The Ghost at the Feast: Depictions of the Ukrainian People's Republic in Vaplitian Ukrainian Modernism

• In Event: Competing Liberations in the Literature and Art of 1920s Ukraine

Abstract

In this paper I will argue that depictions of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) in literature and film by the "Vaplitians" (former members and associates of the Soviet Ukrainian literary organisation VAPLITE) are characterised by a marked ambivalence, revealing both anxiety and fascination with the short-lived state as the road not taken, an alternative vision of Ukraine with enduring affective potential. I will take as the heart of my paper works by dramatist Mykola Kulish and filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, both of whom, in "Sonata Pathétique" and "Arsenal" respectively, use civil war with the UPR as a device to introduce a dialogue between competing visions of Ukraine's future, and in whose other works memory of the UPR recurs as a particular type of Ukrainian identity threatening to unravel the ever-unstable "Soviet Ukrainian" formulation. I will link the questions raised by such representations of the UPR both to the political context of debates around Ukrainianisation and to the personal biographies of the Vaplitians, who included tried-and-tested Red Army Soldiers (such as Kulish) and former partisans of the UPR (such as Dovzhenko).

Author

• William Ronald Debnam, Columbia U