Intellectual History of the XX Century: Yuri Mezhenko's Archive as a Personal Project and Historical Projection
A general aim of this project is to contribute to the complicated intellectual history of Eastern Europe, analyzing personal experience and collective imagination of the revolution(s) and war(s), models of individual creativity and the process of institution building, the invention of a modern cultural tradition and the work of memory in Ukrainian culture during the 20th century.
The proposed project is focused on the end of 1910s through the beginning of 1920s as one of the most interesting, inspiring and complicated periods in the history of Ukrainian culture, with attention to the subsequent consequences during the 20th century (totalitarian 1930s, the war and post-war period of 1940s, the Thaw of 1950-60s). The research is based on the recently opened archive (more than 4,000 items) of the prominent Ukrainian intellectual Yuri Mezhenko (1892-1969), who was a famous literary critic, a founder of the National Library and Ukrainian Book Chamber, and initiator of several literary and scientific journals of 1920s. His diaries and memoirs testify to the difficult challenges of national, professional and personal self-determination in the difficult circumstances of the 20th century.
The special focus of this project is the personal archive as a research resource and as a cultural phenomenon, as an example of ego-history and an alternative historical narration, as a historical document and a form of critical reflection on the cultural and historical reality.
Olena Haleta is a professor at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Studies, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, and at the Department of Cultural Studies, Ukrainian Catholic University. Director of the Center for the Humanities (Lviv, 2004-2010), guest professor at University of Zagreb, Jagiellonian University, and Humboldt University of Berlin, visiting research fellow at Warsaw University, Toronto University, Harvard University, Vienna University, Monash University, Columbia University, Humboldt University of Berlin, and at the Kennan Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.