With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.

A survey of the main literary trends of Ukraine, its chief authors, and their works, as seen against the historical background of the present century. Luckyj (Slavic studies emeritus, U. of Toronto) provides information about literary developments both in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ukrainian literature, reflecting a turbulent and often discontinuous political and social history, presents special problems to the historian of literature. In this book George Grabowicz approaches these problems through a critique of the major non-Soviet position in the field, the History of Ukrainian Literature of the eminent Slavist Dmytro Čyzevs'kyj. Grabowicz examines critically the method and theory as well as the actual literaryhistorical argument of Čyzevs'kyj's History and challenges some of its basic premises, particularly regarding the periodization of Ukrainian literature, the thesis of its "incompleteness," and the postulate of a purely stylistic history of literature. Ultimately, he proposes an alternative historiographic model, one which would be attuned above all to the specifics of the given culture.

This study of cultural memory in post-Soviet society shows how the inhabitants in Ukraine?s east negotiate the historical legacy they have inherited. Zaharchenko approaches contemporary Ukrainian literature at the intersection of memory studies and border studies, and her analysis adds a new voice to an ongoing exploration of cultural and historical discourses in Ukraine. The scholarly journey through storylines explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), a diverse, dynamic, but under-studied border city in east Ukraine today, come to grips with a traumatized post-Soviet cultural landscape. Zaharchenko?s book examines the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andre? Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev and others, introducing them as a ?doubletake? generation who came of age during the Soviet Union?s collapse and as adults, revisit this experience in their novels. Filling the space between society and the state, local literary texts have turned into forms of historical memory and agents of political life. ÿ

The first English-language biography of Dmytro Dontsov, the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian literary world has not only experienced a true blossoming of women’s prose, but has also witnessed a number of female authors assume the roles of literary trendsetters and authoritative critics of their culture. In this first in-depth study of how Ukrainian women’s prose writing was able to re-emerge so powerfully after being marginalized in the Soviet era, Oleksandra Wallo examines the writings and literary careers of leading contemporary Ukrainian women authors, such as Oksana Zabuzhko, Ievheniia Kononenko, and Maria Matios. Her study shows how these women reshaped literary culture with their contributions to the development of the Ukrainian national imaginary in the wake of the Soviet state’s disintegration. The interjection of women’s voices and perspectives into the narratives about the nation has often permitted these writers to highlight the diversity of the national picture and the complexity of the national story. Utilizing insights from postcolonial and nationalism studies, Wallo’s book theorizes the interdependence between the national imaginary and narrative plots, and scrutinizes how prominent Ukrainian women authors experimented with literary form in order to rewrite the story of women and nationhood.

Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917-1934 illuminates the flowering of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s and the subsequent purge of Soviet Ukrainian writers during the following Stalinist decade. Upon its original publication in 1956, George S. N. Luckyj's book won the praise of American and English critics, but was violently attacked by Soviet critics who labeled it a "slander on the Soviet Union." In the current political environment of glasnost, the book's findings have been acknowledged and supported by Soviet scholars. Moreover, this new critical corroboration has enabled the author to discover that the 1930s purge was more brutal than was previously estimated. The new edition reissues Luckyj's critical work in light of current political developments and reflects the revision of previous findings. Luckyj originally drew on published Soviet sources and the important unpublished papers of a Soviet Ukrainian writer who defected to the West to describe how the brief literary revival in the Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s was abruptly halted by Communist Party controls. The present volume features a new preface, an additional chapter covering recent Soviet attitudes toward the literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and an updated bibliography.