During World War II, Soviet museums constituted an important part of the war propaganda machine and were used by the Soviet state to mobilize its population and to create a public historical narrative about the war. Staff at Soviet museums began organizing war-related patriotic exhibitions from the very first days of the German invasion in June 1941. This article focuses on two types of war-themed exhibitions and museums that were prominent in the Soviet urban spaces during the war and immediately after: trophy exhibitions and exhibitions and museums that focused on constructing historical narratives about the war. Among the main topics of the latter exhibitions were partisan resistance, German atrocities, and the central role of the Communist Party and Stalin personally. While the creators of these war museums adhered to the ideological frameworks and museum content plans developed by Moscow’s professional ideologists, I demonstrate that local museum workers were able, to some extent, to deviate from centrally prescribed narratives and to engage their own agency and creativity, and that the extent of this deviation was largely defined by regional specifics and by individual efforts and local circumstances. The impact of regional differences in the narration of the war is especially evident in the comparison of the representation of the Holocaust in museums in Kyiv and Minsk. Finally, I demonstrate that local circumstances were a major factor in the fate of each museum after the end of the war.

Before 1939, Jewish architects were active members of their profession, participating in domestic and international architectural networks and contributing to the built environment of Polish cities. From the mid-1930s, however, intensifying antisemitism and far-right political forces pressured architectural networks to exclude Jews from professional unions. The start of the Second World War and the German occupation in 1939 strained professional architectural networks but led to the formation of underground workshops, cooperatives, and other groups, whose connections extended from Warsaw through the camps and ghettos of occupied Poland. This article presents the history of Jewish-Polish architects from 1937 to 1945. Demonstrating how architectural networks reacted to changing conditions of war, occupation, and genocide, it emphasizes architectural networks as sites of political engagement, ranging from prewar antisemitic attacks on Jews and their removal from the Society of Polish Architects (SARP) to underground architectural networks that hid Jews and allowed them to work. Although the fate of Jewish architects depended largely on their relationships with their professional networks, they also actively decided how to utilize those networks to resist the Nazis and to ensure their survival. This research shows that interpersonal relationships and wartime networks were consequential in determining the wartime fates of Jewish architects and also shaped the profession’s post-war structure.

The aim of this article is to analyze and interpret Vladislav Khodasevich’s poem Petersburg (Петербург, 1925), in which the poet evokes the image of the city during the war communism period from the distance of emigration. The poet presents the city in many dimensions: as a place of struggle for physical survival in an era of crisis caused by the Russian Civil War; as a space where high culture clashed with the barbarism of Bolshevism; and in an autobiographical key – as a time in which his own creative forces flourished. The cityscape is based on a series of antinomies: past – present, tradition – innovation, spirituality – materiality, sacrum – profanum, the real world – the surreal world, the culture of old Russia – the primitivism of new times. This allows us to look at the poem simultaneously from several perspectives: historical-literary (cultural life in St. Petersburg during the Civil War), biographical (the poet’s stay in the city in the years 1920–1922), intertextual (assignment of the poem to the Petersburg text) and metatextual/self-referential (Khodasevich’s aesthetic views).

This article examines the staging and coding of femininity in literary works focused on cities during wartime, authored by women. Drawing on Judith Butler’s reading of Luce Irigaray and Henri Lefebvre’s The production of space, the analysis centers on the works of Lidiya Ginzburg (Zapiski blokadnogo čeloveka, 1984), Anna Świrszczyńska (Budowałam barykadę, 1974), Zlata Filipović (Le journal de Zlata, 1993), and Yevgenia Belorusets (Anfang des Krieges, 2022). The article argues that these texts challenge abstracting, phallogocentric systems of meaning on two distinct planes. First, they subvert abstract spatial structures forced on urban space by masculine power dynamics, accomplishing this through a perspective that emphasizes the city ‘from below’ and underscores the private, as opposed to the institutional, dimension of urban life. Second, they contest the erasure of the feminine in linguistic structures, shedding light on the oppression experienced by women during war and showcasing narrative and linguistic practices that reclaim agency. The article contends that these four texts not only represent deviations from conventional war narratives but also stage their own female authorship as an appeal against phallogocentric linguistic, spatial, and narrative structures. Consequently, they provide a means to articulate the precarity and marginalization of the feminine within both cities during war and economies of significance wherein the female is subjected to obliteration.

Shadows of the Teutons, a novel by the contemporary Russian writer Aleksei Ivanov, was published in 2021. The story unfolds across two different time periods. Some events take place in 1457 during the siege of Marienburg, the capital of the Teutonic Order’s State, and the Polish-Teutonic conflict serves as a starting point for the depiction of later battles, in 1945, within the former East Prussia, now known as the Kaliningrad Oblast. This article examines the means used to create the urban spaces depicted in the novel and their transformation as a result of armed conflicts. It focuses on the urban landscapes of Baltiysk (Pillau) and Malbork (Marienburg), which exhibit a complex identity and strong interconnections at various levels of the narrative structure. The analysis explores somatopoetics and thanatopoetics, two categories the author employs to describe places, as well as the auditory and olfactory dimensions of everyday wartime experiences, memoryscapes, Teutonic castles and underground settings such as cellars, bunkers, catacombs, secret passages and tunnels.

Memorial plaques are one of the most common forms of commemorative practices. Organically fitting into the geographical and socio-cultural landscape and having several functions, memorial plaques not only become a kind of marker of a “site of memory” (lieu de mémoire), play an important role in preserving names, transmitting historical memory, but also contribute to the construction and consolidation in the mass consciousness of ideologically verified representations of historical political events. Various “initiatives from below” and projects of independent activists (for example, the “Last Address” (“Poslednij adres”) project with memorial tablets to victims of state terror or the anonymous “questions about repressions” action discussed in this article) become vivid examples of how today’s Russian civil society reacts to a unilateral submission historical facts by power structures. The organizers of such actions become new actors in the politics of memory. They seek not only to expand the space of specific “places of memory” – memorial plaques and their contents – but also to change the perception of certain historical events and attitudes towards them. On the example of memorial plaques as a form of commemoration, the article examines the communicative strategies of different groups of memory subjects in modern Russia.

In this article, Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg is analyzed in terms of the clash of two hostile narratives – Eastern and Western – that have shaped Russian statehood from the rule of Tsar Peter I. The presence of solutions associated with the West, in the history of Russia, as well as in the social and political system of the Russian state, is considered to be the result of a kind of self-colonization and internal colonization. The author of the article, drawing on terminology developed in post-colonial research, highlights the tensions existing within Russian society at the beginning of the 20th century, which translate into internal divisions in the main characters of the work, in particular the senator Apollon Ableukhov and his son Nikolay. Although they both appear to belong to Western civilization and culture, they in fact pave the way for the victory of a chaos of Eastern provenance, which culminates in the Russian revolutions of the early 20th century.

The myth of the founding of the city of Vilnius became particularly important in Lithuanian art in the decade of the restoration of independence. After a long period of occupation, the capital of Lithuania became not only a catalyst for new formulations of national and civic identity, but also a symbol of freedom. The landscape and architecture of the Old Town of Vilnius embody the archaic Baltic imagination, which is not upstaged but, on the contrary, complemented by the Christian world of Vilnius. The restoration of independence activated the archaic Baltic imagination in Lithuanian art and literature as this kind of imagination had nurtured Lithuanians’ national self-awareness over centuries. This article focuses on two modern Lithuanian prose writers, Antanas Ramonas (1947–1993) and Ričardas Gavelis (1950–2002), whose works evoke the two most striking and different images of the same mythical Vilnius – divine and demonic, hopeful and hopeless. These two opposing images of mythical Vilnius reveal two different viewpoints on the world, on history and on the human being in modern Lithuanian literature.

In the environment of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, literary translation acquires critical significance as a way to get Ukraine’s narratives of destruction and urbicide across cultural and political borders. This article will focus on Daisy Gibbons’s 2021 translation of Tamara Duda’s 2019 novel Daughter, set in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, to examine the translator’s project of reconstructing the complex interplay of Eastern and Western Ukrainian identities embroiled in the narrative of crawling occupation. Daughter tells the story of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Donetsk, dissecting the city’s fragmented identity along cultural and linguistic divides and exploring internal tensions and propaganda-fueled conflicts leading to its eventual downfall. The storyline adopts the female protagonist’s insider/outsider perspective, tracing her gradual evolution from an invisible observer to a fearless insurgent fighting for the survival of her unravelling home. The analysis will centre on the translator’s approach, which combines textual and paratextual techniques to highlight the processes of division and destruction – with their transformative impact on the urban space – and to enter into a visible dialogue with the narrator/protagonist’s voice to amplify and reinforce its distinctly pro-Ukrainian perspective.