Tag: Russian empire
Zombie History Stalks Ukraine – The Atlantic
The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions—the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms. Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much
Ukrainian Is My Native Language, but I Had to Learn It
Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with
Ben Rhodes: We Have Reached a Hinge of History
Europe’s largest invasion since World War II is a logical outcome of Vladimir Putin’s dominance of Russian politics in the 21st century, a reminder that grievance-based ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism lead inexorably to conflict. Putin’s efforts to reconstitute empire and “protect” Russian speakers beyond national borders tap into currents of history running deep underneath our collective experience. And in many ways, the tolls of the war—cities reduced to rubble, civilians caught amid armies, refugees moving en masse across European borders, threats