Natalka Sniadanko

Natalka Sniadanko

Research Fellow

contact through sekwoell@uni-potsdam.de

Vita

Born in Lviv (Ukraine), 1973, Natalka Sniadanko is a freelance writer, translator and publicist. She studied in Lviv and Freiburg im Breisgau. She has translated Franz Kafka, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Günter Grass, Stefan Zweig, Elfride Jelinek, Karl May, Herta Müller, Judith Hermann and Sigmund Freud from German, and from Polish Zbigniew Herbert, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz and Johanna Bator, and others. She has published in the Ukrainian and international press, e.g. in Ukrainska pravda (Ukraine), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), Odra (Poland), Süddeutsche Zeitung and Welt (Germany), Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland) and New York Times (USA). Since 2009 she has been on the editorial board of the Polish-German-Ukrainian literary magazine RADAR. She is the author of 10 prose volumes and her texts have been translated and published in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Czech Republic, and USA. Natalka Sniadanko has received various prizes and scholarships, including the Joseph Conrad Prize of the Polish Institute in Kyiv. She was an artist-in-residence fellow of the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar in 2022-2023. Since April 2023 she teaches Slavic Studies at the University of Leipzig.

 

During my stay I intend to research the topic of emigration from Ukraine in literature.

This topic as well as the phenomenon itself is not limited exclusively to the present. In his book “Emperor of America. The Great Escape from Galicia” the well-known Austrian writer Martin Pollack reports about the reasons, ways and human destinies of Galician emigrants starting from the 19th century and through the whole 20th century, the great wave of emigration from Galicia, the poorest province of the k.u.k. monarchy. Ukrainian and Jewish peasants and craftsmen were looking for a better future and a whole industry developed that organized this flight.

One of these emigration stories is also described by Wasyl Stefanyk, a Ukrainian writer of the 19th-20th centuries, in his famous short story “Kaminnyj Chrest” (A Stone Cross). The subject of emigration in Ukrainian literature, as well as in society, is portrayed exclusively negatively – as a tragedy. Emigrants, even if they are voluntary migrants of today, are pitied, or condemned for their “unpatriotic” decision. In my contribution I would like to deal with the topic and think about how much this negative attitude owes to the Soviet mental heritage, and why it is so difficult for society and literature to be open to the phenomenon and also to see advantages of the situation.