Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Where Currents Meet: Post-Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv, Ukraine

Where Currents Meet treats the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in Ukraine's East as elements of a complex continuum. This study of cultural memory in post-Soviet society shows how its inhabitants negotiate the historical legacy they have inherited. Tanya Zaharchenko approaches contemporary Ukrainian literature at the intersection of memory studies and border studies, and her analysis adds an important new voice to an ongoing exploration of cultural and historical discourses in Ukraine. This scholarly journey through storylines explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv, a diverse and dynamic border city in east Ukraine, come to grips with a traumatized post-Soviet cultural landscape. Zaharchenko's book examines the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andrei Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev and others, introducing them as a "doubletake" generation who came of age during the Soviet Union's collapse. Now, as adults, they revisit this experience in their novels. Filling the space between society and the state, these literary texts have turned into forms of historical memory and agents of cultural life.