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From the Editorial Team

Serhiy Bilenky, Tania Plawuszczak-Stech and Marko Robert Stech

Beyond Anthropocentrism in Ukrainian Studies: Proposals from the Environmental Humanities—Introduction

Tanya Richardson and Darya Tsymbalyuk

Sunflowers in the Ruins: A Multimodal Analysis of the Environmental Aspects of Ukrainian War Songs from February to May 2022

Anastassiya Andrianova
This paper looks at the depiction of nature and the environment in contemporary Ukrainian anti-war music videos, inspecting the videos through an ecocritical and ecomusicological lens—and thus adding an environmental dimension to the existing scholarship on Ukrainian music. My goal is to call attention to the long-term impacts of the Russo-Ukrainian war on the non-human by exploring the ways in which landscapes and other features of nature are communicated multimodally. I accomplish this by examining a digital archive of music videos by Ukrainian artists that were uploaded to YouTube between February and May 2022. The music-video archive is placed in the context of Ukrainian environmental history, ecological awareness, and climate denialism before and after Ukraine’s 1991 independence. I apply a method of multimodal discourse analysis to this digital archive of compositions, which vary in genre (rap; rock; ethno-pop) and viewer impact (from thousands to millions of YouTube views). Most of them feature war footage that foregrounds industrial, residential, and natural devastation, while their lyrics and/or visuals include natural elements, such as spring (the literal and metaphoric countermeasure to the February 2022 invasion); the sun or its absence; sunflowers; and non-human animals. Some of the videos include war footage contrasted with aerial sequences of Ukraine’s pre-war cultural and natural diversities. Two videos imaginatively erase war devastation using a reverse-action technique. Without diminishing the pressing need for national resurgence and the emotional and affective function of music in providing hope for an imminent victory, I propose a more long-term, ecological approach: to resist the desire to return to an idealized pre-war past, and instead to discover new modes of living that take into account the precarity of postwar ecologies.

A Systematic Robbery: Transforming the Memory, Culture, and Landscape of the Ukrainian Steppe

Kateryna Iakovlenko
The Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimea and the occupation of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, has brought the issues of memory and identity to the forefront of public discussion. In public discourse, the history of eastern Ukraine is primarily associated with the Soviet-era industrialization of the Donbas and the formation of the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that accompanied it. However, the history of this region is considerably richer and extends to much earlier times. This article explores the ways in which violence has shaped eastern Ukraine’s social and cultural landscapes; its focus is on the kurhans (kurgans [“burial mounds”])—graves that were erected as early as five millennia ago and have existed in the landscape of the region ever since. Investigating the history of these graves involves engaging with centuries of commemorative traditions, colonialisms, and military violence. I look specifically at Soviet-propaganda approaches toward the incorporation and appropriation of burial-mound symbolism for the molding of local identity and memory politics. By analyzing the kurhans as elements of landscape, as memorials, and as poetic metaphors, I attempt to shed light on the process by which the land absorbs traumatic memories and becomes a monument to human tragedy, war, resettlement, and colonialism.

Becoming Tuteishyi: Ukraine in the New Global Climatic Regime

Adrian Ivakhiv
This essay draws on earlier research concerning Ukraine’s northwestern borderlands to articulate a conception of the tuteishyi (one who is “from here”) that resonates with the recent experience of Ukrainians who have been defending their homeland—a domain of blue and yellow; of sunflowers and grain fields; and with a history that is very different from that of its imperial-minded neighbour Russia—from invaders who seek to conquer and suppress its distinct Ukrainianness. The tuteishyi has always been place-based and rooted in the ecological realities of landscape and homeland, even if that individual’s identity has historically resisted definitions of national identity. This makes tuteishist' a fluid and ambiguous concept that may be useful in reconsidering identity with respect to a country that is often described as divided between pro-western Ukrainophone “nationalists” and eastern-leaning Russophones. The present article discusses this formulation of the tuteishyi in relation to philosophies of becoming, post-colonial theories of identity, and politico-ecological analyses of Ukraine and of the emerging “global climatic regime.”

Gathering Ecofeminist Stories with Kateryna Hrushevs'ka

Iryna Zamuruieva
In this essay, I offer a critical ecofeminist reading of Ukrainian ethnographer and sociologist Kateryna Hrushevs'ka (1900–43). I argue that her work, understood in the wider context of feminist and ecological struggles, generates valuable insights on the intersections of environmental and gender oppressions in Ukraine. I adapt the conceptual lens of gathering to draw attention to the political commitments that become possible once the (eco)feminist political agenda is carefully gathered and analyzed in relation to its consequences for the environmental humanities field.

The Evolution of Ukrainian Historical Studies: The North American Case / Volodymyr V. Kravchenko. Ukrainian Historical Writing in North America during the Cold War: The Struggle for Recognition. Lexington Books, 2023. X + 302 pp., bibliography, index, $189.95, cloth

Frank E. Sysyn

Bohdan Klid, editor. Empire, Colonialism, and Famine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Hiroaki Kuromiya

Martin C. Dean. Investigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death

John-Paul Himka