Friends Of Ukraine. As Stanford lecturer teaches students “to read” Kiev and Odessa

The first part of the interview is available here

One of the courses that I teach at Stanford, “Text” city: Soviet and post-Soviet space”. For example, the four cities — Kiev, Odessa, Moscow and St. Petersburg, we study the palimpsest of memory, which creates the city in the XX century. It could be the entire course to construct in the Ukrainian cities, but was confined to the Kiev and Odessa. The reason — the lack of translated Ukrainian literature. Many of the essays and articles has to translate itself, to the translation of major literary texts is not enough time.

We read the city as a palimpsest of “texts”. Thus we are interested not only texts and films about the city, but as the inhabitants mastered the urban space: murals, graffiti, urban all the “garbage” (advertising, communication). Instead of course my students prepare mapping projects using GIS (geographic information systems). We are adopting the service GoogleMap and GoogleEarth, use it to create a narrative tour of the places where I went, for example, the characters of “the White guard” or were events of the film “Brother”. As these locations were called before the revolution? And in Soviet period? Renamed them now, in the period of de-communization?

Placemarks in the places where the action of the novel — introduce students to hypertext, impose a “polygon” (a historical map of that time) and record a voice tour of a particular historical period or event. One of the projects was dedicated to the Maidan. The students outlined the areas of the center, where there were key events by changing the background of the polygon, showing how varied this map from November 2013 to February 2014. This tour (we call it generation) they put in open access on GoogleEarth, so their parents could be sure that I can pay for the education of their children hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In different countries of the city affect residents equally. Students compared the texts of English literature of the early XX century with the texts of Ukrainian and Russian modernists. And those others tried to convey how the city acted on the individual, suppressing his creative initiative. That is, Slavic modernists in relation to the modern city have experienced the same feelings as their contemporaries from other cultures.

The city has always existed in two modes: the project of the Kingdom of God on earth and project-dystopia. Odessa was founded by Catherine II as South Palmyra — a transit point between multiple civilizations. But at the same time in Odessa the text of the beginning of the century reconstructs the biblical view of the city as a symbol Gomorrah, the fallen city. These two myth — the city as utopia and “the fallen” the city is constantly intertwined in the texts, “Odessa”, “Kiev”, “Moscow” and “Petersburg”.

Kiev — a complex text. This city was the religious center in Kievan Rus, a place of pilgrimage in the times of the Russian Empire. Look at the “New Jerusalem” fallen city is not easy. But take the texts of Bulgakov’s the White guard, and you will find a foretaste of the Apocalypse, the end of time. There is Kiev and the whole country is in agony. It is noteworthy that in this work the City is capitalized, it is a separate character with his psychodynamics.

In this course, I refer not only to texts, but also films. The other day we watched “Man with a movie camera” — a tape of avant-garde Soviet Director Dziga Vertov. This film was shot in five cities, including Kiev. He recreates the life of the city in one day method free Association. The Director takes us to Kiev of the NEP period, when peasants migrated to the city in search of jobs or actively traded with the city. The city is rebuilt as a public space to fit the new ideology of the Soviet man, which after work, hurry home, while in the cultural “collective”. The movie I just captured these new places of the Soviet’s leisure: workers clubs, Barber shops, stadiums, public libraries — for ideological education and the formation of collective consciousness. Citizens and visitors had to feel like a cog in the great machine of socialist labor.

“Man with a movie camera” is interesting because it draws Parallels between the industrial production of coal and steel and “bourgeois” activities, such as manicure, haircut, or cut of the film. Dziga Vertov creates a film about the proletarian city. He is interested in the idea of bringing people together for one common process: in a socialist state any activity, regardless of whether it is heavy industrial work, or sphere of life, leads to the construction of the utopian ideas of communism.

Yuliya Ilchuk: “In placemarks, — the place where the action of the novel — introduce students to hypertext, impose a “polygon” (a historical map of that time) and record a voice tour of a particular historical period or event. One of the projects was dedicated to the Maidan”

The program of my course — not the Constitution and not the Bible. I can change it in its sole discretion, to correct, focusing on the interests of individual students. I am pleased when this approach bears fruit. For example, one of my students last year decided to visit Kiev to see the streets and squares where there is a Revolution of dignity. Her course project was a narrative tour of Euromaidan in GoogleEarth. She built a tour with a bird’s eye, and when she was like in places of tragic events, was amazed at how concentrated and open to attack was a space of Euromaidan. Such impressions cannot survive only by studying the history of the city books and maps.

• See also: When the cannons speak, the muses speak even louder — Olesya Ostrovskaya-Lyuta

I set myself a few goals. I want not only to study with students past Ukrainian cities, but also to motivate them for independent studies, redefining the relationship to Ukrainian culture. Let our country will have more friends.