Ukrainian literature in Russian with Vitaly Chernetsky | Literatura 2024

Russophone writing in Ukraine: Andrey Kurkov, Boris and Liudmyla Khersonsky

NB: registration will close 10 minutes before the seminar, 18:20 BST on 25 July.

In the eighth and final seminar of the Literatura course, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, Vitaly Chernetsky, will turn your attention to the real position of the Russian language in Ukraine throughout the country’s independence.  

‘In the discussion of national literatures, the question of the language in which literary works are written presents a challenge. One choice could be to include all texts in all languages originally composed within the present-day borders of the nation; another, to include only the texts in the national language, irrespective of where they were composed. Neither of these two extreme approaches, however, is ultimately productive, and a complex negotiation between them is pursued, often leaving many thorny questions unresolved. This session will consider Russophone writing in Ukraine, with emphasis on the post-Soviet period. Given the lengthy history of Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s imperial domination, the negotiation between the place of those texts within post-imperial (and potentially postcolonially charged) global russophonia on the one hand, and an inclusively conceived Ukrainian literature on the other, has proceeded in complex but fascinating ways, which this seminar will explore. We will take a particular focus on the prose of Andrey Kurkov and the poetry of Boris Khersonsky.’