Remembering the Past and Re-Membering the Present: Reading Contemporary Picturebook Adaptations of Ukrainian Literary Classics as Acts of Resistance

• In Event: Contemporary Ukrainian Children’s Literature and Picturebooks: Adapting the Lessons of the Past, Facing the Challenges of the Present

Abstract

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine beginning on 24 February, 2022 – which followed incremental attacks on the nation since 2014 – has involved not only conventional tactics of warfare but also the destruction of monuments to Ukrainian national and cultural heritage. Indeed, as public intellectuals such as Timothy Snyder have argued, the Russian invasion might be qualified as genocidal because it intends to eliminate not only individual Ukrainian citizens but also the symbols that bind them together within a greater national community. It is not insignificant, for example, that a museum housing the works of Ukrainian folk-artist Maria Prymachenko was deliberately incinerated by Russian forces in the first month of the invasion, or that statues erected in honor of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko have been desacralized by Russian occupiers of Ukrainian cities and villages.
This paper thus argues that contemporary Ukrainian picturebook adaptations of canonical literary works such as the poems of Taras Shevchenko or the fables of Ivan Franko play a particularly important role in maintaining a sense of collective national heritage at a precise moment during which it is (literally) under siege. For example, although Maryna Mychailovchyna’s and Zirka Menzanyuk’s Children’s Kobzar (Дитячий кобзар Old Lion Press, 2012) was published two years before the initial Russian invasion, its visual renditions of Shevchenko’s nineteenth-century iconic poetic collection arguably resound with a new generation of Ukrainian young people currently under siege. Likewise Lavro Kost’s picturebook adaptation of Ivan Franko’s tale “The Painted Fox” (Фарбований лис, A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha, 2014) offers young readers a fresh rendition of a nineteenth-century story featuring a (post-)colonial trickster hero. Ultimately, this paper challenges recent Western European and North American studies of “classical,” “canonical” or otherwise “national” works of children’s literature, which largely argue that such texts are outdated and otherwise give expression to conservative or nostalgic impulses. Rather, it argues that contemporary Ukrainian picturebook adaptations draw on iconic past texts in order to creatively re-envision its heritage in a way that allows for the literal and figurative remembering/re-membering of the nation’s most vulnerable young generation.

Author

• Anastasia Maria Ulanowicz, U of Florida