From pre-war years in Paris to the end of the 1920s in Kyiv, Ukrainians or artists from Ukraine produced some of the world's greatest avant-garde art and made major contributions to painting, sculpture, theatre, and film-making. This book tells their story and explores the roots of their inspiration.
Ukraine is at a historic crossroads, with the nations complex cultural identity at stake. Curator Alisa Lozhkina provides an authoritative overview of the countrys art, artists and movements from the dawn of Modernism to the Soviet period, to post-Soviet times and Russias invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She discusses Ukrainian art and artists within historical and political contexts as well as showing how they have contributed to, and interacted with, Ukrainian culture and identity as the nation transformed from provincial status on the periphery of the Russian Empire, to a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, through to independence and the challenges of its most recent history. Arranged broadly chronologically and fully illustrated throughout, The Art of Ukraine offers a powerful opportunity to explore the rich and complex Ukrainian artistic tradition.
In 2022, Russia heightened its initial 2014 assault and launched its imperialist full-scale war against Ukraine. The Kremlin continued to perpetrate its denial of Ukrainians as a nation distinct from the Russians. Russia’s Denial of Ukraine: Letters and Contested Memory explores the gradual and long-lasting integration of contested memory in the cultural memory of Ukraine. It emphasizes how narratives, which formed the contested memory in the nineteenth century, appeared to come to the fore with the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War. At the same time, it offers the theoretical premise for exploring contested memory, social forgetting, and remembering. The ambivalent nature of contested memory manifests in weakening national aspirations and strengthening resilience and resistance against violence. Contested memory nuances the discussion of undermining a metropolitan center and dismantling oppression. Letters reveal public discourses shaped by cultural and political developments centering on the Ukrainians’ endeavors to remember themselves as a nation distinct from the Russians. Epistolary expressions by Mykola Hohol, Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko illustrate the circulation of contested memory sponsored and supported in many ways by Russia. Writers comment on their Ukrainianness and situate themselves in Ukraine’s entangled past in which empires clash and fall apart.
This book examines four dramatic periods that have shaped not only Ukrainian, but also Soviet and Russian history over the last hundred years: the revolutionary struggles of 1917-20, Stalin’s "second" revolution of 1928-33, the mobilization of revolutionary nationalists during the Second World War, and the Euromaidan protests of 2013-14. The story is told from the perspective of "insiders." It recovers the voice of Bolshevik historians who first described the 1917-21 revolution in Ukraine; citizens who were accused of nationalist conspiracies by Stalin; Galician newspapers that covered the 1933-34 famine; nationalists who fomented revolution in the 1940s; and participants in the Euromaidan protests and Revolution of 2013-14. In each case the narrative reflects current "memory wars" over these key moments in history. The discussion of these flashpoints in history in a balanced, insightful and illuminating. It introduces recent research findings and new archival materials, and provides a guide to the heated controversies that have today focused attention scholarly and public attention on the issues of nationalism and Russian-Ukrainian relations. The Euromaidan protesters declared that "Ukraine is not Russia," but the slogan was already current in 1917. This volume describes the process that led to its reappearance in the present day.
Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.
Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.
Volume 10 examines how the innovative impulses that came from Italy were creatively merged with indigenous traditions and how many national variants of Futurism emerged from this fusion. Ten essays investigate various aspects of Italian Futurism and its links to Austria, Georgia, France, Hungary and Portugual and in fields such as Typography, Olfaction, Photography. Section 2 examines seven examples of caricatures and satires of Futurism in the contemporary press, followed by Section 3, reporting on the Archiv der Avantgarden (AdA) in Dresden. Section 4 communicates bibliographic details of 120 book publications on Futurism in the period 2017-2020, including exhibition catalogues, conference proceedings and editions.
Oleh Ilnytzkyj seeks to rectify the misinterpretations surrounding the Futurists and their leader Mykhail Semenko by providing the first major English-language monograph on this vibrant literary movement and its charismatic leader.
London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political, and cultural insecurities over Britain's status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. Insecurities regarding Britain's colonial rule as exemplified in Ireland and elsewhere, were compounded by growing demands for social reform across the country - the call for women's emancipation, the growth of the labour, and the trade union movements all created a climate of mounting disillusion. Revue correlated the immediacy of this uncertain world, through a fragmented vocabulary of performance placing satire, parody, social commentary, and critique at its core and found popularity in reflecting and responding to the variations of the new lived experiences. Multidisciplinary in its creation and realisation, revue incorporated dance, music, design, theatre, and film appropriating pre-modern theatre forms, techniques, and styles such as burlesque, music hall, pantomime, minstrelsy, and pierrot. Experimenting with narrative and expressions of speech, movement, design, and sound, revue displayed ambivalent representations that reflected social and cultural negotiations of previously essentialised identities in the modern world. Part of a wide and diverse cultural space at the beginning of the twentieth century it was acknowledged both by the intellectual avant-garde and the workers theatre movement not only as a reflexive action, but also as an evolving dynamic multidisciplinary performance model, which was highly influential across British culture. Revue displaced the romanticism of musical comedy by combining a satirical listless detachment with a defiant sophistication that articulated a fading British hegemonic sensibility, a cultural expression of a fragile and changing social and political order. David Linton is a performer/theatre practitioner and senior lecturer in Drama at Kingston University, London, UK. His research explores issues of resistance, adaptation, and exchange in theatre. This focuses on participatory arts practice, black British performance and pre-modern popular theatre forms, and their contemporary applications, specifically mask/minstrelsy, pantomime, burlesque/neo burlesque, cabaret, pierrot, hip hop theatre, and revue.