Authors

Discussion

While ‘the Ukrainian DP story’ was predominantly premised on the analysis of the post-WWII refugee communities in their national ‘solitudes’ with no explicit idea of exchange or entanglement, the present paper foregrounds their alternative contact-driven vision, focusing on interaction and encounter through literature and artistic translation. Insofar as no DP camp was ever a purely monolingual site, and languages did not simply coexist but actively intersected within networks of human relations, I argue that it is essential to reveal larger webs of connectivity and re-position the DP camp as a dynamic cultural contact zone. And it was literature that emerged as a space for negotiating diverse DP identities. Through an examination of Ukrainian DP writings and translational practices, this conference paper will highlight how these communities engaged with cultural influences, reshaping the trajectory of Ukrainian literature by introducing new literary trends, narratives and readerships. I posit that by injecting novel ideas and perspectives into Ukrainian cultural discourse, DP intellectuals carved an alternative path of Ukrainian literary development – avant-garde, experimental, resistant to and deprived of Soviet ideological imprint. Based on my analysis of over 230 periodicals and 818 books published for/by Ukrainian DPs, I will first - and in a rather cursory manner - showcase the evidence of cultural encounters present in the fiction and essays of Ukrainian-language writers within the DP setting (Ulas Samchuk, George Sheveliov, Ihor Kostetzky and others). Subsequently, I will explore the unique extensions of Ukrainian literature inspired by translation and translanguaging in the DP context.