Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute and the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE) for a discussion with writers Vasyl Makhno and Andrey Kurkov. Vasyl Makhno’s novel Vichnyi Kalendar (The Eternal Calendar, 2019) received the 2020 “Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize™”, which is sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter with the support of the NGO Publishers Forum (Lviv, Ukraine). Makhno and fellow writer Andrey Kurkov…

In Vasily Grossman’s case, the boundary between literature and reality is unusually thin.  The figure of Viktor Shtrum, the nuclear physicist hero of Grossman’s two Stalingrad novels, is based on that of Lev Shtrum, a Jewish-Ukrainian nuclear physicist executed during the Purges.  The fictional Viktor Shtrum in turn prefigures the real Andrey Sakharov, an equally creative and free-thinking nuclear physicist. …