Chaired by Yuliya V. Ladygina, Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at HURI.
The discussion will begin with Rafeyenko’s personal and creative journey—from his displacement from Donetsk in 2014 and again following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 to his experience of writing and working as an artist at risk. From there, the conversation will turn to the role of literature in times of war and to Rafeyenko’s current research on the Iliad, exploring what an ancient epic of war might tell us about violence, loss, displacement, and the human experience of war today. The evening will also feature readings from Rafeyenko’s recent play, Signals of Being, or Verbum caro factum est. It is envisioned as an open conversation, with ample time for questions and discussion with the audience.
This event will be an open conversation, with ample time for questions and discussion with the audience. Light refreshments will be served.
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Ukraine Study Group public event series.
Volodymyr Rafeyenko is a writer and literary scholar who received an M.A. in Literary Theory from Donetsk National University in 2005. He is a member of PEN Ukraine.
Rafeyenko is the author of ten works of fiction, three plays, and several collections of poetry. His first literary publications appeared in periodicals in 1994. In 2026, his collection of essays Spohady pro zhyvykh. Donetski istorii (Memories of the Living: Donetsk Stories) was published in Ukraine.
His novels The Length of Days and Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love were shortlisted for Ukraine's National Taras Shevchenko Prize and have received several international distinctions, including the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award and the Peterson Literary Fund Translated Book Award. Both novels have been published in English translation by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The same publisher has also released his play Signals of Being, or Verbum caro factum est and is preparing the English edition of his novel Petrichor: The Scent of the Earth After Rain, originally published in Ukraine in 2023.
Rafeyenko's works have also been translated into French, Polish, German, Slovak, and Czech. His writing has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies and has been included in university curricula in the United States.
Alongside his literary work, Rafeyenko pursues scholarly research in literary theory and hermeneutics, with particular interests in hermeneutic approaches to literary interpretation, the philosophical legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin and Merab Mamardashvili, and Bakhtin's phenomenology and its application to the analysis of fiction. He also teaches creative writing across different age groups.