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Alois Woldan (University of Vienna)

Abstract

For centuries, West Ukrainian Literature was written in territories that did not belong to a Ukrainian state. We can notice a vivid literary life in the Eastern parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth already in the Early New Age.

The situation changes, when large parts of these territories with the 1st partition of Poland in 1772 became part of the Habsburg empire. The majority of the population of the so-called kingdom of “Galicia and Lodomeria” was Ukrainian, using their vernacular language. The West Ukrainian romantic movement in Lviv in the 1830s marks a first highlight of Ukrainian literature in the Austrian Empire. This is followed by a strong realist period in the 2nd half of this century, while modernist tendencies are more commonly found in the Bukovina region.

Austrian Galicia becomes Polish with the end of World War I in 1918. Writing in Ukrainian continued in these now again Polish territories and later in emigration, mainly in Czechoslovakia, and after World War II in the USA. From 1944 to the collapse of the Soviet Union, literary life in the Western parts of the USSR was not very substantial, except for the Lviv underground in the late 1980s.

In the 1990s, after Ukrainian independence in 1991, the center of Ukrainian literary life shifted to the West, to cities like Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. Groups like “Bu-Ba-Bu” or the members of the “Stanislav phenomenon” marked a new peak in postmodern Ukrainian literature. Until now, the contribution of the Ukrainian West to Ukrainian literature and culture as a whole is substantial.

Bio

Alois Linz was born 1954 in Linz, Austria. He studied theology, Slavic and Comparative literatures at Innsbruck University, was a scholar in Voronesh/Russia and lecturer at the University of Linguistics, Moscow. He obtained a Ph.D. in Slavic and Comparative literatures at Innsbruck University,  was an assistant professor at the Slavonic department of Salzburg University, lecturer of German and Austrian culture at the University of Wrocław/Poland, professor of “East-Middle-European Studies“ at the University of Passau, Germany, and professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of Vienna before he retired in 2020. Fields of work: history of Polish and Ukrainian literature, literatures in Austrian Galicia, translation of poetry from Polish and Ukrainian into German.

Dmytro Panchuk (UGent)