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Cover of On Shaky Ground. Image links to event page.

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V. Domontovych’s “On Shaky Ground” – Book Presentation and Discussion

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Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 12, 2025 to attend this event.

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a presentation and discussion of V. Domontovych’s novel “On Shaky Ground” on the occasion of the recent publication of the novel’s translation into English by CEU Press. Participating in the event will be Oksana RosenblumTamara Hundorova, and Mark Andryczyk.

“On Shaky Ground” is a modernist novel written in the late 1930s and early 1940s and was originally published in Nazi occupied Kharkiv in 1942. One of the best examples of intellectual fiction of the time, the work summarizes the struggles of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when totalitarian reality, together with rampant industrialization, started to affect everyday life.

V. Domontovych is the pen name of Viktor Petrov, a historian and archaeologist, a representative of neoclassicism in Ukrainian literature. The novel follows the trajectory of art historian, Rostyslav Mykhailovych, who goes on a work trip from the capital city of Kharkiv to provincial Katerynoslav (today Dnipro), the place where he spent his childhood. In the late 1920s, a section of the Dnipro River became the place of a major industrial project, the construction of the largest hydroelectric station in Ukraine (Dniprelstan), which flooded the rapids over the river and led to serious ecological and social changes in the region. While the main goal of the trip is to save an old church from being turned into a museum, the journey becomes a philosophical reflection on dislocation and loss of connection with one’s birthplace, traditions, religion and more globally, a sense of security.

Oksana Rosenblum's headshot

Oksana Rosenblum is an art history researcher and translator based in New York City. She was born and raised in Ukraine but calls NYC her home since 2003. Her poetry translations from Ukrainian, essays, and book reviews appeared in National Translation Month, Versopolis, Ukrainian Weekly, Asmyptote, Bracken, and Arrowsmith. She co-edited a bilingual volume of the early poetry of Mykola Bazhan, an important and prolific twentieth century Ukrainian poet (Academic Studies Press, 2020), translated V. Domontovych’s novel “On Shaky Ground” (2024), and co-translated Artem Chekh’s novel “Rock, Paper, Grenade” (Seven Stories Press, forthcoming in 2025).

 

 

 

Tamara Hundorova's headshot

Professor Tamara Hundorova is a Principal researcher at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, an associate fellow at HURI (USA) and Dean of the Ukrainian Free University (Germany). She is currently a visiting professor at Princeton University. Hundorova has authored several books, including “Транзитна культура і постколоніальна травма” (2024), “Леся Українка. Книги Сивілли” (2023), “The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s” (2019); “Кітч і література. Травестії” (2008), “Франко і/не Каменяр” (2006); “Femina melancholica. Стать і культура в гендерній утопії Ольги Кобилянської” (2002). She is a Fulbright Scholar, as well as a recipient of the Yacyk Distinguished Fellowship of HURI, Foreign Visitor Scholarship (Hokkaido University), MUNK School of Global Affairs Scholarship (University of Toronto), Philip Schwartz Scholarship – Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Initiative (University of Giessen).

 

 

Mark Andryczyk's headshot

Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has a PhD in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). His monograph “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction” was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Andryczyk is editor and compiler and a translator of “The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology” (Academic Studies Press, 2017). He has translated eleven essays by Yuri Andrukhovych for the award-winning publication “My Final Territory: Selected Essays” (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is the translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel “Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love” (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2022) and the editor, compiler and a translator of “Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writer Respond to War” (Penguin, 2023).

 

 

 

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