Moderated by Serhiy Bilenky, Research Associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Editor-In-Chief of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, and Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI)
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
The lecture focuses on the representation of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukrainian and Ukrainian émigré fiction of the 1940s – 1960s. Witnessing the Holocaust was an integral part of the Ukrainian experience in World War II, over the course of which 1.5 million Jews perished in what is now known as “the Holocaust by bullets”. Despite the official Soviet policy to refer to the victims of the Nazis as “peaceful Soviet people” and thus to obscure the experience of the Jews in occupied territories, Ukrainian writers spoke directly about the tragedy of the Holocaust. However, was there a substantial difference between the literary texts written in Soviet Ukraine and those written in post-war emigration? By analyzing Soviet Ukrainian (Varvara Cherednychenko, Iurii Smolych, Iurii Ianovskyi, and Mykola Bazhan) and postwar émigré (Iurii Klen, Eva Biss) fiction, the lecture reveals the complexity of the issue of Holocaust representation in postwar writings and shows how the authors oscillated between compassion and indifference towards their neighbors – thus, between remembrance and oblivion.
Hanna Protasova (1984) is a Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist. In 2021, she earned her candidate of sciences degree from the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine with specialization in Ukrainian literary modernism and Ukrainian émigré literature. She is currently a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Western University (London, Canada). She holds two MA degrees: one in Slavic Studies (University of Victoria, Canada, 2023) and another one in Theory and History of Literature (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine, 2007). Her second doctoral dissertation focuses on the Holocaust representation and Holocaust memory in Ukrainian fiction and, where applicable, non-fiction beginning from the mid-1940s and all the way to the 2020s. Hanna is a 2018 alum of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI).
This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the HUSI Public Lecture Series.
Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks in advance of the session.
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LOCATION:CGIS-Knafel/North Building, 3rd Floor, Room K-354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20240710T210000Z DTEND:20240710T223000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR