A new issue of the London Ukrainian Review examines culture as a matter of national security in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Review, which is an open-access publication of the Ukrainian Institute London partnering with the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Academic Studies Press, and INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, has been publishing excellent work since 2021. Editor-in-chief Sasha Dovzhyk explains that this issue “highlight[s] the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms” and “examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.”
While some on the left continue to take the old Marxist view that a concern for Ukrainian culture and language is a purely liberal or “bourgeois nationalist” interest (I examined this in the writing of Volodymyr Ishchenko some time ago), authors of this issue take the opposite view, which is well articulated by University College London’s Uilleam Blacker in “Defensive Wall: Why Ukraine’s Culture is Everyone’s Fight.” Blacker writes:
Had the long history of Russian colonial violence against Ukraine been better understood by a public familiar with the canon of Ukrainian culture, Ukraine and Crimea might not have been perceived by so many in the West as obscure parts of Russia’s ‘backyard’ in 2014. Ukraine, of course, is not alone in this sense: how different might our reactions to events in Gaza or Sudan be if we all read novels by Palestinian and Sudanese writers in our schools and universities?
Alongside wartime poetry and prose (in translation) and arguments about the politics of concert halls and misplaced Russophilia, the issue includes a richly insightful conversation between historian Olesya Khromeychuk and author and propaganda analyst Peter Pomerantsev. Another piece, Maria Sonevytsky’s “Everyday Amulets,” documents how displaced communities maintain cultural memory through transported objects — specifically, in this case, through house keys, which “become symbols of refusal to consent to elimination across contexts of displacement: Crimean Tatars deported by Stalin in 1944, Palestinians displaced in 1948, and Ukrainians fleeing Russian occupation since 2014.”
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