Authors

Panayiotis Xenophontos¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

There was much Greek-language fiction and non-fiction published in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine in the 1930s. These publications were halted by the Greek Operation of 1937-38 when Soviet forces massacred the Greek-speaking population of the area.

In this paper I answer two questions: what was this literature comprised of? How did writers of Greek-language literature see and present themselves to their reading publics: did they consider themselves Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, or Soviet? To answer these questions I bring together work by three scholars - Stephen Greenblatt, Yurii Lotman, and Rory Finnin - and analyse the idea of self-fashioning in this context.