Topic
Urban Magic and Cultural Memory: Animating Kyiv’s Landscape in Contemporary Ukrainian Urban Fantasy for Children and Adolescents
Urban fantasy in contemporary Ukrainian literature for children and young adults frequently uses the urban landscape of Kyiv as a narrative field for negotiating cultural memory in the post-Soviet period. By turning elements of the city space into agents within the storyworld, these texts expose the ideological layers embedded in the urban environment. As scholarship on urban fantasy has noted (Ekman), the genre offers productive possibilities for engaging with questions of modernity; in recent Ukrainian texts for younger readers, this potential is mobilized to address issues of cultural identity, belonging, and historical memory through adventure-driven plots and fantastic characters.
The proposed presentation examines how specific markers of the urban landscape become narrative instruments for representing the decolonial renegotiation of Kyiv’s cultural memory in the post-Soviet period, including the recovery of suppressed multicultural histories of the city. Three recurrent narrative strategies will be discussed. First, statues and monuments appear as sentient characters with aims and missions, exposing the ideological intentions behind the politics of installing these markers of cultural memory in the urban landscape. Second, natural features of the city space act as conscious agents, enabling commentary on the relationship between nature and culture, particularly in the context of imperial abuse of conquered territories. Finally, different areas of the city are associated with distinct forms of magic, creating a spatialized model of cultural identity that enters into dialogue both with the opposition between “urban memory” and “suburban oblivion” in memory studies and with the literary tendency to represent historic city centers as “numinous” spaces in contrast to “mundane” peripheries.
These issues will be considered through a corpus of works of Ukrainian speculative fiction for children and adolescents by Ivan Andrusiak, Iryna Tsilyk, Kateryna Korniienko, Olena Zakharchenko, Miia Marchenko, and Kateryna Pekur.
Daria Semenova (University of Warsaw)
Daria Semenova obtained her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her previous degrees include a BA and MA from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. In 2024-2026, she worked on a project dedicated to the construction of collective memory and space in Ukrainian children's and young adult literature since 1991, as a postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Since 2026, she is an assistant professor (adjunkt) at the Institute of Ukrainian studies of the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests include children's and YA literature, popular culture, and genre fiction in a comparative context of 20th and 21st-century Eastern Europe. She published in Filoteknos, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature on various aspects of Ukrainian children’s literature.