Where Currents Meet, Tanya Zaharchenko’s path-breaking study of literature and cultural memory, moves decisively beyond the simplistic view of a post-Soviet Ukraine divided between east and west. It positions the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in the country’s east as elements of a complex continuum. Combining insights from memory studies and border studies, Zaharchenko analyzes a generation of younger riters in the city of Kharkiv—a “doubletake generation” that came of age at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and now revisits this experience through fiction. In the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andreĭ Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev, and others the author reveals how borderlands and frontiers, both geographical and conceptual, acquire zonal qualities of their own as these writers navigate the historical legacy they have inherited.

Tanya Zaharchenko (MSc Oxon 2007, PhD Cantab 2014) was the 2015 Einstein Fellow in Germany, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Oslo.

Notes on Format

Foreword




Introduction

Kharkiv’s Doubletake Generation and the Shimmer of Frontiers

Time and Space

Memory and Literature

The Shimmer of Frontiers

Where Currents Meet




Chapter One

Frontiers of Identity

Fluid Identities

Narratives at War

Sloboda: Roots of Fluidity




Chapter Two

Frontiers of Emptiness

The Last Barricade

A Story in Old Drawings

Of Monsters and Men

Memory and Emptiness

The Nonmissing Variable




Chapter Three

Frontiers of Life (and Death)

The Charon Hypothesis

The Mourning Writer




Chapter Four

Frontiers of Trauma

Expressing the Unspeakable

Surviving the Unspeakable

Traversing the Unspeakable

Writing about the Unspeakable




Chapter Five

Frontiers of iIn)Sanity

Monologues of Madness

Death, Movement, Place




Conclusion




Bibliography




Index