Bildung, Sprache, Migration

Dr. Iryna Odrekhivska (University College London / Ivan Franko National University of Lviv) delivered a lecture exploring the transformative potential of displacement in shaping Ukrainian literature. Focusing on the cultural space of Ukrainian Displaced Persons (DPs) in 1940s Germany and Austria, Dr. Odrekhivska examined how forced migration not only geographically relocated literary production but also disrupted established literary canons, genres, and linguistic norms. She argued that the DP literary community offered an avant-garde and ideologically independent counter-current to Soviet literary models—marked by experimentation, resistance, and a commitment to a decolonial cultural vision.

Translation, she emphasized, played a redressive role within this alternative literary formation, serving both as a mode of cultural preservation and as a vehicle for international engagement. At the same time, she noted that efforts to defend culture from exile could risk essentializing its identity, raising important questions about the constraints displacement imposes on literary imagination.

Through this historical lens, the lecture reflected on contemporary implications: How does the past shape current literary responsibilities? What new transnational and intercultural entanglements emerge in a decolonial present? Dr. Odrekhivska invited the audience to reconsider the role of Ukrainian literature today—not only as memory work but as an evolving practice shaped by mobility, rupture, and renewal.