| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, April 19, 2018 | 7:00PM - 9:00PM | External Event, room 100A, Jackman Humanities Institute 170 St. George Street |
In the course of the Wolodymyr Dylynsky Memorial Lecture, Professor Shore will present her new book, the Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.
“This is a civilization that needs metaphysics,” Adam Michnik told Václav Havel in 2003. A decade later, on 21 November 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly reversed the course of his own stated foreign policy and declined to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Around 8 p.m. that day a thirty-two year-old Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Nayem, posted a note on his Facebook page: “Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan”—Kiev’s central square—“by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.” No one then knew that “likes don’t count”—a sentence that would have made no sense before Facebook—would bring about the return to metaphysics to Eastern Europe. While the world watched (or did not watch) the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Kiev during the winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices.
The book will be available for purchase at the event.
Marci Shore teaches European cultural and intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her PhD from Stanford University in 2001. Before joining Yale’s history department, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University‘s Harriman Institute; an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University; and Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Yale. She is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (Crown, 2013), Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale University Press, 2006) and the translator of Michal Glowinski‘s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons (Northwestern University Press, 2005).
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