Yuliya Ilchuk

As a Ukrainian citizen and a scholar who teaches cultural history of Eastern Slavic civilization, I condemn Russia’s war of aggression against the people of Ukraine. Russian army funded by the Russian state has been unlawfully using military power to kill and torture civilians, to abduct children, to rape women, to destroy Ukrainian culture and the state  in order to force Ukraine to divert it from its course towards a democratic, inclusive, educated society in which everybody can realize their full potential. I am committed to use the soft power of Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures to educate future world leaders about the differences between the Slavs, the rich history of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire, the atrocities committed against the people of Ukraine under the Tsarist, Soviet, and Putin’s regimes, and the profound role of the Ukrainian culture in the modern world.

Yuliya Ilchuk's  first book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid by situating them in the in-between space of Russian and Ukrainian cultures. Studies of hybridity have also informed her recent research projects on othering, protest culture, and memory on the move as socio-cultural responses to the war in Eastern Ukraine. Ilchuk's most recent book project, tentatively entitled The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits the major issues of memory studies—collective memory and trauma, post-memory, remembrance, memorials, and reconciliation—and shifts the discussion to the social and cultural dimensions of forgetting. 

Past Courses:

SLAVIC 121/221 Ukraine at a Crossroads

Literally meaning “borderland,” Ukraine has embodied in-betweenness in many ways. In the course, we will consider the permeability of its territorial, linguistic, and ethnic borders as an opportunity to explore the multiple dimensions of Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors. We will examine the many cultural forces that shaped modern Ukraine: history, literature, art, cinema, folklore, music, and pop culture created during the XI-XXI centuries. In addition to learning how to interpret literary texts and relate them to the current cultural and political situation, we will collaborate on multimedial projects on recent transformation of society in Ukraine. All required texts are in English. No knowledge of Ukrainian is required.

SLAVIC 146/346 Russian Novel Decolonized 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, scholars of Russian literature have debated the relationship between Russian culture and the imperialist politics of the Russian state, and correspondingly, how the Western audience should reinterpret Russian classical literature, particularly the texts that shaped the idea of “great Russian culture.” Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky underwent a significant transformation as intellectuals throughout their careers: Tolstoy from a proponent of the Russian military might to the pacifist and anti-statist, and Dostoevsky from a progressive socialist to the imperial chauvinist. In this course, we will analyze Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment through the lens of postcolonial theory, situating each novel within its intellectual context and within each writer’s conception of “Russianness.” No knowledge of Russian is required. Slavic majors must take the course as WIM.

SLAVIC 70N Socialism versus Capitalism: Russian and American Writers' Responses

The turn of the 20th century was marked with turbulent political events and heated discussions about the future of Russian and American societies. Many writers and intellectuals responded to the burning issues of social justice, egalitarianism, and exploitation that divided societies into two competing ideological camps. Through close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, we will engage in the critical discussions of class struggle, individual interest versus collective values, race, social and gender equality, and identify points of convergence and divergence between the two systems. To what extent was the opposition between capitalism and socialism fueled by the artistic vision of the Russian and American writers? What were these thinkers' ideal of society and what impact did it have on the emerging socialism? Readings for the class include the fundamental works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sholem Aleichem, Olha Kobylianska, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, and other prominent writers. All required texts are in English.

SLAVIC 171/371 Chernobyl: From Late Socialist Utopia to Post-Soviet Apocalypse

The course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the history of the late Soviet utopian project of the "atomic cities" to the intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic responses that the Chernobyl catastrophe generated in the post-Soviet Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian societies. During the course, we will study environmental, social, and ecological consequences of the Chernobyl disaster and analyze its many representations of Chernobyl in fictional, cinematographic, oral histories, map projects, VR, photography, and other media in order to understand how the disaster resonates across space and time. We will consider such issues as urban and technological utopias of the late Soviet Union, representations of the disaster; ethics; health and disease; the body and its deconstruction; ecology and climate; the appropriation of disaster narratives and disaster tourism; the media and cover-ups; and faith and religion.

SLAVIC 148/348 Slavic Literatures Since the Death of Stalin

The course aims at acquainting students with major developments in Soviet literature from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. We will trace the cultural tendencies in the context of political and social upheavals of twentieth-century Soviet history. In the Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-Soviet cultural history, the best works written by writers both within the USSR and in immigration or in prison occupied not the center of literary life, but its periphery or underground. The reading list for the course includes the most experimental part of the Soviet and early post-Soviet literary canon in literature, drama, film, and popular music.

SLAVIC 332 The Burden of Memory

This course explores the growing field of memory studies and various modes of memory-forgetting in the post-Soviet society and culture. The 'memory boom' has significantly altered the way the post-socialist subjects remember, forget, or imagine their Soviet legacy. The course proposes a critical appraisal of memory studies as an opportunity for engaging in a genuine interdisciplinary endeavor. It starts by defining the field of research at the intersection of history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural theory and examines the emergence of 'memory' as an object of study within these disciplines. In the second half of the course, we will study literary representation of memory and forgetting through the concepts of post-memory, second-generation memory, memory of eyewitnesses and perpetrators, memory of the displaced persons, and amnesia and memory loss fiction. And finally, we will engage in comparing the social practices of selective remembering and forgetting of the memory of the WWII and Soviet legacy in present-day Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.