmates. The text repeatedly references Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” (Todesfuge, c. 1945), and we learn that, in the narrator’s own conviction, his life ended in the camp. He is merely digging his own “grave in the air,” awaiting death as the final accomplishment of the Nazis’ industrial destruction of Jewish life. While certainly no easy read, this dense masterpiece is impossible to let go of and enriches the reader’s soul with a perspective vital to understanding the last century.
Album Recommendation
Касета (Cassette) by SadSvit (2021)
At just sixteen, Ukrainian singer-songwriter Bohdan Rozvadovskiy (SadSvit) released his album Kaseta, featuring the title track that in 2025 still tops my Spotify Wrapped. The atmospheric sound of the post-punk coldwave song provides an ideal backdrop for the themes of nostalgia and longing expressed in its lyrics. Published mere weeks before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kaseta’s evocation of coldness and loss, set against the solace of shared memories (the sounds of cassettes), appeared to hit a nerve in Ukrainian society once daily life became shaped by uncertainty, fatigue, and the search for calm, contributing to the song’s wide resonance. Despite its cosmic soundscape, Kaseta is not about escapism, but about the resilient power inherent in the human experience of shared tenderness amid struggle, inviting the listener to pause, breathe deeply, and reflect on their own experience.
Mia Uremović, Southeastern Europe Regional Editor
Film Recommendation
Fiume o morte! directed by Igor Bezinović (2025)
Evangeline Moore, Central Europe Regional Editor
Film Recommendation
Summer School, 2001 by Dužan Duong (2025)
Summer School, 2001 (Letní škola, 2001), is a raw and complex story centering the Czech Vietnamese immigrant community across generations and evolving identities. Many herald it as the “first real Czech Vietnamese film,” as it depicts a vibrant and very human representation of the third-largest minority in the Czech Republic, which until now has remained largely absent from or sidelined in Czech media. Director Dužan Duong tells the story through the eyes of various characters who are all ultimately striving for a good life, but – due to dissimilar values, pressures, life experiences, and Vietnamese and Czech identities – have difficulty understanding each other. The “Czechness” of the story is not only found in its setting or context, but can be felt spiritually in its wit and artistry. Yet, for most of the film’s characters, the Czech language is used only reluctantly, and characters from the Czech majority take only peripheral roles. Thus Duong’s work is a novel (perhaps overdue) expansion of Czechness to the mainstream.
