Stijn Vervaet (University of Oslo)
Archives: Events
“Felix Timmermans in Slowakije en op de Balkan tijdens het communisme: hoe maak je een christelijke auteur socialistisch?”
Benjamin Bossaert (Comenius University Bratislava) & Michel De Dobbeleer (UGent)
“Gezocht: dichters! Hoe Poetin de Russische literatuur naar zijn hand probeert te zetten”
Pieter Boulogne (KU Leuven)
Abstract
Wat gebeurt er met literatuur wanneer een staat niet alleen bepaalt wat er niet meer mag worden geschreven, maar ook actief voorschrijft wat schrijvers wél zouden moeten schrijven? Sinds het begin van Poetins derde ambtstermijn in 2012 is de ruimte voor onafhankelijke cultuur in Rusland steeds verder ingeperkt. Na de grootschalige invasie van Oekraïne in 2022 is die ontwikkeling in een stroomversnelling terechtgekomen. In deze lezing bekijken we hoe de literaire repressie zich onder Poetin heeft ontwikkeld en nieuwe vormen heeft aangenomen. We volgen daarbij twee tegengestelde bewegingen: enerzijds de uitsluiting en marginalisering van onafhankelijke schrijvers (zoals queer auteurs), anderzijds de actieve promotie van auteurs en werken die aansluiten bij de ideologische agenda van het Kremlin (zoals oorlogspropagandastrips). Lukt het eigenlijk om schrijvers en lezers met wortel en stok naar de hand te zetten?
Bio
Pieter Boulogne (1982) is als professor Russische letterkunde, vertaling en tolken verbonden aan de KU Leuven. Zijn onderzoeksinteresses bevinden zich op het snijpunt van de Russische literatuur- en cultuurgeschiedenis en vertaalwetenschap. Buiten de academische wereld werkt hij als sociaal tolk en als literair vertaler.
“The impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on public support for EU enlargement”
Dmytro Panchuk (UGent)
“West Ukrainian Literature – an Overview”
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.
“Future that we have… what?” The tenses of the modern Russian science fiction
Elena Mikhailik (University of New South Wales)
Abstract
It’s been long noticed and discussed that in the last 30 years Russian speculative fiction has developed a curious relationship with the future – past a certain point the simple future stemming from the current existing present increasingly becomes something that is somehow difficult to imagine and portray. Even radically alternative, “what-if”, futures, that is – futures in a subjunctive mood – are becoming relatively rare (and increasingly subversive even within the realm of mass literature). What seems to flourish, though, are various forms of future-in-the past, where Russian (and world) history is rewritten (in the “time-traveller” “popadantsy” version – together with the personal history of the character) to fit the “proper” image of what should have been, or where that history has been different (and, once again, properly cynicised and archaicised) to begin with. We would like to discuss the possible reasons for this desperate reduction of the future in the future- and speculation-driven genres – linking it not just to ressentiment but to the image of the “world as it is” and the collective fears that (being more sustainable economically – in all senses of the term) have replaced even sectoral collective dreams.
Bio
Elena Mikhailik is a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales; PhD. She specialises in the Russian prison camp literature and Varlam Shalamov in particular, with an interest in the poetics, rhetoric and cultural anthropology (especially that of the early to mid-20th Century Soviet Union)
Nasvidenje v naslednji vojni | See You in the Next War
Joegoslavië, 1980, Živojin Pavlović
Deze verfilming van Vitomil Zupans roman Menuet za kitaro (1975) volgt Berk, een jonge Sloveen die zich tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog aansluit bij de partizanen en al snel aan het front belandt. Parallel met deze verhaallijn loopt een episode die zich jaren later in Spanje afspeelt. Berk ontmoet hier Bittner, een voormalige Duitse soldaat. De twee voormalige tegenstanders halen herinneringen op en discussiëren over de emotionele, politieke en psychologische gevolgen van de oorlog.
Dit controversiële portret van een intellectueel in oorlogstijd werd in 1982 geselecteerd voor de Un Certain Regard-sectie van het filmfestival van Cannes.
Утомлённые солнцем | Burnt by the Sun
Rusland, 1994, Nikita Michalkov
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Film Critic: Mixed-Race Identity, Queer Ingenuity, and Precarious Cultural Labour in Misha Zakharov’s Doramaroman
Having arrived in Moscow in 2014 to study at the leading film school, author and film worker Misha Zakharov began documenting his experiences of coming of age as queer, Korean, and precarious amidst the dramatically shifting and hostile political and cultural landscape of Putin’s Russia. Between 2016 and 2020, he wrote what would become Doramaroman — an autofictional novel whose title combines dorama (i.e. a Korean TV drama) and bildungsroman, signalling the interplay between cinema and literature that runs throughout the book. A kind of scrapbook, which can also be read as a collection of essays, Doramaroman engages with a wide range of visually driven media — from comic books (Alan Moore’s Promethea) to video games (Façade) to the cinema of Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis — in order to explore topics such as mixed-race identity, precarious labour in the cultural sector, fascination with the moving image, the writing process, gay sexual politics in contemporary Russia, and the states of drifting, mutating, and being on the move. Standing outside canonical Russian gay writing of Gennady Trifonov, Yevgeny Kharitonov, Slava Mogutin, or Sergey Khazov-Kassia, it instead approaches queer identity intersectionally, considering Misha’s positionality as someone from the periphery, of colour, and trying to make it. The book was published in October 2022, a few months before the newly intensified version of the anti-LGBTQ+ law was introduced in December 2022, and following Misha’s own departure from Russia in early March of that year.
In this keynote, drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s Archive of Feelings and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer ephemera, Misha will reposition his novel Doramaroman as a historical document and glimpse into film, contemporary art, and the broader cultural life of Russia after the occupation of Crimea and before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as an unruly decolonial seed now beginning to bear fruit. He will situate the work within several literary traditions — including queer, feminist, and immigrant film criticism (Eric de Kuyper, Serge Daney, Kier-La Janisse, Hamid Naficy); film-related autofiction (Chris Kraus, Qiu Miaojin); memoir and experimental writing by Korean American authors (Jane Jeong Trenka, Alexander Chee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha); and Russophone queer carceral writing (Ali Feruz, Evgeny Shtorn, Sergei Parajanov) — while proposing a new form of writing in which film and life writing are inseparable. Misha will also reflect on his practice as a translator of queer literature into Russian, including seminal texts such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, as well as the subtitles for the first-ever (and most likely last) retrospective of Barbara Hammer in Russia.
The event — reading from Doramaroman (10 mins) and keynote lecture by Misha Zakharov (40 mins), followed by a Q&A (20 mins) — will conclude with a film screening, featuring Maxim Pechersky’s acclaimed autofictional short The Year of the White Moon (2021).
On the speaker
Misha Zakharov (b. 1996; he/they) is a Russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent as well as a pro-Ukrainian political refugee in the UK. He is a London-based author and film worker, with a particular interest in queer and decolonial perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. He is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Film & TV Studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry. His academic and film-curatorial work investigates film events as sites of (un)learning, world-making from below, and South-South solidarity.
Misha’s debut novel Doramaroman was published in 2022 by the now-defunct No Kidding Press. The first chapter of Doramaroman appeared in Tupelo Quarterly in 2024, translated into English by Nathan Jeffers. His writing residencies include the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2013) and the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2023).
Extra: The Year of the White Moon, dir. Maxim Pechersky, Russia, 2021, 21 mins
In the intimacy of a muted, deserted living room, a series of telephone conversations take place between a superstitious mother living in the Russian provinces and her gay son, who moved to the capital. The Year of the White Moon is a tragicomedy about a conversation between two people who hear each other, but are not able to listen.
On the filmmaker
Maxim Pechersky is a filmmaker working at the intersection of visual arts, theatre, and artistically driven film and video projects.
Born and raised in Yekaterinburg, Russia, he graduated in 2022 with a degree in documentary film directing from VGIK, Russia’s leading film school. He has collaborated with artists such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Curver Thoroddsen, and Julian Charrière. He made his directorial debut with the short film The Year of the White Moon (2021), which received acclaim at major film festivals, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Sheffield Doc/Fest. He lives and works in Berlin.
Attendance is free, but registration is obligatory via this link. If you cannot attend in person, you can register for streaming.
AFGELAST: Van het Oud-Russisch naar het (moderne) Russisch en het Oekraïens: algemene geschiedenis, ontwikkeling, verschillen en parallellen
Leonid Kulikov (UCLouvain / UGent)
Abstract
Leonid Kulikov zal spreken over de gemeenschappelijke oorsprong van Oost-Slavische talen, vooral Russisch en Oekraïens. Hij zal zich eerst concentreren op gemeenschappelijke kenmerken van deze talen die ze onderscheiden van andere (zuidelijke en westerse) Slavische talen. Vervolgens bespreekt hij kort de belangrijkste verschillen binnen de groep van Oost-Slavische talen (zoals Ukr. ikan’je of Russ. E → ’o), waarbij hij ook enige aandacht besteedt aan culturele aspecten die met deze kenmerken verband houden.
Bio
Leonid Kulikov (Ph.D. van de Universiteit Leiden) is docent-professor aan de Université catholique de Louvain (UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve) en onderzoeker aan de Universiteit Gent. Hij was aangesloten bij en doceerde aan verschillende universiteiten, zoals Russian State University for the Humanities [RGGU], Moskou, Universiteit Leiden, Göttingen University, Uppsala University en U Pavia. Zijn huidige onderzoek richt zich op Vedische en Klassieke Sanskriet-grammatica en filologie, taalkundige typologie, Indo-Europese vergelijkende taalkunde en mythologie, geschiedenis van Indo-Arische talen, Oud-Slavisch en Russisch, talen van Zuid- en Centraal-Azië, en een vertaling van de Atharvaveda (de op één na oudste Indische tekst).
De SEELECTS-lezing van Leonid Kulikov op donderdag 7 mei kan helaas niet doorgaan.
We hopen deze lezing op een later moment opnieuw te kunnen inplannen en houden jullie daarvan op de hoogte.
Bedankt voor jullie begrip.