No. 5 : Cross-Cultural Connections and Displacement in Ukraine and Beyond

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https://ekmair.ukma.edu.ua/handle/123456789/14961

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A Word of Welcome from the Editor-in-Chief : [preface]
(2018) Morenets, Volodymyr
This fifth issue of our journal is dedicated to questions pertaining to intercultural relations and displacement in Ukraine and abroad. This makes sense, as beginning with the 17th century Ukrainian culture has experienced several large high and low ebbs, major spatial displacements (to Muscovy, Poland, Canada, Czechoslovakia, the USA, Argentina…), and undergone a number of significant transformations (the replacement of Church Slavonic in literature and scholarship by Ukrainian, a phenomenon, by the way, that occurred a quarter century earlier than in Russia; entry into the international historical-literary context, and the emergence of potent émigré communities with their own literary and cultural movements, etc.), which brought about significant changes in and modifications to Ukrainian culture.
Chornobyl as an Open Air Museum: a Polysemic Exploration of Power and Inner Self
(2018) Bertelsen, Olga
This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a regimented area around the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Ukraine) established in 1986, where the largest recorded nuclear explosion in human history occurred. The mass pilgrimage movement transformed the place into an open air museum, a space that preserves the remnants of Soviet culture, revealing human tragedies of displacement and deaths, and the nature of state nuclear power. This study examines the impact of the site on its visitors and the motivations for their persistence and activities in the Zone, and argues that through photography, cartography, exploration, and discovery, the pilgrims attempt to decode the historical and ideological meaning of Chornobyl and its significance for future generations. Ultimately, the aesthetic and political space of the Zone helps them establish a conceptual and mnemonic connection between the Soviet past and Ukraine’s present and future. Their practices, in turn, help maintain the Zone’s spatial and epistemological continuity. Importantly, Chornobyl seems to be polysemic in nature, inviting interpretations and shaping people’s national and intellectual identities.
Kyiv in the Global Biblical World: Reflections of KTA Professors From the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
(2018) Golowaszczenko, Sergij
The focus of this article is the global and European experience of the reception, assimilation, and social application of the Bible, reproduced in the works of a number of prominent Kyiv Theological Academy (KTA) representatives from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis specifically covers the works of professors Stefan Solskyi, Kharysym Orda, Nikolai Drozdov, Afanasii Bulgakov, Mykola Makkaveiskyi, Vasylii Pevnytskyi, Arsenii Tsarevskyi, Volodymyr Rybinskyi, Dmytro Bohdashevskyi, and Aleksandr Glagolev. The author uses the metaphor of the Biblical world to describe the historically developed spiritual and cultural component of the European world, for which the Bible played the role of a normative and symbolic core. Affiliation with the Biblical world - as a way of broad social application of the Bible and assimilation of the norms and public behaviors sanctioned by this text - was and still is a stable symbolic marker as well as a cultural and ideological factor of integration with European civilization. The historical panorama of the reception of Biblical knowledge and the inculturation of Biblical morality by Christianized nations, reproduced in the writings of Kyiv academics, is presented as a field of centuries-old intercultural contacts and active inter-confessional interaction, and as an important ideological and moral factor of the socio-political integration and development of civil society. The issues addressed by Biblical studies in Europe and the rest of the world and considerations and solutions prompted by these issues proved to be fruitful for both the academic research and public practices in which academics of the Kyiv Theological Academy were engaged. The past and modern foreign experience related to the inculturation of the Bible was interpreted by the Kyiv researchers in the local context, more specifically, in the modernization attempts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, the reflection of European and worldwide experience, though not fully implemented, was productive and was a potential factor that could have contributed to the European modernization of Kyiv cultural and religious life of the time and its integration into the global Biblical World.
"Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Intellectual Space" as a Manifestation of Intercultural Communications (on the Basis of the Ukrainian Hierarchs' Epistolary Legacy)
(2018) Kagamlyk, Svitlana
Based upon the Ukrainian hierarchs’ epistolary legacy, the article analyzes characteristic features of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy intellectual space, which was created by Academy alumni of different generations and various hierarchy levels. The author establishes that the closest relations were between correspondents belonging to the same or almost same hierarchy level and who were bonded together by the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy educational system and school comradeship, eventually obtained high positions in the hierarchy. Communication within the boundaries of individual centers (the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, collegiums in Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Pereiaslav, seats of Ukrainian bishops in Russia, etc.) depended on specificity of the environment. Predominant themes encountered in the letters of the Ukrainian bishops included needs of the alma mater, the Kyiv Academy, and the collegiums. The correspondence addressed issues of their legal status, academic staff, financial support, as well as the literary work and publishing activities of the hierarchs.
A Reading of Alexander Motyl's Fall River Through the Lenses of Bordermemories
(2018) Ostapchuk, Tetiana
This paper examines the concepts of borderlands, borderscapes, and bordermemories as cultural discursive practices that have been extensively presented and analyzed in an increasing number of theoretical works in Border Studies. Contemporary American Ukrainian writers have made attempts to introduce their hybrid experience and include it into American culture. One of them is Alexander J. Motyl, whose novel Fall River (2014) is analyzed as an example of border writing. The novel is based on the author’s narrative memory, rooted in his mother’s stories about Ukraine and their family members’ crossings of borders in the interwar period and belonging to two cultures, Ukrainian and American, that shaped their identities.

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