Professional Affiliation

Professor, Mykola Gogol State University

Expert Bio

Valentyna Kharkhun is Professor, Head of Ukrainian Literature Department, Mykola Gogol State University (Nizhyn, Ukraine); she is Senior researcher at the Department of 20th Century Ukrainian Literature, T. G. Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of two books, five textbooks and more than 100 articles. She is the holder of a Fulbright fellowships (Pennsylvania State University, 2005-2006; Columbia University, 2011-2012), J. Mianovsky and Queen Jadwiga fellowships at Jagellonian University, Poland (2008, 2009), Ivan Vyhovsky fellowship at Warsaw University (2014-2015). She has taught a course entitled Museums of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe at Warsaw University in Fall 2015. Her research interests include the memory about communism in the museums, the projection of “sovietness” phenomenon in modern world, aesthetical paradigm of the Soviet totalitarianism, the socialist realist canon and its reflection in Ukrainian literature, methodologies of literary studies, and Vynnychenko studies.

Wilson Center Project

Museumification of the Soviet Past in Russia and Ukraine: Between Nostalgia and Historical Trauma

Project Summary

The project is devoted to the comparative study of chronology and typology of the Soviet past museumification in Ukraine and Russia. The project has three objects of study: "museums of communism", the national historical museums, temporary exhibitions. The main hypothesis of this research is that Russia and Ukraine have different experience of the communist past and its understanding, interpretation and museumification causes contemporary ideological confrontations. The social importance of the project consists in establishing cooperation between Russian and Ukrainian researchers to achieve mutual understanding of the Soviet past and create new forms of good-neighborly relations.

Major Publications

• Socialist Realist Canon in Ukrainian Literature: Genesis, Evolution, Modification. (in Ukrainian), Nizhyn: Hidromax Ltd. – 2009. – 508 p. (laureate of Year Book’2010 prize in category of Literary Studies).
• Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s novel Notes of the Snub-Nosed Mephistopheles : Generics, semantic sphere and imagology. (in Ukrainian), Nizhyn, 2011. – 200 p.
• Museums of communism in the context of polish museum politics. (in Ukrainian), in: Agora. – Kyiv.: Publishing House "Kyiv Mohyla Academy", 2015. – Vol. 14. Museums and cultural diplomacy / ed. by К. Smagliy, N. Moussienko. – P. 16-32.