East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
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Curative Mythmaking: Children\u27s Bodies, Medical Knowledge, and the Frontier of Health in Early Soviet Odesa
Full text linkThis essay explores how Soviet authorities appropriated medical knowledge derived from the treatment of a “passive” juvenile population to create a new assurance of municipal well-being in the 1920s. The attempt to control and remediate the spread of disease reflected a Bolshevik certainty in the state’s ability to confront the frontier of health by applying the dictates of modern science. Revolution and civil war brought challenge—the fractured city changed hands repeatedly until a final, tentative victory by the Red Army in 1920. Odesa’s children figuratively confronted a political, moral, and social liminality, standing between the diseased, corrupt yesteryear and a salubrious, principled future. Soviet central authorities sought to revive the newly liberated city by establishing a network of children’s institutions in which they would contain contagion, but also bring the full spectrum of applied expertise to bear on young bodies. In this traumatized city at the Soviet Union’s edge, state custodians would raise a new, loyal generation. Its health would signify revolution achieved. Illness would continue to plague the city’s residents, but the myth of a community united in health created an ecology of promise and activism
Ivan Kozlenko’s Tanzher and the Odesa Myth: Multidirectional Memory As a Strategy of Subversion
Full text linkIvan Kozlenko’s novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine’s biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country’s media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial version of the city’s popular myth, widely disseminated both by mass media and by scholarly discourse. A novel whose plot centres on two pansexual love triangles, one taking place in the 1920s, the other in the early 2000s, Tangier employs strategies of intertextual engagement and multidirectional memory to construct an alternative affirming narrative. It focuses on the episodes in Odesa’s history during Ukraine’s wars of independence in 1918–20 and the time it served as Ukraine’s capital of filmmaking in the 1920s and seeks to reinsert this queer-positive narrative into the national literary canon. This article analyzes the project of utopian transgression the novel seeks to enact and situates it both in the domestic socio-cultural field and in the broader contexts of global countercultural practices. It also examines the challenges faced by post-communist societies struggling with the new conservative turn in national cultural politics
Review of Irena Kozak. “Zrodylys\u27 my velykoi hodyny . . .”: Spohady. : [“We Were Born at a Great Hour . . .”: Memoirs]
No full textReview of John-Paul Himka and Franz A. J. Szabo, editors. Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy.
No full textPolish-Ukrainian Dialogue on the Restitution of Cultural Property Displaced during World War II
Full text linkNegotiations between Ukraine and Poland concerning the return of lost treasures have been ongoing since the beginning of the 1990s. In total, during 1997–2020 six sessions were held of the Intergovernmental Ukrainian-Polish Commission for the Protection and Return of Cultural Property Lost and Illegally Displaced during World War II. However, no cultural objects have been returned to Ukraine or Poland. This article analyzes current Ukrainian-Polish intergovernmental relations on the return and restitution of cultural property lost in consequence of World War II, describes the accomplishments, and examines the problematic issues concerning mutual co-operation
Review of Michael M. Naydan and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones, translators. The Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak: Songs of Love, Songs of Death, Songs of the Moon.
No full textКіборги проти ватників: гібридність, вепонізація інформації та медіатизована реальність у сучасних українських фільмах про війну
Full text linkFocusing on Akhtem Seitablaiev’s blockbuster Kiborhy: Heroi ne vmyraiut\u27 (Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die, 2017) and Sergei Loznitsa’s auteur production Donbass (2018), this article argues that the latest cycle of Ukrainian war films merits critical attention as an astute record of conspicuous social transformations in today’s Ukraine and as a medium that presents an original perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization, the latter being a relatively new theme in war films broadly defined. The article uses post-colonial and cyborg theories of hybridity, Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, and the Marxist notion of “false consciousness” to illustrate how post-Soviet, post-colonial, and post-truth aspects of war-torn Ukraine conflate in Seitablaev’s and Loznitsa’s works to bring to the fore a recent shift in the nature of warfare itself. As the two films unequivocally demonstrate, the latter is defined not so much by high-tech armed operations and direct annihilation of the opponent as by contactless warfare, as well as its consequences for those directly influenced by it.Аналізуючи блокбастер Ахтема Сеітаблаєва «Кіборги: Герої не вмирають» (2017) та авторський фільм Сергія Лозниці «Донбас» (2018), ця стаття доводить, що найновіший цикл українських фільмів про війну вартий уваги критиків не тільки як документування важливих трансформацій сучасного українського суспільства, але і як медіум, що передає оригінальне бачення гібридної природи сучасної війни та її стрімкої медіатизації. Це є відносно новими темами у воєнних фільмах. У статті використовуються постколоніальне поняття та кібер-теорії гібридності, концепція симулякрів Бодріяра (Baudrillard) та марксистське поняття «хибної свідомості» для ілюстрування того, як пострадянські, постколоніальні та постправдиві аспекти пошматованої війною України переплітаються в роботах Сеітаблаєва та Лозниці, виводячи на перший план нещодавні зміни природи війни. Як показують обидва проаналізовані фільми, конфлікт наразі визначається не так високотехнологічними збройними операціями та прямим знищенням супротивника, як безконтактною війною та її наслідками для тих, кого вона безпосередньо зачіпає