Authors

Tetiana Ostapchuk¹;  ¹ University of the West of England, UK

Discussion

Yuriy Tarnawsky is one of the most prominent poets and writers of the Ukrainian American Diaspora of the 20th - 21st centuries. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West. He is well-known in Ukrainian literature as the poet who made lots of efforts to modernize Ukrainian poetic language but also as a writer who developed his unique style while writing prose in English. One of his latest texts is an autobiographical novel Warm Arctic Nights published in 2019. The paper will analyze different approaches to re-presentation of memory and how they have changed during the span of time. The main protagonist of the novel is a boy who learns about his identity and belonging in idyllic pre-World War II Poland, in war-torn Ukraine, and finally during the flee to the West. The narrative structure of the novel throws light on permanent dialogical character of an émigré identity that has always been in flux. The border poetics approach will be applied to the analysis of cultural and other forms of identity and memory in the novel. It is seen as a border-crossing narrative as it connects individual experience of the border with larger historical narratives. The protagonist is standing for the border crosser, narrative situations are standing for different territories, and the antagonist is standing for the border or for associated border agents.