Cultural memory as a Concept and Collection: Taras Shevchenko in the Legacy of Yur Mezhenko

• In Event: Exploring Cultural Memory: Collection, Construction, and Continuity in Modern Ukrainian Literature

Abstract

Based on publications and archival materials of Ukrainian literary critic and bibliographer Yur Mezhenko (1892-1969), this paper analyzes the process of creating a modernist version of the Ukrainian cultural and literary canon and rethinking the place and role of Taras Shevchenko as its key figure. In his works of the 1920s, Mezhenko moves away from a historical approach towards a theoretical one, interpreting Shevchenko's work through the category of revolution and thus typologically comparing it with modernism (J. Ortega y Gasset, A. Gramsci, Z. Bauman). In later adverse circumstances, Mezhenko chooses collecting as a "silent resistance", a form of self-narrative and evidence of involvement in a collective cultural space (W. Benjamin, J. Baudrillard, W. Muensterberger, A. Assmann, S. Stewart, S. Pearce, J. Elsner & R. Cardinal, P. van der Grijp). The 1960 transfer of the Shevchenko collection (about 15,000 items) to the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is considered as an important transition from individual cultural action to the formation of institutionalized collective memory, and the Mezhenko case is seen as contributing to the understanding of Ukrainian intellectual history of the 20th century.

Author

• Olena Haleta, Ivan Franko National U of Lviv (Ukraine)