Oksana Pashko

Postdoctoral Researcher

Contact

via Pashko(at)europa-uni.de

Vita

Dr. Oksana Pashko is a literary scholar specializing in modern Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian-French and Ukrainian-Russian literary relations. She graduated from Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv and defended her PhD dissertation in Comparative Literature at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Since then, she has taught at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. From 2022 to 2025, she was awarded a scholarship of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is an associate member of the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies in Frankfurt (Oder).  In 2025, her book “Nejavne literaturoznavstvo v Ukrajini 1920-kh rokiv (Implicit Literary Studies in Ukraine in the 1920s)” was published in Kyiv (Publishing house “Dukh i Litera”). She was a fellow of EUTIM in 2022 and 2025.

Ukrainian Émigré and Soviet Literary Studies: The Case of Dmytro Čyževskyj and Oleksandr Biletskyi

Dmytro Čyževskyj (1894–1977) and Oleksandr Biletskyj (1884–1961) were the most influential Ukrainian scholars of the 20th century. Although they often debated, they never met. This project aims to identify points of interaction between these seemingly very different literary scholars. My working hypothesis is that their ideas were similar in many ways, despite the fact that their concepts developed within two different political systems, with varying levels of censorship, ideologization, and politicization. Their shared interests included the Baroque period of Ukrainian literature (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries), the role of the reader in the literary process, and issues of style. Both also attempted to identify criteria that could form the basis of Ukrainian literary history and tried to comprehend the role of Ukrainian literature in European, Slavic, and global contexts. Each of them founded an original philological school. In the 1920s, Oleksandr Biletskyj established a philological circle in Kharkiv (at the Department of Literary Studies of the Kharkiv Institute of Public Education (KhINO, formerly Kharkiv University)), and later in Kyiv at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Dmytro Čyževskyj headed the Slavic Institute at the University of Heidelberg starting in 1956.

My study primarily focuses on how these philologists conceptualized the history of Ukrainian literature. Since the 1920s, Biletskyj has emphasized the importance of a stylistic approach to the history of Ukrainian literature; however, he regarded Čyževskyj’s scheme of cultural-historical epochs as overly abstract. It is already evident that similarities between their versions of literary historiography are particularly noticeable in the 1920s and during the “thaw” period in Soviet Ukraine. In the late Stalinist era, their “histories of Ukrainian literature” diverged, and this was largely due to the ideologization of the cultural sphere in Ukraine. Their positions also shaped their approaches: Biletskyj was a Soviet academician responsible for conveying the official doctrine, while Čyževskyj was an émigré heading a Slavic studies research center at a German university.

What are the main differences that can be identified in their historiographical assessments of Ukrainian literature? During the late Stalinist period, Biletskyj presented the literary texts of Kyivan Rus as the “common cradle” of East Slavic literatures. At the same time, he did not recognize the Ukrainian Baroque tradition and regarded realism as the most influential stylistic trend not only of the nineteenth century but also of the twentieth. Within the central topic of Soviet comparative literature – Ukrainian-Russian literary relations – Biletskyj promoted the idea of a one-sided influence of Russian culture on Ukraine.

In contrast, Čyževskyj consistently emphasized the leading role of the Kyivan Rus’ heritage and the Baroque period in Ukrainian literature. In his assessment of Ukrainian realism, he sometimes noted its affinities with Biedermeier. In his works on the comparative history of Slavic literatures, he argued that different periods were shaped by shifting centripetal and centrifugal forces in interliterary relations.

A comparison of the legacies of these two leading twentieth-century Ukrainian Slavists reveals the key literary concepts in the humanities in Ukraine of that period, outlines the dynamics of dialogue and antagonism between them, and highlights their sustained attention to the work of colleagues and intellectual opponents across the border.