Monday, 9 December 2024, 6 - 8 p.m., Galina Babak / Susanne Frank: Shaping and Translating Ukrainian Intellectual Heritage. Soviet Ukrainian and Yiddish Literary Theory of the 1920s. A Handbook Project for German Ukrainian Studies

In this lecture we will present a publication project whose idea emerged from a joint master's seminar at the HU. It is about nothing less than rewriting the legacy of Slavic literary theory. To this day, all Slavicists and, more generally, all literary scholars begin their studies by reading the ‘Texts of the russian Formalists’, which are generally regarded as the founding texts of 20th century literary theory. By making important essays by Ukrainian literary theorists accessible through translation from Ukrainian and Yiddish, we want to decenter the traditionally russocentric perspective and thereby also rewrite the canon of theory history. We want to show that russian formalism and the Ukrainian theoretical developments of the 1920s have a common Ukrainian origin and that important theoretical approaches also emerged in Kharkiv and Kyiv in response to formalism, which, through their regional focus and their sociological and reception-aesthetic orientation, not only contributed significantly to the general development of theory at the time, but also still appear inspiring and relevant today.

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