VIDEO ESSAYS
Jeremiah (Ieremia) Aizenshtock and his role in the development of Ukrainian studies
In her video essay, Vira Aheieva talks about Jeremiah (Ieremia) Aizenshtock, one of the most prominent researchers of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s. A student of Professor Oleksandr Biletskyi, Aizenshtock studied and popularized the works of Oleksandr Potebnia, as well as formalist approaches to literary studies that offered an alternative to Marxist methodologies. He discovered and analyzed a number of important texts by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Kotliarevskyi, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and other Ukrainian writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He made a conscious choice in favor of Ukrainian language – and this is a question of identity change that many Ukrainians face acutely today. Thanks to Aizenshtock’s efforts, the Taras Shevchenko Institute was established in Kharkiv. During 1930s and later in the post-war years, Jeremiah (Ieremia) Aizenshtock endured persecution; nevertheless, despite being effectively forbidden from living in Kyiv, he continued to maintain ties with Ukrainian literary figures, including Maksym Rylskyi.
This video essay was produced and published within the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union. All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their content is the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel about Ukraine as a metamodern project
Rostyslav Semkiv’s video essay interprets one of the most intriguing texts of American literature from the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries – Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel «Everything is illuminated» - which describes the journey of the author’s namesake protagonist through Ukraine in the late 1990s in search of traces of his relatives who were exterminated during Holocaust. A significant portion of the text consists of the history of a small Jewish town (shtetl) in Ukraine from the 18th century until its destruction by Hitler’s Nazis. The novel also demonstrates an American’s perspective on Ukrainians in the late 1990s. At the same time, Foer’s text is a striking example of metamodern writing, which combines the irony and even grotesque inherent in postmodern poetics with a search for a serious tone, the configuration of post-memory and attempts to speak about trauma to an audience distant from it in time. Semkiv concludes that this aspect of Foer’s writing is highly relevant to contemporary Ukrainian culture.