Competing Liberations in the Literature and Art of 1920s Ukraine

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the emergence and interaction of competing ideas of liberation in early post-revolutionary Ukraine, as reflected in the modernist literature and art of the 1920s. We will consider how creatives of various backgrounds grappled with the main tensions of the period, focussing particularly on shifting ideas of nationhood and Ukrainianness within the context of both an internationalist Soviet project and a multiethnic, diverse Ukraine. Our papers are linked by discussions of how the pre-Soviet Ukrainian past came to bear on liberatory artistic projects: how forms from the Ukrainian national tradition are reimagined in the work of Jewish Ukrainian writers Bagritskii and Babel; how the national liberation represented by the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) becomes a source of both fascination and anxiety in Soviet Ukrainian modernism; and how the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine (ARMU) synthesised diverse influences from Ukrainian artistic history to create a new aesthetics of visual sovereignty. With this panel, we aim to to engage in our own kind of intellectual liberation, freeing Russophone Jewish authors from their restrictive classification as “Russian literature” by Russocentric scholarship; revealing the UPR as not just a state but an idea that reverberates beyond its temporal and spatial boundaries; and laying bare the uniquely Ukrainian elements of artists previously obscured by the label of “Russian avant-garde.” Insisting on interdisciplinarity, we link the dynamic aesthetic experimentations of this period to the historical realities of Soviet Ukraine in the age of Ukrainianisation.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Mark Roman Andryczyk, Columbia U

Papers

• Reclaiming Ukrainian Jewish Russophone Literature of the Twentieth Century: The Cases of Eduard Bagritskii and Isaac Babel - Olha Khometa, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• The Ghost at the Feast: Depictions of the Ukrainian People's Republic in Vaplitian Ukrainian Modernism - William Ronald Debnam, Columbia U

• The Association of Revolutionary Masters of Ukraine: A Move toward Visual Sovereignty - Samuel Veremchuk, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussant

• Mayhill C. Fowler, Stetson U