Authors

Discussion

The Ukrainian Pan-Futurists of the 1920s saw themselves as direct heirs of the Italian Futurists. In so doing, the artists and writers belonging to this group occupied an imaginary space between the Russian East and the European West. By comparing the self-perception of the radical Ukrainian art writers, such as Mikhail’ Semenko or Mykola Chvyliovyi, and its position in contemporary academic curricula with its Russian counterpart, this paper will analyse the place of the Ukrainian Modernism on the global map of the international avant-garde movement. These issues are presented in the anthology “Between the City and the Steppe. Texts of Ukrainian modernism" (ed. by Marina Dmitrieva: Berlin 2010). After Russia's aggression against Ukraine, discussions of the 1920s about the autonomy of Ukrainian artistic culture acquired a new relevance. Artistic issues take on a new dimension in a political context.

Using the ‘horizontal’ concept of “critical art geography” (Piotr Piotrowski), as opposite to the post-colonial approach, the presentation will question the discourse of centre and periphery in the study of the avant-garde in Eastern Europe.