SEELECTS

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)

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)

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.

Benjamin Bossaert (Comenius University Bratislava) & Michel De Dobbeleer (UGent)

Stijn Vervaet (University of Oslo)