Contested narratives and contested identities have recently become a staple expression in Ukraine. The notion of contestation is included in the academic discourses across disciplines to underline various cultural and historical narratives that can compete for the dominance in the process of constructing narratives to be shared by Ukrainians, with a goal of consolidating and uniting the nation. This notion also illuminates a "war of memories," the description which Andreas Kappeler mentions when discussing the current Russo-Ukrainian relations. The goal of this talk is to unpack the notion of contestation with the major focus on Ukrainian and Russian components as it is specifically this cluster that appears in the center of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Today expressions such as "contested identities," "contested narratives," "contested histories" describe a variety of phenomena ranging from identity formation to educational programs on history. However, these descriptions are understood more often than not as self-explanatory.
This talk discusses contestations as constructs which arise out of competing political narratives and which are integrated in the cultural memory. Some narratives form and dissolve; others prove to be deep-rooted, long-term, and unremitting. The latter appears to be part of the cultural memory which is transmitted from generation to generation. The beginning of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2014 was marked by the resuscitation of the question which more than 150 years ago was posed to Mykola Hohol by his Russian acquaintances: Are you Russian or Ukrainian? This question ties in an intricate way the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries.
To describe the nature of the contestations, the project zeroes in on the letters written by the writers who were born in Ukraine during the Russian Empire time period: it will help elucidate the continuity of contestations. Letters are discussed as carriers of fine cultural and memorial overlaps that let us identify contestations, where the private and the public intertwine and collide. These tensions, which may seem invisible first, appear to not only shape writers' literary identities, but also project the development of individual, collective, and cultural memory.
By analyzing how contestations are engrained in and transmitted through cultural memory, this talk contributes to the exploration for possibilities of pluralistic narratives and memories that present political, historical, and cultural complexities, rather than contestations.
