Crossed Paths: Mapping Ukraine’s Multicultural Literary Landscape

Project summary

Ukraine has, for centuries, been a place where many cultures, literatures and languages have co-existed. In the 19th and 20th centuries, writers working in the lands that are today Ukraine wrote in more than half a dozen languages, from Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar and Yiddish to German, Polish and Russian. They did so in the context of shifting borders and the rise and fall of multiple empires and states. Ukraine’s literary heritage is, thus, extremely rich; yet this richness is almost never viewed as a coherent, if complex, whole. Instead, self-isolating national paradigms separate and limit the work of writers who, in reality, existed across and between languages and cultures. This project makes a groundbreaking attempt to synthesise this diverse landscape and create a more nuanced understanding of the cultural history of a country that is at the centre of the world’s attention yet still poorly understood.

Principal investigator

Dr Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture