Podcast from our Columbia University panel (part of Kharkiv: City of Ukrainian Culture conference) is now available here:
13 March 2015
There were three panels: focusing on the Kharkiv Romantic school, the 1920-1930s, and the post-Soviet period. Mine was the last one. Thoughtful presentations by colleagues Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Vitaly Chernetsky preceded my talk on “Between Language and Identity: the Case of Contemporary Kharkiv Writers” (it’s always cool to spend some time with people you tend to cite!).
I wanted to bring first-person voices from Kharkiv to this conference, so I interviewed four writers for this presentation. They belong to what I call the doubletake generation, and you’ve seen them around this blog before: Yuri Tsaplin, Viktor Shepelev, Andrei Krasniashchikh, Oleh Kotsarev. I am grateful for their input, as well as to all the participants of the conference who stayed to hear it (mine was the concluding talk of a very long day).
Afterwards, everyone headed to the Ukrainian Museum to watch Serhiy Zhadan perform. It was as packed as usual, and as satisfying as ever. Alex Yanevsky’s piece on that evening for Voice of America can be see here (in Ukrainian).
Of Memory and Identity 