Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L'viv: Narratives, Identity, and Power [Hardcover]

Intelligentsia assumes the right to speak in the name of the entire nation and to extrapolate its own tastes, values and choices to it. Therefore, intelligentsias voices have been in many ways decisive in the discussions about Ukrainian national identity, which gained momentum in the post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The historical and cultural cityscape of Lviv is an especially apt site for investigation of the nexus intelligentsia-nation not only in the Ukrainian, but in the East-Central European context. This borderline city, while not being a remarkable industrial, administrative or political centre, has acquired the reputation of a site of unique cultural production and a principal center of the Ukrainian nationalist movement throughout the twentieth century. Here the popular conceptions of intelligentsia have been elaborated at the intersection of various cultural, historical and political traditions. This study addresses Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia and intellectuals in Lviv both as a discursive phenomenon and as the social category of cultural producers who in the new circumstances both articulate the nation and are articulated by it.Eleonora Narvselius holds her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from Link?ping University (Sweden) and degree in ethnology from Kyiv University (Ukraine). She launched her scholarly career at the Ethnology Institute in Lviv, a research institution at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She has conducted her fieldwork in different Lviv milieus in the course of more than 10 years. Presently she is affiliated with the Centre for European Studies at Lund University (Sweden).

Eleonora Narvseliuss book tackles one of the most elusive social groups in a rapidly transforming social and physical landscape of a very unusual post-Soviet city. ... This book proves that, despite the economic cataclysms of the post-Soviet period and the intelligentsias significantly weakened social status, the group remains an important player in tlÓu