Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution and the subsequent tragic events brought Ukraine to the front pages of global media, generating unprecedented attention not only to politics but also to contemporary culture. New Ukrainian cinema and musical groups like DakhaBrakha have been gaining worldwide recognition. In literature, one of the most remarkable cases is Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria: Ukraine’s biggest literary success of 2014, it won the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year award and several other prizes, and is now also translated into French, German, Hungarian, and Polish. A film adaptation is in the works.The talk explores the reasons why this historical novel set in a small city in the Habsburg-ruled part of Ukraine in the year 1900 became such a great success in the dramatic post-Euromaidan days, as well as the strategies the author employed in constructing her text, among them painstaking archival research, postcolonial sensibilities, and play with genre conventions, notably the neo-Gothic tradition. The journey of self-discovery and liberation from delusions on which the readers accompany the narrator-protagonist resonates profoundly with Ukraine’s ongoing social transformations.

Vitaly Chernetsky is an associate professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and director of the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. A native of Ukraine, he received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania (1996). He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007; Ukrainian-language edition, Krytyka, 2013) and of numerous articles on Russian and Ukrainian literature and film. A volume of his selected writings in Ukrainian translation is forthcoming from Krytyka. He co-edited an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation, Crossing Centuries (2000), a bilingual anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Letters from Ukraine (2016), and an annotated Ukrainian translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (2007). He also
guest-edited an issue of Kinokultura on Ukrainian cinema (2009). His translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) and a volume of his selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (2018, with Ostap Kin). He is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies and the current vice president and learned secretary of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S.