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Articles by Uilleam Blacker
Speaking Truth in a Time of War: A translation of a letter by Lesia Ukrainka on her birthday.
Last year, the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature series published a brilliant new translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s play Cassandra by Nina Murray (which began life as part of a special translation project on Ukrainka by the Ukrainian Institute London). I’ve been waiting for this for some time, and I immediately put it on my syllabus.
A Ukrainian Writer Who Understands Wartime Ambivalence Original
A relatively young Ukrainian state, having freed itself from Moscow’s grasp, is trying to find its place as an independent nation in a changing world order. Moscow, however, decides to reclaim what it lost and sends an army to take Kyiv. An outnumbered Ukrainian force intercepts the Russian soldiers just north of the city. Ukraine’s fate hangs in the balance. This is a description not of February 2022 but of January 1918, when the Bolsheviks advanced on Kyiv to crush the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
Rock, Paper, Grenade — an unflinching portrait of 1990s Ukraine
Despite a long and complex history, Ukraine essentially became a new country in the years following its independence.
“Opus No.7” By Krymov To Be Performed In London
Director and artist Dmitry Krymov’s production of Opus No.7, about the Holocaust and the celebrated Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich, is set to be performed at the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) from June 4 to 14, and then at the Northern Stages festival in Newcastle from June 19 to 21. In November, Krymov’s Laboratory is mounting another show in England: As You Like It, based on Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Uilleam Blacker: That’s why literature exists
When I heard Halyna Kruk read this poem, in the Powder Tower at the Lviv Book Forum in September 2023, I was struck as much by the text itself as by the effect it had on those listening. It’s a busy, noisy venue; people come and go during events; friends and colleagues meet, whisper at the back of the room they laugh, or cry, together in corners. But when Kruk read her poem, the room became still. The ancient walls themselves seemed to be listening.
Historical Perspectives on Russia’s War Crimes in Ukraine
Polish struggles to remember Soviet atrocities in World War II provide lessons for today's conflict In the 2007 film “Katyn,” directed by Poland’s acclaimed Andrzej Wajda, a young woman in wartime Krakow tries to sell her hair to raise money for a headstone for her brother, who has been murdered and buried in an unmarked grave by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. She finds a buyer in a local theater, an actress who survived Auschwitz and lost her own hair.
Ukrainian Women Poets: Foreword
Subscribe Non-Fiction Olesya Khromeychuk & Uilleam Blacker Ukrainian Women Poets: Foreword In a foreword to our Ukrainian women poets, Olesya Khromeychuk & Uilleam Blacker ask, how can faith, hope, and love live in a space of pain? Fides, Spes, Caritas—the story tells us—were young girls, martyred in front of their mother, Sophia. They were ordered to forgo their belief and, instead, to accept one imposed by the emperor. When they disobeyed the order, they were tortured.
Ukraine in the Russian Imperial Imagination
In January 1787 Catherine the Great travelled south from St Petersburg to survey some new imperial possessions. Crimea had been taken from the Ottoman Empire, the partitions of Poland were underway and the last vestiges of Cossack autonomy in the Ukrainian steppes had been eliminated. The journey was a grand event, lasting six months and covering 6,000 kilometres accompanied by thousands of soldiers and sailors.
Writing around War: Parapolemics, Trauma, and Ethics in Ukrainian Representations of the War in the Donbas
Authors Uilleam Blacker University College London DOI: https://doi.org/10.21226/ewjus706 Keywords: contemporary Ukrainian literature, war, Donbas, trauma Abstract The article considers a range of literary texts about the war in Donbas and argues that one of the primary representational strategies employed by Ukrainian writers has been the use of “parapolemics.” The article operates with Kate McLoughlin’s definition of this term as a focus on the “outskirts” of armed conflict, but also relates...
Ukrainian Tales
In January 1787 Catherine the Great travelled south from St Petersburg to survey some new imperial possessions. Crimea had been taken from the Ottoman Empire, the partitions of Poland were underway and the last vestiges of Cossack autonomy in the Ukrainian steppes had been eliminated. The journey was a grand event, lasting six months and covering 6,000 kilometres accompanied by thousands of soldiers and sailors.
What Ukrainian Literature Has Always Understood About Russia
For centuries, Ukraine’s writers have—surreptitiously, brashly, satirically—fended off attempts to erase their national culture. On February 26, missiles rained down on Kyiv as the Russian army tried to enter the city. During a lull in the fighting, Tamara Hundorova, one of Ukraine’s foremost literary critics, sat calmly in front of her laptop and delivered an online lecture on the Ukrainian modernist writer Lesya Ukrainka, a canonical fin de siècle poet and playwright.
On Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: A Call to Action for the UK Higher Education Sector
This blog was kindly contributed by Dr Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in Comparative Russian and East European Culture, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. Dr Blacker is on Twitter @BlackerUilleam. From the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has been heartening to see the global community of scholars of Ukraine and Russia mobilise not only to disseminate their expertise, but also to coordinate help for those in need.
Europe Archives | The Theatre Times
This is a story you will have heard before. A genius but completely mad scientist – with the backing of a ruthlessly greedy corporation – creates a sentient robot. The scientist’s intentions for the robot are noble: to help us...
Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe
Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe: The Ghosts of Others ISBN | Quantity: Shopping Cart Summary Items: Routledge & CRC Press eBooks are available through VitalSource. The free VitalSource Bookshelf® application allows you to access to your eBooks whenever and wherever you choose. Mobile/eReaders – Download the Bookshelf mobile app at VitalSource.com or from the iTunes or Android store to access your eBooks from your mobile device or eReader.
“Holocaust Disney” and the Russia-Ukraine War
In late April 2020, two prominent members of team behind of one of eastern Europe’s most important new Holocaust memorial projects — the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv — unexpectedly resigned.
This Crimean filmmaker's hunger strike highlights all that is wrong with modern Russia
In a recent, widely reported recording of Pussy Riot protestors being arrested at the World Cup final, a voice can be heard saying, “sometimes I regret it isn’t 1937”. In 1937, Stalin’s terror was at its height – and the secret police operated with impunity against political opponents. The Pussy Riot members were handed 15 days in prison. For around 70 Ukrainian political prisoners currently incarcerated in Russia, however, it feels like that individual’s nostalgic wish has already come true.
Dog - PEN America
PEN America features a series of short stories by Ukrainian writer and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who was sentenced to 20 years in a Siberian prison in August 2015 on trumped up charges of terrorism after being a vocal opponent of the Russian annexation of Crimea. He has been on hunger strike for a second month now to urge the Russian authorities to release all Ukrainians unfairly imprisoned in Russia. PEN America is calling for his immediate release. “Dog” When I was a child I wanted to have a dog.
Russifying revolutionary art at the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy’s new blockbuster show “Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932” is a disorienting experience. Caught between bombastic propaganda — albeit made with irresistible avant-garde panache — and the works of great modernist painters like Chagall, Kandinsky or Malevich, one is never quite sure what the exhibition’s purpose is. Is it to showcase early Soviet art? Or to speak more broadly about modernist and avant-garde art in Russia in the years after the Revolution?
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