Usually, I reach the height of my media popularity as a fashion researcher once a year on Independence Day. TV and radio programmes, websites and blogs want information about Ukrainian fashion, since it’s an easy and extravagant topic, often associated with celebration. Analysing various invitations and requests, year after year, I have observed how Ukrainians […]

A new life for Bruno Schulz in a new, independent Ukraine began with his repeated – and repugnant – murder. Luckily, the second of these ‘murders’ was only metaphorical: it consisted of the partitioning and theft of his wall-paintings from one small, but very important storage room in a private residence within the town of […]

The anti-colonial resistance of Ukraine, since Russia’s escalation of war on 24 February 2022, is part of a wider process of decolonization. In this century, its driving forces have been the Orange Revolution of 2004, Euromaidan of 2013-2014, and the war in East of Ukraine since 2014, alongside decommunization and subsequent emancipation processes. Ukraine became […]

Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev, who was born and spent part of his life in Ukraine, published a book in exile called “The Russian Idea” («Русская идея», 1946). Here he singled out five periods in Russian history: the Kyivan, the Tartar, the Moscow, the “Petrovsky” (from “Peter I”), and the Soviet. The naming of each period […]

The beginning of the twentieth century was a period of significant change for Ukrainian urban culture. The city of Kyiv was rapidly developed: its first skyscraper, known as the Ginzburg House, was constructed in 1901, not far from centrally located Khreschatyk Street; cable car routes were ambitiously plotted along complex geomorphology; airplane flyovers became fashionable, […]

This year, my personal Venice Biennale started with a line-up of pictures on social media featuring a middle finger against a background of the closed and empty Russian pavilion. Here it was, European geopolitics in a nutshell: superpowers and empires don’t disappear completely; they may turn silent for a moment, if forced to do so, […]

It is all too easy to paint the history of Ukrainian culture as one of losses. There’s the loss of continuity between one generation and the next as the result of another large-scale calamity and repressions. There’s the loss of cultural artifacts destroyed in historic conflagrations or looted for imperial museums. And, last but not […]

As paradoxical as it may sound today, for many of my fellow citizens, this war has proven to be not only an encounter with suffering but also a reunion with themselves and their country, which had seemed so very convenient to ignore until Russia’s invasion. As paradoxical as it may seem today, for many Europeans, […]

1.  ‘The Nowhere Nation’ was the title of the featured article published in 2000 in the reputable New York Review of Books by a reputable author, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock. The disparaging title was typical rather than unique; other titles, throughout the 1990s, referred with similar wit (and analytical […]

Продовжуємо спецпроєкт «Друга спроба» — цикл розмов із представниками та представницями сфери культури Львова про те, наскільки наші — усіх українців — плани на 2022 рік виявились (не)сумісними із реальністю, що планувалось і що було втілене і заплановане натомість. «Друга спроба» — це можливість оцінити реактивність, проактивність та гнучкість культурної сфери за надзвичайних ситуацій, ведення […]