Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg University)
Abstract
Since the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, this border region has garnered global attention both in news coverage and on the battlefield. This spotlight has brought a wide array of issues concerning the Donbas’s place on the cultural maps of Ukraine and Russia, which are ranging from the region’s entangled history to the complex relations between regional and national identity within its borders. The image of the Donbas as a contested, unsettled region has gained even more significance with the escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war in February 2022.
In my presentation, I will delve into the construction of the Donbas’s image in culture, literature, and cinema since the early 20th century, tracing its evolution and the narratives it has generated over time. However, my primary objective is to examine the Donbas within the context of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. In this conflict, the region serves as both a Russian casus belli and a central element of contemporary Russian imperial imagery, where the Donbas plays a prominent role as the heartland of “Novorossiya” or “New Russia” – a territorial concept that lays claim to southeastern Ukraine as part of the Russian state. Ultimately, I will investigate the strategies employed by contemporary Ukrainian authors to counter Russian imperial claims and reimagine the Donbas as both a Ukrainian and European region.
Biografie
Oleksandr Zabirko completed his studies in Literature and Linguistics at the University of Luhansk (Ukraine) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). He earned his PhD in Slavic Literatures and Cultures from the University of Münster and is currently affiliated with the Slavic Department at the University of Regensburg. His primary research interests encompass literary models of spatial and political order, contemporary literatures from Russia and Ukraine, and fantastic literature as a whole. Notable among his recent publications are “Literary Forms of Geopolitics: The Modeling of Spatial and Political Order in Contemporary Russian and Ukrainian Literature” (in German, 2021) and “Figurations of the East” (in German, co-edited, 2022).