Vitaly Chernetsky

Between the Poetic and the Documentary: Ukrainian Cinema’s Responses to World War II

While the “ethnic” cinematic traditions of the Soviet Union are receiving increasing recognition in recent years, they remain little studied and little appreciated as examples of World War II-centered films, even though one such non-Russian Soviet republic, Ukraine, provided a key locus both in the establishment of the genre of World War II documentary (in the work of Alexander Dovzhenko) and in the making of the paradigm of guerrilla fighter (“partisan”) films with Mark Donskoi’s The Rainbow (1943, rel. 1944). The latter film established the presentation of Nazi-occupied Soviet territory through the fate of women characters that became a paradigmatic feature of a large number of both films and literary works. It also gave us the classic images of the noble suffering maternal female character (Natalia Uzhvii’s Olena), the immoral hedonist collaborator (Nina Alisova’s Pusia), and the selfless partisan fighter (Ol’ha, Pusia’s sister, played by Vera Ivashova, best known for her role as Ol’ga Danilovna, the Novgorod beauty in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky). It is Dovzhenko’s films, however, that inaugurated a Ukrainian response to the events of the war. With his trilogy of wartime documentary films, for all the genre and content limitations of official Soviet wartime chronicle, he built narrative and visual bridges to the first golden age of Ukrainian cinema during the VUFKU years,

East-Central European Literatures Twenty Years After

The goal of this collective effort is to provide an overview of the course of Central European literatures in the twenty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The authors have highlighted works they consider representative of their countries’ literary production and placed them in the context of the political and social changes they reflect. Where English translations of the works in question are available, they are listed in a bibliography attached to each article.