Transition als Translation. Dekolonisierung und Mehrsprachigkeit in osteuropäischen Kulturen
In 2012, the literary scholar Tamara Hundorova characterized Ukrainian a culture as »tranzytna kul’tura« (transit culture), capturing its postcolonial and post-totalitarian changes. These changes, driven by the agency of Ukrainian culture and society, encompass various phenomena, including the shift towards Ukrainian as a »language of resistance«, the intertextual reclamation of cultural memory, the decolonization of toponyms, and practices of (self)translation. These processes have intensified following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Against the backdrop of Ukrainian postcolonial theory, this project focuses on multilingual authors from Ukraine, namely Borys Khersonskyi, Iia Kiva, and Oleksandr Averbukh. These authors navigate both a multilayered language transition and displacement. The project investigates their self-translation practices and multilingualism through textual analysis and problem-oriented interviews. It conceptualizes their multiple transitions within the framework of the »postmonolingual condition« (Yildiz), interpreting them as a form of cultural translation (Bachmann-Medick) and an act of decolonial resistance.
Mariya Donska is a literary and cultural scholar at the University of Graz. Her research focuses on contemporary Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarusian poetry, intertextuality, decolonization, and praxeology. She teaches Ukrainian as a foreign language at the University of Graz and launched this course in 2022 with the active support of the Department of Slavic Studies. She studied classical philology and Ukrainian in Kharkiv, comparative literature in Munich, and Old Greek/Slavic studies in Graz, and received her doctorate from the University of Salzburg.
Mariya Donska has twice been awarded the Ingeborg Ohnheiser Prize by the Austrian Society for Slavonic Studies. In the winter semester of 2024/25, she was a Visiting Scholar in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. Starting in 2026, she leads a third-party funded project supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation entitled »Voices of Resilience: Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry«.
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Die Lecture widmet sich den dekolonialen Praktiken Oleksandr Averbuchs, der als Autor, Übersetzer und Wissenschaftler Transitionen durchläuft, Zwischenräume und Verflechtungen schafft: vom Russischen hin zum Ukrainischen und zu intern mehrsprachigen Texten, zwischen Ländern und (Kultur-)Räumen sowie zwischen fiktionalem und dokumentarischem Schreiben.