The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction


Book Description

The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction weaves a fascinating narrative full of colourful characters by examining the prose of today's leading writers.




Ukraine's Quest for Identity


Book Description

Winner of the 2019 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies. Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1991–2011 is the first study that looks at the literary process in post-independence Ukraine comprehensively and attempts to draw the connection between literary production and identity construction. In its quest for identity Ukraine has followed a path similar to other postcolonial societies, the main characteristics of which include a slow transition, hybridity, and identities negotiated on the center-periphery axis. This monograph concentrates on major works of literature produced during the first two decades of independence and places them against the background of clearly identifiable contexts such as regionalism, gender issues, language politics, social ills, and popular culture. It also shows that Ukrainian literary politics of that period privileges the plurality and hybridity of national and cultural identities. By engaging postcolonial discourse and insisting that literary production is socially instituted, Maria G. Rewakowicz explores the reasons behind the tendency toward cultural hybridity and plural identities in literary imagination. Ukraine’s Quest for Identity will appeal to all those keen to study cultural, social and political ramifications of the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and beyond.




Writing from Ukraine


Book Description

A selection of fifteen of Ukraine's most important, dynamic and entertaining contemporary writers Under USSR rule, the subject matter and style of literary expression in Ukraine was strictly controlled and censored. But once Ukraine gained independence in 1991 its literary scene flourished, as the moving and delightful poems, essays and extracts collected here show. There are fifteen authors included in this book, both established and emerging, and in this anthology we see them grappling with history and the future, with big questions and small moments. From essays about Chernobyl to poetry about Robbie Williams, from fiction discussing Jimmy Hendrix live in Lviv to underground Ukrainian poetry of the Soviet era, WRITING FROM UKRAINE offers a unique window into a rich culture, a chance to experience a particularly Ukrainian sensibility and to celebrate Ukraine's nationhood, as told by its writers.




Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater


Book Description

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.




Ukraine 22


Book Description

'The extraordinary writers in this volume articulate the taste, the terror, and the dialect of war; they command their powers of description to face a shameless empire intent on annihilating them' Ellena Savage A selection of Ukraine's leading writers convey the reality of life within Ukraine during the first year of the invasion On 24 February 2022, the lives of Ukrainians were devastatingly altered. Since that day, many of Ukraine's writers have attempted to fathom what is happening to them and to their country. This anthology brings together writing from inside Ukraine, by Ukrainians, available in English for the first time. Here they document everyday life, ponder the role of culture amid conflict, denounce Russian imperialism and revisit their relations with the world, especially Europe and its ideals, as they try to comprehend the horrors of war. From tearing-downs of Russia's use of culture as justification of the war to moving descriptions of nights spent sheltering in corridors, poignant snatched moments with a husband on his single night away from the army, to descriptions of the eerie weather in the months leading up to the invasion, as if nature was trying to warn Ukraine, these essays reveal the texture, rawness and reality of life in Ukraine under war as never before.




Historical Dictionary of Ukraine


Book Description

Although present-day Ukraine has only been in existence for something over two decades, its recorded history reaches much further back for more than a thousand years to Kyivan Rus’. Over that time, it has usually been under control of invaders like the Turks and Tatars, or neighbors like Russia and Poland, and indeed it was part of the Soviet Union until it gained its independence in 1991. Today it is drawn between its huge neighbor to the east and the European Union, and is still struggling to choose its own path… although it remains uncertain of which way to turn. Nonetheless, as one of the largest European states, with considerable economic potential, it is not a place that can be readily overlooked. The problem is, or at least was, where to find information on this huge modern Ukraine, and since 2005 the answer has been the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine in its first edition, and now even more so with this second edition. It now boasts a dictionary section of about 725 entries, these covering the thousand years of history but particularly the recent past, and focusing on significant persons, places and events, political parties and institutions as well as more broadly international relations, the economy, society and culture. The chronology permits readers to follow this history and the introduction is there to make sense of it. It also features the most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of English-language writing on Ukraine.




Mondegreen


Book Description

A mondegreen is something that is heard improperly by someone who then clings to that misinterpretation as fact. Fittingly, Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love explores the ways that memory and language construct our identity, and how we hold on to it no matter what. The novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region, who has escaped to the capital city of Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. His physical dislocation—and his subsequent willful adoption of the Ukrainian language—place the protagonist in a state of disorientation during which he is forced to challenge his convictions. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification. Taking on crucial topics stirred by Russian aggression that began in 2014, the novel stands out for the innovative and probing manner in which it dissects them, while providing a fresh Donbas perspective on Ukrainian identity.




Where Currents Meet


Book Description

Where Currents Meet treats the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in Ukraine's East as elements of a complex continuum. This study of cultural memory in post-Soviet space shows how its inhabitants negotiate the historical legacy they have inherited. Tanya Zaharchenko approaches contemporary Ukrainian literature at the intersection of memory studies and border studies, and her analysis adds a new voice to an ongoing exploration of cultural and historical discourses in Ukraine. This scholarly journey through storylines explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), a diverse, dynamic, but understudied border city in east Ukraine today come to grips with a traumatized post-Soviet cultural landscape. Zaharchenko's book examines the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andrei Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev and others, introducing them as a "doubletake" generation who came of age during the Soviet Union's collapse and as adults revisited this experience in their novels. Filling the space between society and the state, local literary texts have turned into forms of historical memory and agents of political life.




Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary


Book Description

By writing of Ukrainian national identity from a woman-centered perspective, female authors from the last Soviet generation established themselves as authoritative critics of their culture and paved the way to visibility and success for their younger female literary peers.




Family Constellations in Contemporary Ibero-American and Slavic Literatures


Book Description

This volume examines Ibero-American as well as Slavic literatures of the 21st century and studies how historical imaginaries in family narratives are functionalized for both individual and collective and (post-)national identities. The analysis proceeds along three conceptual axes. What these narratives have in common is that they construct specific constellations of the historical imagination and of family, whereby 'family' is here conceived not so much as an organic micro-unity, but rather as changing, multiple relations between individual members, godparents, first- and second-degree relatives, non-blood-related family members, present and absent members, adopted children, etc. Furthermore, these novels are often grounded in trans-generational memories. They are written by members of a generation that, as a rule, did not directly experience these historical events. It is also significant that these narratives are no longer conceived as representing national identities, but paradigmatically speak for a collective that defines itself in regional, ethnic, religious or ideological terms. It seems, therefore, that these narratives of family constellations are in need of more flexible typological rubrics and interpretive frameworks. Intended as a sustained comparative study of these family narratives, this volume is a contribution in understanding how historical caesura, experiences, and their literary representation work on the self-understanding of the present.