Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 4, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for an evening featuring Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko in discussion with Mark Andryczyk. On the occasion of the recent publication of Andryczyk’s English-language translation of Rafeyenko’s play “Signals of Being or Verbum Caro Factum Est” (2025), the two will read excerpts from the publication and discuss how Ukraine’s culture continues to respond to Russia’s enduring drive to eliminate Ukrainian identity.
In the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine the residents of a small co-op community outside of Kyiv find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances, surrounded by occupying Russian forces. Pinched between Bucha and Borodianka, cut off from aid, and unable to escape, their attempts at survival rely on connection: a cellphone signal in the forest, their bonds with each other, and, ultimately, new understandings of what it means to be Ukrainian. Weaving Shakespeare with both Ukrainian literary classics and contemporary works, Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s play “Signals of Being or Verbum Caro Factum Est” stages a captivating dramatic interpretation of a country at war.
Volodymyr Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic. Although he initially wrote and published in Russian, his novel “Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love” was his first written in Ukrainian. It was nominated for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel “Brief Farewell Book” and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel “The Length of Days.”
Mark Andryczyk teaches Ukrainian literature and runs the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction” (2012) and has published translations of numerous Ukrainian poets and writers. He is the editor, compiler and a translator of “The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology” (2017) and “Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War” (2023). Among his recent translations are Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s “Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love” (2022) and “Signals of Being or Verbum Caro Factum Est” (2025).
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