Tetiana Kalytenko

Research Fellow

Contact

via dathe@europa-uni.de

Vita

Tetiana Kalytenko is a literary scholar. She studied Ukrainian philology at the National Drahomanov University of Pedagogy Kyiv and at the Mohyla Academy Kyiv and received her PhD from the Mohyla Academy on the topic “The principles of construction of multiple fictional universes in the Middle Ages and in modern literature”. Her research focuses on postcolonial aspects of literary studies. In addition to her academic work, Tetiana Kalytenko curates literary and art projects, most recently focusing on comics at the Arsenal Book Fair in Kyiv in 2021, and works as a literary critic, i.e for the online portal Chytomo.

During her EUTIM research stay at the European University Viadrina she is working on the following topic:

The fictional multiverse under the conditions of (in)freedom: colonial and postcolonial contexts

The main goal of the project is to investigate the correlation between fictional plurality colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus matching the issue of minor literatures with postcolonial theories for the case of Ukrainian literature. The focus is on three examples of Ukrainian literature from different periods: Romanticism (i.e. Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire), 20th century science fiction (Ukraine as a part of the Soviet Union), and postmodernism (independent Ukraine). On the one hand, living in a totalitarian system can inspire writers to create fictive worlds where one can escape reality. On the other hand, the lack of freedom can also undermine the creation of real and utopian worlds. The literary examples are for the Romantic era: Oleksa Storoshenko’s “Damned Marco” (Marko Prokliatyi), for the 20th century science fiction: Yuri Smolych’s “Ostanni Eidschevud” and for the literature of the independent Ukraine Yuri Andrukhovych’s “Moscoviada”.