Ukrainian Identity Within and Against Official Soviet Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The establishment of Soviet rule in Ukraine and the consequent changes to the political and social order prompted cultural producers to search for new ways to express and capture Ukrainian identity. Throughout the entire Soviet period, Ukrainian writers, artists, and intellectuals found modes of expression allowing them to carve out spaces for alternative and subversive language within the limitations imposed by the régime. This panel explores [four] projects of resistance and identity preservation that established sites for alternative views and political discourse while bypassing or evading the Soviet authorities and their control over the cultural sphere. Whether by means of satirical devices, memory writing, samvydav, or collecting and utilizing the objects of material culture, the subjects discussed in this panel explored the possibilities to claim and reclaim their notions of Ukrainian identity in opposition to the dominant power structures. The goal of this collaborative inquiry is to identify and examine the ways Ukrainian social, intellectual, and cultural lives transformed in response to the limitations of Soviet public discourses. The presenters address this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective that engages literary criticism, historical analysis, and ethnographic studies.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Vincent Zubrow

Papers

• Thinking Beyond Helsinki: Ukraine Between the Global and the National - Thom Loyd, Augusta U

• Preserving Self in the Soviet Prison System: Relationship Between Resistance and Embroidery During Iryna Senyk’s Incarceration - Alina Orlova, U of Chicago

• Revising Memory, Rewriting Identity: Petro Grigorenko’s Memoirs - Una Vulevic, Stanford U

• Chronicling a Crisis: Leonid Nedolia’s Sickness - William Ronald Debnam, Columbia U

Discussant

• Alex Averbuch, U of Michigan