Vitaly Chernetsky

University of Kansas | KU · Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures

We don't agree that Nato membership for Ukraine would provoke a conflict with Russia. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/27/ukraine-nato-membership

Please mark your calendar for a March 29-30 symposium at the University of Virginia on “Re-envisioning the Black Sea in Literature and Historiography: Backwater or oikoumenē?” In this moment of Russia’s war against Ukraine, imperial ambitions are once again intruding on the Black Sea region. With the premise that imagining comes first in scripting...

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a rich history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. The international team of the handbook’s contributors treats Soviet cultural nonconformism as a phenomenon with its own history and internal logic, idiosyncratic principles, and in...

Ivan Kozlenko’s novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine’s biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country’s media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial ver...

This concluding essay is a response to the other chapters included in this volume and suggests potential directions for further research. It situates literary translation in the context of the struggle by the Soviet regime and its East European satellites to develop a differently organized and differently functioning cultural sphere, where top-down...

Book review of Olha Rudakevych, translator. A Novel about a Good Person. By Emma Andiievska, edited and with an introduction by Marko Robert Stech, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies P, 2018. xiv, 224 pp. $29.95, paper.

Sofiia Andrukhovych’s 2014 novel Felix Austria (Feliks Avstriia) became Ukraine’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work of literature published in the immediate aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution of 2013–14. It combined an ambitious historical reconstruction of daily life in the year 1900 in a mid-size city in the Habsburg-...

This is the first volume on the studies of queer identities in Europe to adopt a strong focus on the history of the Baltic region among other countries in Central and East Europe. It unites work by researchers of different European countries that deals with various representations of the queer culture over a period of more than one hundred years. A...

This article discusses the aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts of Zakhar Berkut, a 1972 film by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka, one of the leading figures of Ukrainian poetic cinema. An ambitious adaptation of a canonical nineteenth-century historical novel by Ivan Franko, it was conceived as the first big-budget Ukrainian historical film si...

In this excerpt from the novel Twelve Circles, photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen takes leave of his earthly body and experiences an unexpected lightness of being. It is just before dawn on Easter Sunday, but he does not turn toward the resurrection of the rising sun; he sets instead on a westward flight, away from the Ukrainian town where he was...

Full text available at https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/11800/s7.pdf This article discusses several Ukrainian writers who gained prominence during the post-Soviet period, in particular Vasyl Makhno, Serhii Zhadan, Andrii Bondar, Natalka Sniadanko, Oksana Lutsyshyna, and Dmytro Lazutkin. Grounded in theoretical models of cultural...

This volume is a comprehensive introduction to innovative Russian drama emerging over the past decade. The book is lucidly written yet makes bold and constructive use of a wide range of theoretical concepts, from anthropology to Lacanian psychoanalysis. To date, drama has been fairly marginalized within the study of Russian literature; thus this vo...

This article focuses on A Stone Cross (Kaminnyi khrest), a 1968 film by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka based on the work of the Ukrainian modernist writer Vasyl' Stefanyk, including the eponymous short story. While this film is regarded in the countries of the former Soviet bloc as one of the highest accomplishments of the poetic cinema moveme...

Few writers can rival Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in the degree of notoriety that has accompanied his name. To an even greater degree than the Marquis de Sade, Sacher-Masoch’s legacy is inextricably bound with the psychosexual condition that has received a designation derived from his surname. For more than a century now, the overwhelming majority of...

Drawing on the discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and globalization, Vitaly Chernetsky maps out the new cultural developments in literature, architecture, painting, film, and performance art emerging in Russia and Ukraine, the two largest successor states to the Soviet Union, situating these phenomena in a greater global context.In Mappi...

"... a hot subject in today's scholarship... and a groundbreaking project of vital significance to the field of cultural studies at both 'western' and 'eastern' geographical locations." -- Elwira Grossman Over the Wall/After the Fall maps a new discourse on the evolution of cultural life in Eastern Europe following the end of communism. Departing f...

Summaries of the discussions at two recent conference sessions: “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” (MLA Annual Convention, 27 Dec. 2005, Washington, DC) and “Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space” (Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 29 Dec. 2005, Washington, DC).

Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday...

The last two decades of Soviet Union's existence witnessed the emergence of new art forms, characterized by the critical investigation of totalitarian culture and of the mindset of its subjects, by the reappropriation and simulation of its language and the subversion of that language from within, by the breakdown of aesthetic taboos and the explora...