Challenging the Code ─ Essays on Ukrainian Literature and Culture

Drawn from a Festschrift honoring George G. Grabowicz, the essays in this collection examine central issues in Ukrainian literature and culture with special attention to the comparative and deconstructive approaches that reflect the honoree’s own work. All major time periods are covered: the onset of literacy in Kyivan Rus´; the cultural intersections of the early modern period; the gradual but persistent articulation of a national discourse in the new imperial reality (culminating with the defining figure of Taras Shevchenko); the vagaries of the long nineteenth century; twentieth-century modernism, ideology, and scholarship; and Ukraine’s intellectual position today.

The essays also variously explore the interface of literature, language, theater, and film, and touch upon the strictures and distortions imposed by censorship and ideology, uncharted currents of reception, and the interpretation of key texts, particularly the light they shed on the “political unconscious.” Special attention is devoted to the transnational functions of Ukrainian literature in the modern period. A full bibliography of Grabowicz’s foundational contribution to the field completes the collection.