Tanya Pyankova “The Age of Red Ants”
One of the biggest tragedies of the past century, the mass starvation of Ukrainian people in 1932-1933 committed by the leadership of Soviet Union was recognized as genocide of the Ukrainian nation by many countries, including Germany only recently. The great hunger of the 1930s, following forceful collectivization policies implemented by the USSR leadership, took away millions of lives of Ukrainians in the Ukrainian SSR and abroad, in the regions historically populated by Ukrainians: the Kuban, the North Caucasus, Lower Volga, and Kazakhstan. How is Holodomor remembered among contemporary Ukrainians and in the world? How is it perceived at the times of Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine?
Ukrainian writer and poet Tanya Pyankova, who was born in the Ukrainian region of Ivano-Frankivsk, has written a book on Holodomor called „Вік червоних мурах“ (The Age of the Red Ants), for which she combined and assembled in an imagined place what she found in archive documents from that time. As she writes in the epilogue, her novel is about "the horrible, unjustifiable terror that the occupying state of Russia began against Ukraine in 1908 and is continuing to this day".
The reading and discussion with Tanya Pyankova is jointly organised by Citizen+ Platform for Political Education and the German Association for Eastern European Studies (Junge DGO).
The event will be moderated by Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague).
Please register via: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfoFFg1LYbx37KFuV8lv1XOA8YKg7c8OzZSX5GO25sGktDqJA/viewform