Description
Book SynopsisWhere Currents Meet, Tanya Zaharchenko’s path-breaking study of literature and cultural memory, moves decisively beyond the simplistic view of a post-Soviet Ukraine divided between east and west. It positions the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in the country’s east as elements of a complex continuum. Combining insights from memory studies and border studies, Zaharchenko analyzes a generation of younger riters in the city of Kharkiv—a “doubletake generation” that came of age at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and now revisits this experience through fiction. In the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andreĭ Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev, and others the author reveals how borderlands and frontiers, both geographical and conceptual, acquire zonal qualities of their own as these writers navigate the historical legacy they have inherited.
Table of ContentsNotes on Format
Foreword
Introduction
Kharkiv’s 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 iIn)Sanity
Monologues of Madness
Death, Movement, Place
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
