Date:
Location:
Tamara Hundorova, Principal Research Scholar at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Kyiv), National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Moderated by George G. Grabowicz, Dmytro Čyževs’kyi Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
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Abstract
The idea of an "Asiatic renaissance," proclaimed by Mykola Khvylovy in the 1920s, finds its continuation in the postwar period of 1946-1948 in the Ukrainian intellectual circles of displaced persons camps and among Ukrainian scholars united around the Ukrainian Free University. Against the backdrop of the "crisis of the European spirit," which was widely disputed at that time by Western philosophers, these scholars began to discuss the "psychological Occidentalism of Ukraine," thus inscribing Ukraine in the postwar anticolonial movement.
Hundorova analyzes the 1946-1948 debates about Ukrainian Occidentalism in the context of contemporary decolonization studies. She explores the positions of Volodymyr Yaniv and Yurii Shevelov regarding so called "problem of the West," the idea of Eurocentrism, and the question of borderlands. The lecture addresses the reception of Arnold Toynbee's philosophy of history and Mykola Khvylovy’s idea of the “Asiatic Renaissance.”
About the Speaker
Tamara Hundorova is Principal Research Scholar at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Kyiv) and Associate Fellow at HURI. Currently she is Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University. She is a member of PEN Ukraine.
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