The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine by Anna Wylegała Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper

Abstract

 Reviews Kukryniksy’s cartoon ‘Progress’ (p. ) was a satirical comment on Robert Ardrey ’s book African Genesis (), which was briefly summarized in a caption above the cartoon in the following way: ‘[Ardrey] sees gangsters and robbers as the ideal of modern man, the peak of civilization.’ It is therefore evident why the cartoon depicts a prehistoric couple who perplexedly observe a fight to the death between two well-dressed capitalists, thus reinforcing the cliché of the inhumanity of Western civilization, a frequent topic in Soviet satirical cartoons and feuilletons. is context is omitted by Etty, who instead interprets the cartoon as a criticism of capitalist modernity and offers the Bible as a possible referent. e book could have benefited from a comparative analysis of the aw period with, at least, the s (when satire as a genre was under attack) and the late s (when censorship was gradually relaxed). Such a comparison would elucidate much more in terms of the magazine’s engagement with propaganda, norms, ideology, and subversion than Etty’s ‘poststructuralist’ analysis, which turns out to be seriously undercontextualized. Finally, of the devil found in the details. ere are a number of misprints, especially in Russian names; some references are given with a wrong year (Bird et al.); Elem Klimov’s film Welcome, or No Trespassing is incorrectly dated and titled, and there are quite a number of mistranslations—for example, Ogoniok is translated as ‘spark’, a wordplay in one of the cartoons (bredvybornoe vystuplenie, i.e. ‘nonsense-election speech’) is translated simply as ‘campaign speech’ (p. ), etc. U U A S e Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine. Ed. by A W and M G-G. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. is volume, edited by Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, presents a remarkably consistent scholarly concept and a clear civic, or even political, agenda. As the title itself explicitly states, in the case of Ukraine the past is, or at least runs the risk of being, a burden. e subtitle posits the triad of history, memory, and identity as those components of contemporary Ukrainian culture and society that may be subject to the burden of the past. However, as the editors acknowledged in an interview with Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed (