CBEES Advanced Seminar with Galina Babak, Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies, University of Konstanz, and Research Fellow at the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Speaker: Galina Babak, Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies, University of Konstanz (Germany), and Research Fellow at the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Discussant: Olena Jansson, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German, Stockholm University.

Chair: Julia Malitska, Project Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies and Research Coordinator at CBEES, Södertörn University

Abstract: In my presentation, I will explore the role of modernist literary theory in the process of Ukrainian nation-building within the broader context of Soviet modernization from the 1920s to the early 1930s. I intend to examine “Ukrainian modernism” as a phenomenon intrinsically linked to the ideas of national liberation, which was initially conceptualized within the framework of socialism—a dominant political ideology and mode of thought at the time.

I will explore the history of Ukrainian modernist literary criticism as a national phenomenon that developed within the wider universalist paradigms of socialism and modernism. The discussion will center on case studies analyzed within the context of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolution of 1917, the subsequent Ukrainian War for Independence, and the Bolshevik radical modernization of the 1920s.
The suggested concept of “national modernism” (natsmodernizm) will also be explored to highlight the complex interplay between the universalist paradigm of the Bolshevik project and the development of a modern, nationally-oriented culture.

Galina Babak is an assistant professor at the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and a research fellow at the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the political and cultural history of the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the period of Soviet modernization in Ukraine from the 1920s to the early 1930s and Ukrainian interwar emigration. She is the author of the monograph The Atlantis of Soviet National Modernism: The Formal Method in Ukraine (1920s–Early 1930s) (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021; co-authored with A. Dmitriev).