Ukraine. Literature and Politics

The course will consider the relationship between politics and literature in Ukraine, focusing on the late Soviet period up to the present, but also covering the tragic pages of the history of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s-1930s, when Ukrainian creatives loyal to the Soviet regime were seemingly granted freedom of expression only to be brutally suppressed.

We will trace the emergence of new post-Soviet literature and consider texts which were written in reaction to "dead Soviet literature". We will analyze why the first post-soviet generation of young Ukrainian authors was consciously apolitical and how this generation matured, experienced some dramatic events in Ukrainian politics and society, and formed their own political views. We will analyze how these views are reflected in the writers' texts.

We will consider the extent to which literature influenced Ukrainian society immediately after 1991, in the late 1990s, and up to the present day. What has been the role of the writer in Ukrainian society through this 30-year period?

Separately, we will consider and try to model the near future of Russian-language and Crimean-Tatar literature in the context of Ukrainian literature and politics.

The course will be given in English.