The war in eastern Ukraine continues to produce casualties and an ever growing number of refugees and displaced persons every day. When urban public space is dedicated to commemorating the dead who have died since the Maidan protests, the frontiers of war become inscribed in the urban landscape and in the everyday life of many Ukrainians. These commemorative spaces are an unrelenting reminder of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine that threatens to remake political borders once again. Commemorative practices articulate new understandings of relatedness as symbolic statements that, once inscribed in public space, have the potential to affect the thinking of locals and far outlive the actual armed conflict that produced them.
A war frontier in Lithuania was engendered by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March of 2014 and the beginning of the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. This essay explores how the new war frontier emerged in Lithuania, becoming an integral part of the public sphere and civic life. I argue that the war frontier is a social institution of sovereign uncertainty, which engenders divisive politics of historical justice, protection of the majority’s rights, and dangers to liberalism. The geopolitical insecurity and sovereign uncertainty that define this Baltic frontier are essential to understand how Lithuania can be a strong ally of NATO and the EU, a proponent of democratic politics and liberalism, a claimant to regional security expertise to lead western countries, and at the same time undermine liberal ideals of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
“In case of Russian invasion, would you be ready to pick up arms and fight or would you flee the country?” This morally charged question has recently been pre-occupying the Latvian collective imagination. The Latvian Ministry of Defense has conducted several nation-wide surveys to monitor the public's response to it. Focusing on two controversies that recently erupted in the Latvian public sphere, this essay maps the growing militarization in Latvia and the tensions in the symbolic space between the state and the citizen that it brings to the surface. I argue that the recent militarization brings into sharp relief the socio-economic and political tensions created by several decades of postsocialist neoliberal restructuring. To the extent that we can observe here contemporary reconfigurations of the state and political subjectivity, I propose considering the Baltics as not only geopolitical but also analytical borderlands.
In this article, I explore recent efforts to “de-Sorosize” the Republic of Macedonia, arguing that they reveal an obsession in Macedonia—and more broadly in east central Europe—with defending ethnonational interests against assumed interlopers. New, self-proclaimed patriotic associations have mobilized ideas of combined external and internal threats to national existence as though there were a war frontier. This imagined war frontier marks the dividing line between belligerent nationalists, who claim that Macedonian sovereignty and national identity are under threat of extinction, and the Macedonian center-left and liberal (moderate and left-leaning) NGOs, which tend to promote greater inclusiveness in society, are assumed to side with “the Albanians,” and to have a direct connection to George Soros. The case study of Macedonia highlights the outright public rejection of liberal ideals and the key role that populist, militant sensibilities play in the formation of civil society groups in Europe today.
This paper is programmatic: it defines the concept of “phantom borders” and describes its heuristic potential. The proposed approach positions itself between structuralist methodologies that postulate stable social and cultural regional structures and deconstructive viewpoints that reject the former, while focusing on the discursive dimension of regions. The paper takes this tension as its point of departure. Viewed from a situational perspective, phantom borders are neither to be understood as immutable structures nor as purely discursive constructions, but rather as an outcome of the interaction between three interwoven levels, which are simultaneously: 1) imagined in mental maps and discourses, 2) experienced and perceived by the respective actors, and 3) shaped by everyday practices and continuously updated and implemented. Phantom borders are context sensitive. We argue that the topic of phantom borders is not only relevant for research on eastern Europe, but also for research in “new area studies” in general.
This article explores the ideological implications of the Gothic mode in Panteleimon Kulish's first novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). I show that the multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel—from Walter Scottian ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains, uncanny ethnic Others, and supernatural phantoms—produce an intricate play of temporalities, identities, and allegiances that ultimately create a highly ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dark period of chaos overcome by the country's incorporation into the Russian empire. Rather than dismissing Kulish's engagement with the Gothic as a tribute to the fashionable western trend, I argue that this mode serves as a conduit to some of the work's most pressing ideological and historical concerns and ultimately yields a more nuanced insight into the author's complex position as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire.
In Serhiy Zhadan's recent novel Internat (2017), the protagonist epitomizes the quintessential east Ukrainian under scrutiny today, while his journey depicts working through trauma. His transformation portrays the ultimate shedding of melancholy when, in response to violence, the past is replaced by the present. I elicit some of the key symbols and features of this process, which I call triggered mourning, and attend to the role of real-time menace in initiating it. This article draws connections not only between the story's plot arc and the ongoing war, but also between Ukraine's past and present from the perspective of trauma theory. The four sections of the article (on the transformation, the void, the defect, and the antidote) propose and expand upon the notion that Internat is a synchronous war novel—a narrative that emerges parallel to, and closely entwined with, unfolding warfare—and examine its significance for scholarship on Ukraine, for Slavic studies, and beyond. Trauma studies in the context of literature are central to this analysis, with postcolonial studies providing some helpful illustrative parallels.
This article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia's most famous realist painter, Il΄ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un café du boulevard, the work was conceived during Repin's stay in Paris from 1873–75. Repin himself described the work as “the main types of Paris in their most typical place,” but what he produced proves a departure for the young artist, not only in terms of its Parisian subject matter. Careful analysis of Repin's letters and the work itself shows him searching for a stylistic language that had universal translatability in this moment, one that he importantly associated with the French artist Édouard Manet. Understanding how Repin came to center his painting on cocottes and flâneurs, the foremost heroes of west European urbanity, allows for a new understanding of transnational connections in late nineteenth-century art, one in which Russian artists mediated French modernism as it was developing.
In art historical scholarship, inasmuch as he is considered at all, the painter Arkhip Kuindzhi has long been viewed as a peculiar outlier. His landscapes, with their coloristic drama, light effects, and simplified forms, hardly fit the accounts of Russian nineteenth-century painting that focus on the development of the realist school. Questioning the artist's anomalous status, this essay discusses his canvases from the 1870s and 1880s within the broader framework of nineteenth-century popular visual amusements, discourses on realism, and the physiology of vision. Considered through this wider lens—beyond the institution of easel painting and beyond Russia—Kuindzhi is revealed to be an innovator whose approach to painting was profoundly modern and aligned with the aesthetic preoccupations of many west European artists. His painterly pursuits and exhibition practices, furthermore, force a reconsideration of the biases associated with the established narrative of modern art in the west.
The influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on Russian symbolism has not been adequately explored in the significant body of scholarship dedicated to it. To give but a few examples, Pre-Raphaelite motifs such as the enigmatic female figure, a jewel-toned palette, and elements drawn from a mythical European past widely appear in Russian symbolist poetry and painting. Drawing upon archival research, this article demonstrates that the symbolists did not simply borrow these motifs in passive imitation, but that they arose out of the symbolists' substantive engagement with modernity itself. Tracing the genealogy that links symbolism to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the article develops a transactional model of influence that encourages us to think of the development of Russian modernism with greater nuance. By destabilizing the notion of the Russian symbolists' marginal position in relation to western Europe, this investigation provides a theoretical challenge to the notion of Russia's peripheral modernity.
