Ola Hnatiuk

Ola Hnatiuk (born November 11, 1961 in Warsaw ) is a Polish literary scholar, Ukrainist and translator.

biography

Ola Hnatiuk (Ukrainian Олександра Євгенівна Гнатюк) was born as Aleksandra Siwak to Ukrainian-Polish parents in Warsaw. The mother, Halina, b. Lewkowska, came from Lemberg , the father, Jevhen Sivak, an engineer and inventor, came from the Hrubieszów area . Hnatiuk studied Ukrainian and Russian philology at the Warsaw University and was awarded a doctorate in 1992 with his dissertation “The Ukrainian Religious Baroque Song”. phil. PhD. From 1997 to 2006 she worked as a lecturer or professor at the Institute for Slavonic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, interrupted by a research stay from March 2001 to March 2002 at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) at Harvard University . In 2004, Hnatiuk completed his habilitation with the thesis “Farewell to the Empire: Ukrainian Discussions about Identity”. From 2006 to September 2010, Hnatiuk was cultural and science advisor at the Polish embassy in Kiev and, like the Instytut Polski, made a significant contribution to improving Polish-Ukrainian cultural relations. Since then she has been a professor in Kiev at the Kiev Mohyla Academy , where she heads the master's program, at the University of Warsaw and at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

plant

Ola Hnatiuk's work describes a path from literature to politics. After her first major academic work on “The Baroque Ukrainian Religious Song”, the Slavist devoted herself to translations of Ukrainian literary and historical-political works for ten years. Above all, she translated several early works by Jurij Andruchowytsch , as well as the drama "Wozzeck" Jurij Isdryks , as well as, together with the second important Polish Ukrainian Katarzyna Kotyńska, the "History of Ukraine" Natalija Jakowenkos and Mykola Rjabtschuk's collection of essays "From Little Russia to Ukraine". She also worked as the editor of several Polish anthologies of Ukrainian literature. Some of her numerous essays on Ukrainian contemporary literature, which have appeared in magazines such as “Znak”, “Kultura”, “Kresy”, “ Literatura na Świecie ”, “Krytyka” etc., were summarized by the Slavist in a collection of articles and in interviews. Her main work “Courage and Fear”, published simultaneously in Polish and Ukrainian in 2015, finally describes the lives of the Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish intelligentsia in Lviv from 1939 to 1945 using selected illustrated biographies. The descriptions take up traces of the Hnatiuk family history: their Polish, Roman Catholic grandparents and their mother experienced those times of courage and fear, shared in solidarity by the Lviv intelligentsia, under the challenges of two totalitarian regimes. The work, which supplemented several controversial histories of Lviv's urban culture (Chr. Mick, T. Amar, K. Kotyńska) with seven concrete vivid résumés that appeared at the same time, immediately aroused great interest in Poland and the Ukraine and immediately received his The Grand Prix of the 22nd Lviv Book Forum 2015 will be published. In 2020 the English edition will be published.

Awards

• Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2012)
• Polish PEN Club, Nagroda im. Ksawerego i Mieczysława Pruszyńskich (2018)

bibliography

• Українська барокова духовна пісня (The Ukrainian baroque religious song). Warsaw-Kiev 1994.
• (together with Bogumiła Berdychowska), Бунт покоління. Розмови з українськими інтелектуалами (Generational Uprising. Conversations with Ukrainian intellectuals). Kiev, Duch i Litera, 2004.
• Pożegnanie z imperium. Ukraińskie dyskusje o tożsamości, Lublin 2003 = Прощання з імперією. Українські дискусії про ідентичність (Farewell to the Empire: Ukrainian Discussions about Identity). Kiev, Krytyka, 2005.
• Польсько-український діалог: часопис KULTURA та його спадщина. До сторіччя Єжи Ґедройця (The Polish-Ukrainian Dialogue: The KULTURA magazine and its legacy. On the 100th anniversary of Jerzy Giedroyc) Lviv-Kiev 2007 (Universytets'ky dialohy 1).
• Між літературою і політикою. Есеї та інтермедії (Between literature and politics. Essays and objections). Kiev, Duch i Litera, 2012.
• Odwaga i Strach. Wrocław 2015 / Відвага і страх. Kiev, Duch i Litera, 2015 (courage and fear)
• Courage and Fear (translation by Ewa Siwak). Brookline 2020

Articles (selection)

• Nativists versus Westernizers: Problems of Cultural Identity in the Ukrainian Literature of the 1990s, in: Larissa ML Zaleska Onyshkevych / Maria G. Rewakowicz (ed.), Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe. London-New York, Routledge, 2009, 203-218.

literature

NM Hauk, Art. Hnatjuk, O., in: Encyklopedija sučasnoï Ukraïny 5 (2006) 710.