Uilleam Blacker

This article explores the representations of Ukrainians in the work of Włodzimierz Odojewski. Focusing on his trilogy of books set in Ukraine, Zasypie wszystko, zawieje . . ., Wyspa ocalenia and the earlier collection of stories, Zmierzch świata, the article considers Odojewski's representations of the Ukrainians, mainly peasants, among whom his Polish landowning protagonists live. The article identifies a purported preoccupation in Odojewski's work with trying to understand the motivations for the Ukrainians who participated in the horrific violence that erupted in what is today western Ukraine in 1943–44; yet at the same time, Odojewski's literary strategies consistently defer any understanding by rendering the Ukrainian characters in his work voiceless or imperceptible, reducing them to symbolic elements of a pre-existing Romantic martyrological discourse around the “kresy,” which ultimately precludes any deeper reflection on the experiences of the “other side” of the conflict.

The article traces the concept of martyrdom through Ukrainian cultural history from the 19th century to the present. It identifies a tradition of martyrological thinking in Ukrainian culture and commemorative practices, arguing that this paradigm begins and is manifested prominently in literature, before spreading much more widely in Ukrainian culture in the twentieth century. The article ar- gues that religiously inflected Romantic nationalist ideas, language and imagery have dominated since the formulation of the concept of Ukrainian national martyrdom in the 19th century, and that these have been evident in various ways in official and unofficial uses of public space, from the creation of Taras Shevchenko’s grave as a site of national memory in the late 19th century down to commemoration of the victims of the Maidan shootings in 2014. Finally, the paper identi- fies potential problems with the paradigm of martyrology in terms of what it includes into and excludes from Ukrainian memory culture.

The chapter explores the various ways in which Jewish return is manifest in recent Polish film and literature. Such returns function variously to express anxiety, loss, mourning or the recovery of lost identity, and appear in diverse forms, from tongue-in-cheek genre fiction to art house cinema. The article argues that the motif of Jewish return has shifted in recent representations from being framed in terms of engagement with a defining other towards an exploration that is more about rediscovering forgotten aspects of the self. The chapter discusses a diverse range of writers and directors, including Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Ewa Lipska, Magdalena Tulli, Hanna Krall, Piotr Paziński, Paweł Pawlikowski and Władyslaw Pasikowski.

The article examines Russian literary representations of the city of Kaliningrad, focusing on how Russian writers approach the problematic, fragmented past of this city. Focusing on works by a diverse range of writers who have written about the city since the 1960s, the article traces the images, motifs and ideas through which Russian authors have accessed the city’s German past, or, indeed, expressed the impossibility of accessing that past. Of particular interest to the article is the motif of ruins. The writers who form the focus of the article are Joseph Brodsky, Zinovy Zinik, Iurii Buida and Aleksandr Popadin.

The paper analyses how the work of three contemporary artists deal with the memory of Poland’s pre-war Jewish population and the Holocaust. Joanna Rajkowska is one of Poland’s leading contemporary artists and her artworks have been displayed in prominent public sites in Warsaw. Her most famous work is her palm tree in central Warsaw, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (2002, ongoing), which references, in its form and physical location on Aleje Jerozolimskie, or Jerusalem Avenue, both Jerusalem and Warsaw’s vanished Jews. Rajkowska has also used important Jewish locations in Warsaw in other work, such as Oxygenator (2007). Yael Bartana is an Israeli artist, but represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2011. In her trilogy of films set in Poland, And Europe Will Be Stunned (2006-11), Bartana uses prominent
locations in Warsaw in which to stage performances (the Palace of Culture, the National Stadium, site of the future Museum of Polish Jews) that provocatively posit a return of Jews to Poland. Betlejewski has authored several provocative and creative responses to the absence of Jews in contemporary Poland, such as his I miss you, Jew! project (2004), and his Burning barn performance (2010). The paper will examine the varying strategies through which these artists deal with the problem of the absence of Jews, the trauma of their violent disappearance, and attempt to re-inscribe the vanished Jews back into the landscape of contemporary Poland. The paper argues that all three artists use actual and imagined space in order to create a complex, often ambiguous dialogue between diverse traumatic pasts and the problems of the present. This text is published as a counterpart to the contribution to Disturbing Pasts from the artist Rafał Betlejewski.

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L’viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city’s “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L’viv’s memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L’viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L’viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L’viv’s Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city’s memory culture.

The paper considers the ways in which Polish authors have re-inscribed Poland's 'lost others' onto its contemporary cityscapes.  The article focuses on evocations of the memory of the Germans deported from the cities that were transferred to Poland after the war, and the Jews who comprised large parts of many urban populations across the country before the war and the Holocaust. The chapter considers a range of authors, including Hanna Krall, Adam Zagajewski, Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, Marek Krajewski, Olga Tokarczuk, Piotr Paziński and Andrzej Bart, in the light of the ideas of leading scholars of cultural memory, such as Jan Assmann and Marianne Hirsch.

A comparative analysis is made of the evocation of urban memory in the work of the Polish author of detective fiction Marek Krajewski and the leading Ukrainian writer of postmodernist fiction and popular historical publications Iurii Vynnchyuk. The cities that form the focus of the work of these writers, Wroc/law for Krajewski and L␣viv for Vynnychuk, both experi- enced massive population shifts after World War II, meaning that the post- war populations had little or no memory of the pre-war cities. The legacy of this disjunction can be felt to this day. This study demonstrates how both writers re-create a sense of memory through a number of similar memory strategies and concludes that the recreation of memory in these writers’ work can be understood as what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, yet that this is postmemory removed from the traumatic context of Hirsch’s original concept. It is also argued that these writers demonstrate that an effective ‘cultural memory’ can be produced in a situation when ‘communi- cative memory’ is lacking, through an imaginative and accessible representa- tion of the ostensibly inaccessible past. This is achieved through the utilization of mass cultural forms, which some theorists of urban memory see as conducive only to forgetting.

The Review is the oldest British journal in the field, having been in existence since 1922. Edited and managed by the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, it covers not only the modern and medieval languages and literatures of ...

The article discusses the controversy sparked in Ukraine in early 2020 over the appointment of the Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky as head of the planned "Babi Yar Memorial Centre" at Babyn Yar, Kyiv. It considers the controversy in the light of the "memory war" that Russia is waging against Ukraine.

After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorializing of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialization and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanization of memory.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the humanities and social sciences in Western Europe and North America experienced a 'memory boom' that gave rise to new research agendas and provoked interdisciplinary exchange. Less known are the ways in which academic practices of Memory Studies have been applied, adapted, and transformed in the countries of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Proceeding from a clear-eyed interrogation of the 'memory boom' paradigm itself - and its theoretical portability into a new cultural context - this volume collects new and varied perspectives on the challenges of post-catastrophic memory, offering a novel approach to a paradigm that has become canonical and crystallized.

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe.
This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn.
Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.