The journal KRYTYKA, summary of issue 9-10, 2012

[Oleh Kotsyuba (Harvard Univ)]

Dear SEELANGers,

Please find below an English-language summary of the latest issue of  
the Ukrainian intellectual journal KRYTYKA.

All best,
Oleh Kotsyuba
- Editor of the Online Edition


SUMMARY , No. 9-10 (179–180), 2012

The September-October, 2012 issue of Krytyka opens with
“The Republic of Regions: still Post-Soviet, ultimately outdated” by  
the Ukrainian political scientist and analyst Mykhailo Minakov. He  
explains how the legacy of Communist Party elites and their regional  
antagonisms have shaped the ongoing conflict between political and  
business elites of different Ukrainian regions from Bolshevik times to  
the present.

Tamara Hundorova of the Institute of Literature of the Ukrainian  
Academy of Science continues her study “Verka Serdiuchka’s Mask:  
Feminization of Transgression in Post-Totalitarian Culture” (see  
Krytyka No. 7–8, 2012 for the first part). Professor Hundorova  
analyzes in this part the public images of on the one hand the famous  
drag-queen Verka Sierdiuchka (Andrii Danylko) and on
the other of the former prime minister (and now political
prisoner) Yulia Tymoshenko.

In her article “In the New World of Spies,” which appeared in The New  
York Review of Books (vol. 59, No. 16), Ann Applebaum, a columnist for  
The Washington Post and Slate, recounts the history of Soviet  
espionage – since Bolshevik times to the recent Anna Chapman scandal.  
Krytyka presents this article in Ukrainian translation as the  
exclusive partner of NYRB in Ukraine.

In his “The Bourgeois Anatomists of Stalinism” Ukrainian critic and  
poet Oleh Kotsarev reviews several books about the unhappy lots of  
foreigners imprisoned in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s times,  
either when they came to USSR because of their convictions, or merely  
by chance.

The Ukrainian historian Andrii Portnov reviews in his “Dancing with  
Memories” Georgy Kasyanov’s Dance Macabre, a study of the perceptions  
and interpretations of the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor of 1932–33.  
Portnov approves of his colleague’s non-partisan and nonpolitical  
approach to academic matters, but finds the study inadequate in  
various other crucial ways.

In his “Stalin Reloaded” Serhii Hirik of the Hrushevsky Institute of  
Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies explores a number of new  
Russian books on Stalin and discusses various re-visions of him in  
contemporary Russia and Ukraine.

The Ukrainian historian Mykola Borovyk replicates in his article  
“Walking with Monuments” an exercise described in “Shared Authority:  
Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History” by Michael  
Frisch, i.e., he surveys his students on their vision of Ukrainian  
national history and its most important figures.

In “Political Science in Ukraine: Twenty Years of Independence,”
Oleksandr Starish of Ostroh Academy continues the discussion begun by  
Serhii Kudelia and by Yuri Matsievskyi in Krytyka No.1–2, 2012 and No.  
6, 2012.

In this issue Krytyka pays homage to historian and public intellectual  
Tony Judt (1948–2010). Ian Buruma recalls Judt’s passion for trains  
and tries to explain why that was so important for him. Buruma  
provides an overview of Judt’s intellectual biography, his commitments  
and inspirations, in “Tony Judt: The Right Questions”, which appeared  
in The New York Review of Books (vol. 59, No. 6).
Timothy Snyder’s recollection “On Tony Judt” (NYRB, vol. 57, No. 15)  
begins with a train episode too, and both authors highlight Judt’s  
cosmopolitan identity.
Tony Judt himself is represented with an extract from his book
“Thinking the Twentieth Century” (with Timothy Snyder) under the title  
“On Intellectuals and Democracy”.

In his essay “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Fear of Intimacy” Volodymyr  
Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher and essayist, writes on the  
personal side of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Many of the issues here, above  
all his failure to become a good public speaker, motivated Rousseau to  
become a writer who in the end had a profound impact on European  
literature.

The issue concludes with an essay “The Years of Occupation” by the  
Ukrainian poet, essayist and translator Andrii Bondar in which he  
shares his love-hate relationship with the post-War diaries of the  
German writer Ernst Jünger.



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