Oksana Pashko

Research Fellow

Kontakt

über Pashko(at)europa-uni.de

Vita

Dr. Oksana Pashko is a literary scholar specializing in modern Ukrainian literature, and Ukrainian-Russian literary relations. She graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv and obtained her Ph.D. in philology at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature in 2015. Since then she teaches literary theory, sociology of literature, Ukrainian literature, and Ukrainian-French literary relations at the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. She also worked as an academic and literary editor of the publishing house “Dukh i Litera” in Kyiv. 2022-2025 she was awarded a scholarship of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for her research project “Specifics of the Literary Process in Ukraine, mid-nineteenth – mid-twentieth centuries. The Perspective of Literary Sociology”. She is the author of the book „Nejavne literaturoznavstvo v Ukrajini 1920-h rokiv” (Invisible Literary Studies in Ukraine in 1920s) currently being prepared for publication.

Ivan Franko and the Emergence of the Concept of World Literature in Ukrainian Literary Studies

The problem of the concept of World literature has interested Ukrainian critics and literary scholars since the second half of the 19th century. The preoccupation with it is connected, first, with the comprehension of Ukrainian literature as a national and international phenomenon, second, with attempts to popularize the Ukrainian culture in the Polish-, German-, and Russian-speaking environment, which also raised the issue of separation from the more influential Russian literature, and third, with rethinking multilingualism and attempts to build a canon of Ukrainian literature as a monolingual phenomenon. In my project I will examine the stages of formation of the concept of World literature on the example of Ivan Franko’s critical and translation activity in the late 19th and early 20th-century. The success of the Danish critic Georg Brandes, who wrote in little-known Danish about the World republic of literature but nevertheless gained recognition from readers throughout Europe, inspired Ivan Franko. His articles from the late 19th century helped reconstruct the concept of World literature, for example: “Ethnography and History of Literature” (1894), “Internationalism and Nationalism in Modern Literature” (1898), “Yuri Brandes” (1899), German-language articles etc. The concept of “World literature” will be also analyzed in the focus of the selection and principles of translation from the world classics, as well as in connection with the formation of a certain canon of World literature and the possibility of Ukrainian literature entering this canon. The interest of Ivan Franko in World literature determined his translation projects. Scholar`s translation legacy includes approximately 140 authors from 25 literatures, among whom are many authors of German literature, including Heinrich Kleist, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and others.