Abstract

SUMMARY:

This is a Russian version of the text originally published in Ukrainian in the Kiev journal Ukraina Moderna. Gerasimov summarizes the rhetorical strategies of Bartov’s opponents (in their critique of his book Erased) and shows their unintentional outcome: the construction of a profoundly colonial image of Ukraine as requiring special standards for the assessment of its past and present. In this logic, Bartov’s approach is anticolonial in that it considers Ukraine fully accountable for its traumatic past, just as any other European country. Gerasimov shares his “insider” knowledge of Bartov’s next book – a “thick description” of the Jewish elimination in Buchach, Bartov’s family town, based on hundreds of interviews and providing “hard” evidence lacking in Erased (for which it was criticized). Gerasimov predicts that this future book can play the role of Ukrainian analogue to the Neighbors by Jan Gross if Ukrainian intellectuals persist in denying and refusing to discuss specific contexts and features of the Galician version of Ukrainian nationalism and the implications of the present-day politics of memory in the region.

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