Literature, Exile, Alterity ― The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets

This pioneering book is the first to present the postwar phenomenon of the New York Group of Ukrainian émigré poets as a case study for exploring cultural and aesthetic ramifications of exile. It focuses on the poets’ diasporic and transnational connections both with their country of origin and their adopted homelands, underscoring the group’s role in the shaping of the cultural and literary image of Ukraine abroad. Displacements, forced or voluntary, engender states of alterity, states of living in-between, living in the interstices of different cultures and different linguistic realities. The poetry of the founding members of the New York Group reflects these states admirably. The poets accepted their exilic condition with no grudges and nurtured the link with their homeland via texts written in the mother tongue. This account of the group’s output and legacy will appeal to all those eager to explore the poetry of East European nations and to those interested in larger cultural contexts for the development of European modernisms.

Born in Poland, Maria G. Rewakowicz is affiliated with the Slavic Department at the University of Washington. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto and has taught at Rutgers, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Washington. She is the author of four books of poetry in Ukrainian, two anthologies of the poetry of the New York Group and a book of essays Persona non grata (Kyiv, 2012). She also co-edited a collection Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe (2009). She is currently working on a monograph on literature and identities in Ukraine since 1991.