Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

SLA358H1S, Breaking Away from Empire:
Ukrainian Fiction Since Independence
Spring 2025

Assignment 1 is due at the beginning of class February 12, 2025.

You must write a brief essay of about 750 words, less than three pages. Essays should be formatted with 1 inch margins, double spacing, and 12 point type.
You don't need an extra page for your name and the title or another extra page for references to works cited (If you cite any works, you need to indicate a reference but if you cite only the assigned text, just give a page number). Write clearly. Choose the right words, shape your ideas into meaningful sentences, and structure your argument into cohesive paragraphs. Make sure you say EXACTLY what you mean, not something almost similar to what you thought you might want to say. Be brief and get to your point directly. You don't need an introduction, you don't need to tell the reader the plot of the work, or the biography of the author, or the history of Ukraine or Ukrainian literature up to this point. Get to your argument immediately. Demonstrate that you have given some consideration to the ideas you are expressing and that you understand how these ideas relate to other ways of looking at the topic. Make an argument that helps explain your reading of the work.

This is the topic:

In Oles Ulianenko's Stalinka, the protagonist twice escapes from prison-like circumstances, first from a psychiatric asylum, then later from a work camp. How are these two episodes similar or different? What is their significance? How do they reflect the ideas the author is presenting in the work? How are they related to the story line that centers on Horik Piskariov?
This is a difficult text. There are many possible interpretations of it. Do not feel that your essay must necessarily come to a unique and all-encompassing explanation of the novel. But try to make as much sense of it as you can.