A Supernatural Manifestation of the Imperial Past: Lada Luzina’s Kyiv

• In Event: The Kyiv Text: Evolution, Persistence, Subversion

Abstract

Lada Luzina’s mystery-fantasy series The Witches of Kyiv serves as a vehicle for the author to reimagine 21st-century Kyiv through nostalgic reflection on a Russophone version of the city’s past. Luzina offers a new narrative which places Kyiv as a center of power in Eastern Europe through witchcraft, as well as advancing a vision of the city as both Russophone and distinctly Ukrainian, concomitant with the author’s position as a writer working in a minor literature. My paper examines how Luzina reconciles pre-imperial past, imperial past, and independent present in the urban landscape, and the means by which writing genre fiction rather than literary fiction enables her to achieve this.

Author

• Theodore Edgar Jefferies, U of Toronto (Canada)