Oleksandr Pankieiev1; 1 Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Canada
Discussion
Extreme, life-threatening events in the life of any group have been known to provoke a rise in individual and group creativity. This happened when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The war became a very real symbolic factor influencing the physical and emotional connections shared by many Ukrainians living in Ukraine and abroad. The folklore of Russia’s war against Ukraine has been narrated and disseminated mostly using digital tools across different social media platforms. The most ubiquitous form of digital folklore produced over the course of the war has been memes. The rate and number of memes produced since the start of Russia’s escalated invasion of Ukraine are unprecedented. New memes are being created and disseminated daily; some events cause a higher number of memes than others. The proposed paper surveys how the images of heroes in memes, particularly, the motifs of tricksters, have been constructed and what character features have been ascribed to them. As their image evolved throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, different motifs emerged around them. The paper aims to show how those motifs have migrated from one cycle to another, and what types of folklore trickster those memes have constructed in the public imagination.
