The Post-Chornobyl Library

Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Union and tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.

Dr. Tamara Hundorova is Chair of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Associate of Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of Транзитна культура. Симптоми постколоніальної травми (2013) [Transit Culture: Symptoms of Postcolonial Trauma], Кіч і література. Травестії (2008) [Kitsch and Literature: Travesties], ПроЯвлення слова. Дискурсія раннього українського модернізму (1997; 2009) [The Emerging Word: The Discourse of Early Ukrainian Modernism], Femina melancholica. Стать і культура в гендерній утопії Ольги Кобилянської (2002) [Femina melancholica. Sex and Culture in the Gender Utopia of Olha Kobylianska], Франко – не Каменяр (2006) [Franko Not the Stonecutter] and numerous articles on Ukrainian literature, modernism, postmodernism, gender studies, postcolonial trauma and kitsch. She taught at Toronto University, Harvard Summer School, Greifswald Ukrainicum, Ukrainian Free University, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Kyiv National University. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship (Harvard University), a visiting professorship at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (Hokkaido University) and the MUNK School of Global Affairs (Toronto University), and a fellowship at Monash University (Australia).Yakovenko Sergiy :

Dr. Sergiy Yakovenko teaches in the Department of English at MacEwan University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta. He is the author of Romantics, Aesthetes, Nietzscheans: Ukrainian and Polish Literary Criticism of the Early Modernist Period (2006) and Poetics and Anthropology: Essays on Ukrainian and Polish Prose on the 20th Century (2007), both books in Ukrainian.

Tamara Hundorova is Chair of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Associate of Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of Transit Culture: Symptoms of Postcolonial Trauma (2013), Kitsch and Literature: Travesties (2008), The Emerging Word: The Discourse of Early Ukrainian Modernism (1997, 2013), Femina melancholica: Sex and Culture in the Gender Utopia of Olha Kobylianska (2002). She taught at Toronto University, Harvard Summer School, Greifswald Ukrainicum, Ukrainian Free University. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship (Harvard University), a visiting professorship at the SURC (Hokkaido University) and a fellowship at Monash University (Australia).

Dr. Sergiy Yakovenko teaches in the Department of English at MacEwan University. He is the author of Romantics, Aesthetes, Nietzscheans: Ukrainian and Polish Literary Criticism of the Early Modernist Period (2006) and Poetics and Anthropology: Essays on Ukrainian and Polish Prose on the 20th Century (2007), both books in Ukrainian.

“In her writing, Hundorova demonstrates that she is extremely well read in literary criticism in general and on postmodernism in particular, citing numerous significant thinkers…The book in general will be useful both to literary theoreticians and thinkers as well as to students and a general literary audience interested in pre- and post- independence developments in Ukrainian literature.”

— Aleksandra Konarzewska, Slavic Review

“Its depth of analysis and breadth of engagement with theorists and practitioners of postmodernism worldwide make this book essential reading for anyone studying the tectonic literary and cultural shifts that took place in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet state. … Always insightful and often provocative, the essays of The Post-Chornobyl Library represent, in this reviewer’s estimation, literary and cultural criticism at its best. Now available to the Anglophone audiences in a highly readable translation by Sergiy Yakovenko, they will be of great value to students and scholars of Ukrainian literature and culture, of postmodernism, and of Eastern Europe as a region.”

—Oleksandra Wallo, University of Kansas, Russian Review

“[A]n exciting addition to the growing field of anglophone studies of Ukrainian literature. Hundorova masterfully traces the etiologies and manifestations of postmodern literary and cultural structures in Ukraine, placing the explosion of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant as the genesis of the postmodern cultural and literary movement in Ukraine. … Ultimately, Hundorova's The Post-Chornobyl Library is an important contribution not only to the field of Ukrainian literary criticism but also to the expansive library of studies of postmodernism. This work will certainly prove useful to people in either field of study, and its new translation into English allows anglophone critics access to Hundorova's comprehensive, insightful, and theoretically sophisticated arguments on Ukrainian literature, postmodernism, and their interaction.”

—Brett Donohoe, Harvard University, H-Ukraine

“The Chornobyl nuclear disaster affected much more than human health and the environment. It also challenged the human spirit and gave birth to the rise of new thinking not only about nuclear energy and politics but also about culture, literature, and identity. Nowhere has that transformation become more profound than in Ukraine, where Chornobyl had jump-started the era of mass politics and set the country on the path to political independence. As it is masterfully argued by Tamara Hundorova, Chornobyl also had a lasting impact on Ukrainian literature, helping to end the era of socialist realism and inaugurate a new post-modern literature and worldview. The Post-Chornobyl Library is not only a new and provocative look at Ukrainian literature, but also a highly original contribution to a broader debate on postmodernism and interrelationship between literature and ecology.” —Serhii Plokhy, author of Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

“Tamara Hundorova presents the Ukrainian carnival as a high manifestation of postmodernism but also a unique example of cultural power. Rich in examples, confident in approach and constructive in expectations, this book is probably the best analysis of Ukrainian literature, grasped in its seminal period between the Maidan rebellion and the Servant of the People movement.” —Alexander Etkind, Mikhail M. Bakhtin Professor of History of Russia-Europe Relations, European University Institute, Florence

"Readers of Tamara Hundorova’s 2005 Postchornobyl’s’ka biblioteka will have to read again: this is no mere translation, but a revisitation, generously fleshed out with more and new interpretive penetration, of a Ukrainian critical classic. The cultural turbulence, the paradoxical overlayering of incompatible worldviews and extravagant literary stances that came after Chornobyl and provided a chorus for the demise (forever, it then optimistically seemed) of Sovietness, cultural as well as political—these find their deservedly intricate, masterfully wrought recreation and interrogation in a collection of indispensable essays by a scholar of the first magnitude." —Marko Pavlyshyn, Monash University