Forums of Dissident Thought: An Enclosed Space?

Visegrad Lecture Series

Forums of Dissident Thought: An Enclosed Space? – Ukrainian-Jewish Intellectual life in Kyiv 1956–1985

by Lucien Turczan-Lipets, Researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany, and PhD Student at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Ukraine in the 1960s and 1970s was still struggling with the overlapping catastrophes of the Second World War, Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor. In the Ukrainian capital, the urban landscape had been destroyed and the population decimated. Key events of the past were struggling to stay suppressed. At the same time, the city had just undergone an intellectual revival of sorts, seeing the development of creative vocabularies newly permitted after the end of Stalinism. This presentation asks how these forces affected the intellectual development of several Kyivan members of what some have called a "Soviet Dissident Movement."

Through attempts to rework the recent and distant past, incorporate ideas of law, religion, computer science, spirituality, linguistics, literature, and national inheritance, the intellectual life of mid-20th century Kyiv played out in meetings to honor those pasts, in apartments filled with Samizdat distributed between friends, in trials, in exile in the west, and in the brutality of Gulags and Psychiatric hospitals. Drawing on documents from the Blinken OSA Archivum, this study further aims to chart such developments, examining how these poets, literary scholars, journalists, mathematicians, and psychologists, helped to bridge multiple intellectual moments and traditions while defining their era on their own terms.

The presentation may followed online on Zoom:

https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91299097034?pwd=GuYK1oqUT8ZZRLA3amgQNQQ1KLmeE9.1

Meeting ID: 912 9909 7034 Passcode: 315067