Description
Book SynopsisWhere Currents Meet treats the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in Ukraine's East as elements of a complex continuum. This study of cultural memory in post-Soviet society shows how its inhabitants negotiate the historical legacy they have inherited. Tanya 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. This 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, Andrei 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.
Table of ContentsForeword Introduction THE DOUBLETAKE GENERATION AND THE SHIMMER OF FRONTIERS Time and space Memory and literature The shimmer of frontiers Where currents meet Chapter One: FRONTIERS OF IDENTITY Fluid identities Narratives at war Sloboda: Roots of fluidity Chapter Two: FRONTIERS OF EMPTINESS The last barricade A story in old drawings Of monsters and men Memory and emptiness The nonmissing variable Chapter Three: FRONTIERS OF LIFE (AND DEATH) The Charon hypothesis The mourning writer Chapter Four: FRONTIERS OF TRAUMA Expressing the unspeakable Surviving the unspeakable Traversing the unspeakable Writing about the unspeakable Chapter Five: FRONTIERS OF (IN)SANITY Monologues of madness Death, movement, place Conclusion Bibliography Index
