| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, March 6, 2014 | 5:00PM - 7:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
This paper explains the continued popularity in Russia of the 1967 Soviet film Wedding in Malinovka by analyzing its reliance on the traditional Russian cultural stereotype of Ukraine embedded in the burlesque style of kotliarevshchyna. The threat that the Ukrainian Revolution historically represented to Soviet Russian identity is normalized in the film, as well as in the 1936 eponymous operetta on which it is based, by framing it as an ethnic musical sitcom with dances. Although the two main yokels of the musical hail from a long line of Ukrainian and Jewish characters of popular theatre, both are also deeply ambivalent: one is a trickster who suddenly embraces the Bolshevik cause, while the other is the funniest and least threatening villain in Soviet film.
Olga Pressitch is completing a doctoral thesis on Ukrainian Canadian prose at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since 2011 she has been Assistant Teaching Professor in Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada). A published poet in Ukrainian and a member of Ukraine’s Writers’ Union, she has published articles in English and Ukrainian on diaspora literatures, Eastern European cinema, and Ukrainian art history.
This event is part of the Ukrainian Film Series at the Petro Jacyk Program for the study of Ukraine.
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