Voices from a War-Torn Region: Contemporary Literature of Ukraine and Eastern Europe

Tuesdays 9:00am-11:00am

May 12 to June 16, 2026 (6 weeks)

learn.slc.edu/courses/lifelong-learning-voices-from-a-war-torn-region

The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet spaces has often gone unnoticed in the West.

As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue.

Our first session will present a little history together with a brief exploration of the curious emptiness of Russian nationalism as presented in Russian-American journalist M. Gessen’s recent contribution to This American Life, “Eight Fights.” 

Our second session will be devoted to just one work from contemporary Polish literature, Flights(2007) by the 2017 Nobel prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk.  

Sessions three to five will focus on three contemporary Ukrainian works in turn:  

•Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996)

•Serhii Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2021), and 

•Halyna Kruk’s Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails: Poems (2023).  

Our sixth and last session will be devoted to the still highly unsteady world of contemporary Belarusian literature.  Our focus will be Alhierd Baharevich’s Alindarka's Children (2014) and the extraordinary decision of his translators to echo Baharevich’s own use of two different languages: in Petra Reid and Jim Dingley’s 2020 translation, Baharevich’s Russian is represented by English, and his Belarusian by Scots. 

Note that students are encouraged to listen to “Eight Fights” in preparation for the first class; the podcast can be found on the website for This American Life.