Vitaly Chernetsky. “Traumatic Rhymes. Contemporary Ukrainian Refugee Experience and the Cultural Legacies of the 1940s Displacement”
November 19, 7 pm
Hunter College CUNY
Chanin Language Center (B126 Hunter West Building)
East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue (6 train)
Free and open to the public
RSVP
The lecture links theoretical reflections on narrative temporality and trauma temporality (including those by Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Rothberg) with a literary-historical overview highlighting the pioneering articulation of the displacement theme in the work of the Ukrainian early Modernist writer Vasyl Stefanyk at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing with a closer discussion of the displacement-focused writings of several key authors reflecting on the experiences of the 1940s DP camps (such as Ulas Samchuk and Emma Andiievs’ka, with Andiievska’s A Novel about A Good Person as the key text that subverts both spatial and temporal coherence, as well as the border between the real and the illusory) and on the current refugee experience (such as Sophia Andrukhovych and Oksana Shchur in essays/nonfiction, Ievheniia Kuznetsova in prose fiction, and Iryna Shuvalova and Iia Kiva in poetry).
VITALY CHERNETSKY is a Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007) and of numerous articles on modern and contemporary Slavic and East European literatures and cultures where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is forthcoming from Krytyka. He co-edited a bilingual anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Letters from Ukraine (2016). His translations into English include two novels and a poetry collection by Yuri Andrukhovych and a poetry collection by Ostap Slyvynsky. His latest book publication is the translation of Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria (Harvard, September 2026). Prof. Chernetsky is the current president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US and a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).