Intellectual History of the 20th Century: Yuri Mezhenko’s Diary as a Personal Project and Historical Projection

Abstract

The diary of Yury Mezhenko, which was considered lost since the 1950s, contains entries from 1919 to 1926 and reflects the Ukrainian cultural life of that time and the personal life of the author, one of the most prominent literary critics and bibliographers of that period. Written with the intention of recording historically significant processes and figures in Ukrainian literature during the period of revolutionary transformation, this document contains unique evidence of a rapidly changing intellectual landscape and everyday life, the formation of a literary community and a new idea of literary creativity, and the process of institution building, as well as the author’s personal experiences and emotions closely intertwined with historical events and circumstances.

Studying this document allows us not only to trace the process of the emergence and embodiment of creative ideas, the search for theoretical approaches, and the focus of the author’s critical attention, but also to investigate the processes cultural identity formation, the sense of belonging, or, on the contrary, the alienation of certain generations and creative communities in the context of a historical era.

About the Speaker

Olena Haleta is a professor of literary theory and comparative literature at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and professor of cultural anthropology at Ukrainian Catholic University (Ukraine). She has researched and taught modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature at universities and academic institutions in the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Croatia, and Czech Republic. In the spring semester of 2023, she is a visiting professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

Haleta is an author, co-author, and co-editor of eight books on the literary history of modern Ukraine including Seeing Ukraine: Independent Literature of 1991-2021 (special issue of the academic journal Književna smotra). Her forthcoming book, New Writings: Ukrainian Literature in an Anthropological Perspective, analyzes current changes in the understanding of the concept of literature and focuses attention on “blurred” literary genres as unique forms of expression determined by both aesthetic searches and a combination of historical, cultural, and personal circumstances.

https://huri.harvard.edu/event/haleta-2023