Close
Dr Uilleam Blacker discusses, in his own words, his experience as a European, his expertise, and his thoughts on Europe today.
Dr Uilleam Blacker is one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian. He is Associate Professor of Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London. He is also an author and a writer, with his work appearing in The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review. In 2022, he was Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I was born in Glasgow and brought up in the Outer Hebrides. I went to Glasgow University to study Scottish literature and philosophy and took Russian language as a third subject, purely because I had quite accidentally discovered the work of Nikolai Gogol a few months before starting my degree. Through that, I became interested in eastern and central Europe. I switched to a degree in Slavonic Studies, where I also studied Polish. I soon realised that Gogol was in fact Ukrainian, which sparked an interest in Ukraine. I was intrigued as to why there was so little information available about this huge European country. It was very hard, for example, to find Ukrainian literature in English translation. After travelling to Ukraine and learning Ukrainian, initially by reading texts by contemporary Ukrainian writers with a dictionary, I got hooked on Ukrainian culture. I studied Ukrainian at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, before moving to London for an MA and then a PhD in Ukrainian literature at UCL SSEES. After doing a couple of postdocs, I was fortunate to get a job as a lecturer at SSEES in 2014. Alongside my academic work, I’m also a translator. It’s something I love doing, but it also has a pragmatic aim — I don’t want future students, or indeed any curious reader, to be confronted with the same obstacles that I faced when trying to learn about Ukrainian literature!
What are your research interests?
If I had to gather it all under one theme, I guess it might be the relationship between culture and place. My PhD was on the spatial imagination of contemporary Ukrainian authors. I looked at how geographical figures — regions, borders, cities — intersect in the ways in which Ukrainian authors imagine their culture’s place in the world, both past and present.
After my PhD, I worked on cultural memory in cities in east-central Europe that experienced dramatic population shifts after World War II. There were cities that were “moved” from one state to another – German Breslau became Polish Wrocław, for example, when it was included in the borders of postwar Poland. Its German population was expelled and replaced by Poles. The city that interwar Poles knew as Lwów, with its Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian population, became L’viv, part of Soviet Ukraine, after the war. Its Polish population was expelled by the Soviets and its Jews murdered by the Nazis; in 1945 it became a majority Ukrainian city. I noticed that lots of writers in these cities were writing about the traces of entirely different pasts – old signs in strange languages – that could be found under the paint and plaster of their homes and streets. I wanted to get an idea of how these traumatic histories and fragmented traces challenge cultural memory but also provide opportunities for creativity in the way we imagine our identities as situated in place.
Right not, I’m working on a book that is a kind of literary atlas of Ukraine. It is a book about the relationship between literature and place that tries to go beyond the single-nation paradigm. I look at how we can understand cities, regions, Ukraine itself as places produced by texts written in multiple languages, from the perspective of many cultures, at the same time. Ukraine is remarkably rich in this regard. It has been home to writers working in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Crimean Tatar and other languages, and, indeed, often using more than one of these. I think the complexity of Ukraine’s literary heritage is a real strength, and I want to celebrate this – but also interrogate its knotty aspects – in the book.
Tell us about some of your recent work on European issues
Europe has always been an important dimension of the map of the Ukrainian literary imagination. Recently, I’ve been looking at how early 20th century Ukrainian writers oriented themselves towards Europe through a turn towards the city. Europe stood for modernity, which they believed Ukraine had to embrace to secure a future for itself culturally and politically. This was a reaction against a rural-oriented, inward looking approach to preserving culture among writers in the 19th century. At the end of the century, two writers, Olha Kobylianska and Lesia Ukrainka, began to write about young women in modern towns (Kobylianska) or transferred their work away from Ukraine entirely and set it in the cities Ancient Greece or Rome (Ukrainka); their works were self-consciously modern, urban, and European. They were criticised for diluting Ukrainian culture with foreign influences, but the power of their work spoke for itself. By the 1920s, the Ukrainian avant-garde was thoroughly urbanized and modernised, and one of its slogans was to embrace a “psychological Europe.” Some writers, like Mykola Khvylovyi, even saw Ukraine as the future epicentre of a cultural renaissance that would bring the west and Asia together, reinvigorating a decadent Europe.
It’s interesting that around 1991, another moment of geopolitical upheaval, these ideas return. In my PhD, I looked at how Ukrainian authors in the 1990s/2000s rediscovered their country’s links to Europe – links that had been obscured under Russian imperial/Soviet narratives of history. So, they were interested, for example, in the architectural links to Europe represented by Ukraine’s baroque architecture (also a source of fascination for Kyivan poets in the 1920s, by the way), or about long-forgotten rail connections between Ukraine and Vienna or Venice. But they also had a critical attitude towards Europe, which, for them, had forgotten its sense of political and cultural purpose. It’s captivating to look at how this has developed more recently. In the 2000s/2010s there was great hope for European integration for Ukraine, and a lot of thinking in literature about Ukraine’s Europeanness; now, Ukrainian society, while it still wants EU membership, feels rather exhausted with this endless path to the EU, which has sometimes been so hesitant to help Ukraine get through the war. Ukrainians no longer feel they have anything to prove to Europe, and literature is no longer preoccupied with this subject. It has turned much more to the problem of surviving the war.
What does Europe mean to you, and why are you interested in it?
Of course, Europe is a complicated thing. It has inflicted damage on the world in the name of European civilization through colonialism; it has its own internal hierarchies, which can manifest themselves brutally. Yet the flip side of this is the great richness of European culture and ideas. The tension between these things is fascinating to me. I do wish, however, that Europe could think of itself more broadly, as a space with cultural, political and social unity that stretches beyond just the EU. That’s important for us in the UK, after we sabotaged our own political Europeanness, but it’s also important, in different ways, to those on the eastern fringes, in countries like Ukraine, for whom Europe does not stand just for institutions in Brussels, but for fundamental values like rule of law and human rights. I think it’s critical to remember that Europe can, and does, stand for those things.