Escape to the Past: Escapist Trend in Ukrainian Fiction of the Turn of the 20th-21st Centuries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Escapist fiction is one of the most common forms of artistic response to acute historical cataclysms. The events of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war have actualized the trend of escapist fiction, which was previously represented in Ukrainian literature of the second half of the 20th century as a reaction to totalitarian oppression.The idea of the panel is that escapist prose created in the era of historical cataclysms indirectly relays traumatic events of extra-textual reality. In analysis of the works by Valeriy Shevchuk and Oksana Zabuzhko, which are set in the worlds of the past, we plan to trace implicit forms of mediation of the historical traumas of the “late Soviet” time and premediation of subsequent political upheavals (in accordance with Astrud Erll’s theory). In the study of escapist works written during the Russian-Ukrainian war, based on the texts by Bohdan Kolomiychuk, Sofia Andrukhovych, Ola Rusina, we plan to consider what new techniques are added to the escapist artistic devices generated by the previous literary tradition, and how the past of Soviet-era Ukraine is represented in contemporary works as a premediation of the events of the current war.
The main objectives of the panel are: 1) to trace the continuity of the escapist literary tradition from late Soviet times to the present; 2) to analyze the main artistic patterns used in escapist literature; and 3) to consider indirect forms of reflecting social problems and traumatic experiences in ostensibly escapist works.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Lidia Stefanowska, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• Escapism as a Form of Remediation and Premediation of Cultural Trauma in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature - Tetiana Grebeniuk, U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Escape From War to…War: Military Visions in Contemporary Ukrainian Historical Mysteries - Sofiya Filonenko, Ukrainian Catholic U (Ukraine)

• Childhood in the Shadow of War: Escapism in Ukrainian Children’s Literature on the example of O. Rusin’s novel Apricots Bloom at Night - Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk, U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Historical Fiction as a Form of Escapism: The Case of Valery Shevchuk - Marta Zambrzycka, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Discussant

• Valentyna Kharkhun, Mykola Hohol State U of Nizhyn (Ukraine) / American U

Session Manager

• Tetiana Shyshkina, Justus Liebig U Giessen (Germany)