Serhii Tereshchenko: Theory of Cultural Change in Yevhen Malaniuk’s Poetry and Scholarship

After the Ukrainian National Republic was taken over in 1919, the army officer Yevhen Malaniuk, then 22 years old, moved to Poland. He lived there for twenty years until another world war forced him to move to Czechoslovakia, then Germany, and finally to New York, where he found a job in engineering. Malaniuk, with his ties to academia and many publications, is a little-known public thinker who has already discussed important issues that Ukrainians face today: how to showcase the Ukrainian nation to the world and how cultural politics affects people’s well-being. He presented his ideas about culture in poetry in the books The Stiletto and the Stylus (1925) and The Power (1951). He also developed a cultural theory on how a nation under occupation can move towards a democratic open society in his quasi-anthropological studies, including Essays in the History of Our Culture (1954), On the Problem of Bolshevism (1956), and A Book of Observations (1962).

Serhii Tereshchenko is a visiting assistant professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). He teaches literature and film from Ukraine, Central Europe, and Central Asia. Serhii defended his dissertation at Columbia University, where he studied how science fiction promoted plurality and inclusivity in the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc to dismantle the one-party centralized power through mass media. He presented his research at the Center for Science Fiction Studies at the University of Kansas and the Science Fiction Consortium at the University of South Africa. Dr. Serhii Tereshchenko is now developing the book “Lyrical Games: Gender and Nation in Polish Hip-Hop” (Palgrave McMillan, the US) and translating from Ukrainian an edition of text titled “Cultural Paratroopers: Ukrainian Literary Organizations in the 1840s-1990” (Glagoslav, the Netherlands).