Professor Yakiv Bystrov

Am Planetarium 7 | 07743 Jena
Phone: +49 (0) 3641 9 44070
Mail: yakiv[dot]bystrov[at]pnu[dot]edu[dot]ua

Yakiv Bystrov is Doctor of Philology, Professor of English at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, where he currently serves as Chair of the Department of English Philology. He is the author of two monographs Understanding Fiction: Language and Style in Literary Texts (2014) and English Biographical Narrative in the Scope of Cognitive Linguistics and Synergetics (2016), as well as the co-editor of the monograph Developing Intercultural Competence through English: Focus on Ukrainian and Polish Cultures (Krakow-Ivano-Frankivsk 2011). He has received a Paul Celan Fellowship from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) (Vienna 2019). His project addressed the translation of Kulyk Keefer’s Honey and Ashes in which the writer reconciled her memories with crucial events in the history of Ukraine against the backdrop of the formation of Ukrainian statehood after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He has also published extensively in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals.

Research project at the Kolleg

Ukraine and Ukrainians in the literary legacy of Holocaust survivors

The repression of Holocaust memory in post-Soviet Ukraine and the protracted lack of access to regional archives caused the demand of studying the Holocaust literature which is underrepresented in Ukraine. The project examines literary representations of the Holocaust, the issues of traumatic experience and self-identification of Holocaust survivors which find their aftermath in WWII narratives of the Holocaust in Ukraine. The current research aims to contribute to Holocaust survivors’ writing and to the narrative strategies the Holocaust writers employ in portraying Ukraine and Ukrainians during World War II. The use of the biographical approach and comparative method tend to differentiate between the fictional and the factual in their (semi)autobiographical writing. The literary legacy of the writers, who survived the Holocaust in eastern Galicia, is a poignant and significant aspect of Holocaust literature. Ida Fink, Alicia Appleman-Jurman, Aharon Appelfeld and others have contributed to this body of work, each offering unique perspectives and narratives. Their experiences and connections to different regions of present-day Ukraine namely Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Chernivtsi have influenced immensely their literary writing and determined their literary success. These authors belonged to the first generation of Holocaust survivors, whose works were written from memory, and the mass genocide of Jewish people on Ukrainian territories during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. Through their literary contributions the writers bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust and ensure that the stories of those who suffered and survived are preserved for future generations. Their works offer the readers insights into the human condition, resilience, and the enduring impact of the trauma of the Holocaust.

Main areas of research

• Representations of the Holocaust in literature
• (Auto)biographical narrative
• Cognitive linguistics
• Intermedial and multimodal storytelling
• Translation studies