Negotiating Anarchism, Violence and National Revolution: Representations of Ukrainian Warlords 1917-1921 in Literature and Film in Comparative Perspective

• Applicant: Tetiana Portnova, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524595545

The aim of my research project is to examine the complexity and diversity of the representations of the Ukrainian warlordism (otamanshchyna) in literature, film and popular culture. While the phenomenon of otamashchyna and its role in the revolutionary events of 1917-1921 are well studied in historical works, there has been no systematic research of the warlordism reception in literature and popular culture in transnational perspective to date. With the proposed project, I intend to continue my research on this complex of topics, which I had already begun before the Russian war against Ukraine in order to prepare a monographic work on the representations of Ukrainian warlordism from its beginnings in the 1920s until today. The project has a comparative dimension as it systematically examines not only Ukrainian and Russian, but also Jewish and Mennonite sources, and also considers representations in French, Polish and British literary texts. In particular, three aspects of the diverse, highly politicized and competing negotiations of Ukrainian warlordism appear to be central: the anarchistic character of peasant uprisings, violence, and the question of the warlordism role in national revolution. In the respective national and confessional cultural memories, these central aspects of Ukrainian warlordism are differently negotiated and often contradictorily symbolically encoded. The following research questions are of importance for my project: 1) first eyewitness’ accounts and first literary encounters with warlordism in Ukrainian and Russian literature of the 1920s; 2) victim perspective: recourses to the history of Ukrainian peasant insurgency in Jewish and Mennonite literature (from the 1920s to the present); 3) strategies of communist censorship: peasant warlords in Soviet literature and cinema (1930s-1980s); 4) negotiation of Ukrainian anarchism in Western literatures and film; 5) female leaders of the uprisings and women's perspectives on social and national revolutions (in Ukrainian and Russian literature and film); 6) contemporary negotiations of warlordism in Ukrainian literature and popular culture. My research project is situated at the intersection of cultural history and cultural studies (including literary and film analysis). It requires a strong historical and cultural contextualization as well as interdisciplinary analytical techniques, including those of discourse analysis. An important research perspective for me is also looking at literary texts and films that deal with historical themes as a powerful tool for historical memory formation.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position