It was through learning Russian in my Swiss high school that I first got interested in the history of Eastern Europe. When I became fascinated by the theory of nationalism during my university studies, my geographical focus shifted to Ukraine, a society whose aspiration to nationhood has been repeatedly been contested by the neighboring great powers. For my first book, I researched the history of a fascinating nationally bifurcated family whose members have left archival traces from Moscow to Liubljana and from Kyiv to Stanford. I hold a BA degree from the University of Geneva, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from the University of Basel.
I wrote
Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism
Nikolai Gogol – or, in Ukrainian, Mykola Hohol – is considered a classic of Russian literature.
At the same time, he was born Ukrainian, wrote about Ukraine, and is considered their own by many Ukrainian literature lovers. Literary scholar Edyta Bojanowska has written a fascinating study about how Gogol knew to draw upon both Ukrainian and Russian cultural repertoires to appeal to readers and how he intentionally played with his intimate knowledge of both cultures.
This was one of the studies that inspired me as I tried to understand the complex cultural entanglements between nineteenth-century Russia and Ukraine, as I found them personified in my books’ protagonists.
No other writer captured the fraught relations between Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms with as much complexity and lasting relevance as Nikolai Gogol. This pathbreaking book illuminates the deep cultural stakes of today's geopolitical conflict.
The nineteenth-century author Nikolai Gogol occupies a key place in the Russian cultural pantheon as an ardent champion of Russian nationalism. Indeed, he created the nation's most famous literary icon: Russia as a rushing carriage, full of elemental energy and limitless potential.
In a pathbreaking book, Edyta M. Bojanowska topples the foundations of this russocentric myth of the Ukrainian-born writer, a myth that has also dominated…
This was one of the first books that got me interested in the history of nineteenth-century Kyiv. Freshly published when I began my graduate studies, Faith Hillis’s book is detailed micro-history of local politics in the Ukrainian capital from the early nineteenth century to the revolution of 1905.
In particular, Hillis recounts the rise of a local Russian nationalist movement and does a great job at explaining why the city – and all of Ukraine – came to occupy such a central place in the political imagination of Russian imperialists and nationalists. And several members of the Shul’gin family – the protagonists of my own book – also make an appearance!
In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River-which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine-was one of the Russian empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest's…
Meet Lev Gleason, a real-life comics superhero! Gleason was a titan among Golden Age comics publishers who fought back against the censorship campaigns and paranoia of the Red Scare. After dropping out of Harvard to fight in World War I in France, Gleason moved to New York City and eventually…
Soviet rule completely changed the relationship between Russia as the imperial metropole and Ukraine as a peripheral territory in the empire.
It was through Terry Martin’s classic that I first understood the enormous political implications of the Soviets’ intricate nationality policy that invested the state’s various ethnic groups with their own national educational and administrative institutions, all the while depriving them of the right to political self-determination.
Martin’s analysis is as sharp as his prose is crisp and his detailed understanding of the Bolsheviks’ political reasoning remains impressive over twenty years after the study’s publication.
"Terry Martin looks at the nationalities policy of the early Soviet period and offers an insightful, detailed analysis of a problem that Soviet leaders grappled with throughout the twentieth century. As he points out, it was a problem that eventually helped to usher in the end of the USSR."
- Amanda Wood Aucoin, New Zealand Slavonic Journal
The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the…
Putin’s war, among other things, is aimed at reversing Ukraine’s move towards independence after the crumbling of the Soviet Union in the wake of Gorbachev’s perestroika.
Serhii Plokhy, one of the most respected experts in Ukrainian history, explains in detail how the Ukrainian party leadership and population played a central role in the dissolution of the union. An essential read to understand the processes that ultimately led towards Ukraine’s democratization and towards the rise of a revisionist authoritarianism in Russia.
On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took centre stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades,with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world.As Prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire ,…
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into…
This is by no means an easy read. Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev experienced horrible things while he spent three years imprisoned in a torture camp of the Russian-supported so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic.”
While Aseyev refrains from including graphic details about his experiences, his account is harrowing. In his memoir, he not only takes up the best intellectual traditions of twentieth-century “camp literature” but also powerfully explains what is at stake as Ukrainians fight for their freedom against Putin’s authoritarian regime.
I met Aseyev last year and was simultaneously shocked and impressed to get to know someone who is about my age and has been forced to survive such horrors.
In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation). Aseyev also reflects on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the…
In my book, I tell the story of how both Russian and Ukrainian nationalism emerged in the nineteenth century through the history of one family: the Shul’gins and Shul’hyns, a Kyiv dynasty of journalists, politicians, and intellectuals. While all of the family’s members were passionate patriots of the region, some of them came to see themselves as Russians and others as Ukrainians. By the early twentieth century, they fought each other in press debates, parliamentary discussions, and, ultimately, civil wars. Dynasty Divided restores a human face to the history of the long-standing conflict between Russia and Ukraine by scrutinizing the lives of men and women who witnessed its emergence and made a principled choice for one of the sides.
When two brothers discover a 300-year-old sausage-curing cabin on the side of a Slovenian mountain, it's love at first sight. But 300-year-old cabins come with 300 problems.
Dormice & Moonshine is the true story of an Englishman seduced by Slovenia. In the wake of a breakup, he seeks temporary refuge…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
