Slavic Languages & Literatures *: Ukraine

The Post-Chornobyl Library is a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s,.Ukrainian postmodernism turns into a writing of trauma and reflects the collisions of the post-Soviet time as well as the processes of decolonization of the national culture. A carnivalization of the apocalypse is the main paradigm of the post-Chornobyl text.

This Ukrainian bestseller examines the first three decades (1856-86) in the life of Ivan Franko, a prominent writer, scholar, journalist, and political activist who became a leader in the forging of modern Ukrainian national identity. Hrytsak does so against the background of small communities--Franko's family, his village, his colleagues, the editors , and the revolutionary circles with which he interacted--during a time when multi-ethnic Habsburg Galicia evolved into several modern nations.

This monograph concentrates on 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.

Treats the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in Ukraine's East as elements of a continuum. The author approaches contemporary Ukrainian literature at the intersection of memory studies and border studies. This study explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv come to grips with a post-Soviet cultural landscape. The book 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.

"Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier. Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on topics that are absent from current discourse

This pioneering study is the first to show how Jews have been seen through modern Ukrainian literature. Myroslav Shkandrij uses evidence found within that literature to challenge the established view that the Ukrainian and Jewish communities were antagonistic toward one another and interacted only when compelled to do so by economic necessity.   Jews in Ukrainian Literature synthesizes recent research in the West and in the Ukraine, where access to Soviet-era literature has become possible only in the recent, post-independence period. Many of the works discussed are either little-known or unknown in the West. By demonstrating how Ukrainians have imagined their historical encounters with Jews in different ways over the decades, this account also shows how the Jewish presence has contributed to the acceptance of cultural diversity within contemporary Ukraine.

Concepts of civilizational superiority and redemptive assimilation, widely held among nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, helped to form stereotypes of Ukraine and Ukrainians in travel writings, textbooks, and historical fiction, stereotypes that have been reactivated in ensuing decades. Both Russian and Ukrainian writers have explored the politics of identity in the post-Soviet period, but while the canon of Russian imperial thought is well known, the tradition of resistance B which in the Ukrainian case can be traced as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures of the seventeenth century B is much less familiar. Shkandrij demonstrates that Ukrainian literature has been marginalized in the interests of converting readers to imperial and assimilatory designs by emphasizing narratives of reunion and brotherhood and denying alterity.

From its inception just before World War I to its demise during the Stalinist repression of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s, Ukrainian Futurism was much maligned and poorly understood. It has remained so into the late 20th century. Professor Oleh Ilnytzkyj seeks to rectify the misinterpretations surrounding the Futurists and their leader Mykhail' Semenko, providing the first major English-language monograph on this vibrant literary movement and its charismatic leader. This study places Ukrainian Futurism within the context of other major Ukrainian literary movements of the time and examines its relationship to Russian and West European Futurism; it also includes critical analyses of the major works of the leading figures within the Ukrainian movement.

This comprehensive study of Ukranian literature in English has been expanded to cover literature up to the present time. Cyzevs'kyj's original work, covering periods from prehistoric through to realism, has been slightly revised with additional material, beginning with the emergence of modernism.

George S.N. Luckyj provides a survey of the main literary trends of Ukraine, its chief authors, and their works, as seem against the historical background of the present century. Luckyj provides information about literary developments both in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian emigration and diaspora.

Taras Shevchenko is undoubtedly Ukraine's greatest literary genius and national hero. His extraordinary life-story is recounted in this classic work by Pavlo Zaitsev. Born in 1814, the son of a poor serf, Shevchenko succeeded in winning his freedom and became an art student in St. Petersburg. In 1847 he was arrested for writing revolutionary poetry, forced into the army, and exiled to deserted outposts of the Russian empire to undergo an incredible odyssey of misery for ten years. Zaitsev's recounting of Shevchenko's ordeal is a moving portrait of a man able not only to survive extreme suffering but to transform it into poetry that articulated the aspirations of his enslaved nation. To this day Ukrainians observe a national day of mourning each year on the anniversary of Shevchenko's death. Zaitsev's biography has long been recognized by scholars as definitive. Originally written and typeset in the 1930s, the manuscript was confiscated from Zaitsev by Soviet authorities when they annexed Glaicia in 1939. The author still had proofs, however, which he revised and published in Munich in 1955. George Luckyj's translation, the first in English, now offers this indispensible biography to a new audience.

Ukrainian literature, reflecting a turbulent and often discontinuous political and social history, presents special problems to the historian of literature. In this book George Grabowicz approaches these problems through a critique of the major non-Soviet position in the field, the History of Ukrainian Literature of the eminent Slavist Dmytro Čyzevs'kyj. Grabowicz examines critically the method and theory as well as the actual literaryhistorical argument of Čyzevs'kyj's History and challenges some of its basic premises, particularly regarding the periodization of Ukrainian literature, the thesis of its "incompleteness," and the postulate of a purely stylistic history of literature. Ultimately, he proposes an alternative historiographic model, one which would be attuned above all to the specifics of the given culture.

From literary star Serhiy Zhadan comes a devastating story of the struggles of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting ... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54849798-the-orphanage

With a warm yet political humor, Ukraine's most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict. Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under constant threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich's childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets. But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?

"Combining playful memoir writing, history, fiction, and travelogue, My Final Territory gathers Andrukhovych’s best essays from 1996 to 2011, highlighting　his views of Galicia, Lviv, Kyiv, and attitudes toward Poles, Russians, and the Soviet past. Most importantly, Andrukhovych is concerned with questions of identity, their complexity and the whimsical grounds on which they are constructed. Myroslav Shkandrij, Department of Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba:

This anthology presents translations of literary works by Ukraine's leading writers that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today's Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. It offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.

An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation   "This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan's poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan's no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves."--World Literature Today   "A startling collection of verse."--Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement   "Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully," reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world‑renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where "every year there's less and less air." Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan's poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people "will never let it be / like it was before."

A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation's post-independence years   "Serhiy Zhadan is one of the most important creators of European culture at work today. His novels, poems, and songs touch millions."--Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny   "One of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine. Mesopotamia is seductive, twisted, brilliant, and fierce."--Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure and Absurdistan   This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan's ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post‑independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union's collapse. His novel provides an extraordinary depiction of the lives of working-class Ukrainians struggling against an implacable fate: the road forward seems blocked at every turn by demagogic forces and remnants of the Russian past. Zhadan's nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems are set in a city both representative and unusual, and his characters are simultaneously familiar and strange. Following a kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.

The first half of the twentieth century was in many respects crucial for the evolution and character of Modern Standard Ukrainian. Prior to World War I, the Ukraine was divided between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. The standard language lacked uniformity even though the primacy of the standard established in Russian-dominated Ukraine was theoretically accepted in Austrian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina. Up to 1905 the tsarist government forbade the public use of Ukrainian beyond belles-lettres, and excluded it from education until 1917. In the interwar period the country was divided among the USSR, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and social and cultural conditions differed drastically. Shevelov's book, based on extensive study of factual material, traces the development of Modern Standard Ukrainian in relation to the political, legal, and cultural conditions within each region. It examines the relation of the standard language to the underlying dialects, the ways in which the standard language was enriched, and the complex struggle for the unity of the language and sometimes for its very existence. While shunning excess linguistic terminology, the book presents the essentials of linguistic development in connection with broad political and cultural conditions.

With over 10,000 up-to-date dictionary entries and phonetic transliterations of both Ukrainian and English words, this reference is an invaluable tool for travelers, students and businesspersons. It includes over 10,000 entries with both Ukrainian script and Romanization; a guide to Ukrainian pronunciation; and a section on menu terms.

The Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (second edition) provides about 725 entries 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. It also features the most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of English-language writing on Ukraine.

Over thirty years in the making, the most comprehensive work in English on Ukraine is now complete: its history, people, geography, economy, and cultural heritage, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora.

In this second edition. the dictionary lists 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.