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Drawing on the discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and globalization, Vitaly Chernetsky maps out the new cultural developments in literature, architecture, painting, film, and performance art emerging in Russia and Ukraine, the two largest successor states to the Soviet Union, situating these phenomena in a greater global context.

Ivan Kozlenko's novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine's biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country's media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial version of the city's popular myth, widely disseminated both by mass media and by scholarly discourse. A novel whose plot centres on two pansexual love triangles, one taking place in the 1920s, the other in the early 2000s, Tangier employs strategies of intertextual engagement and multidirectional memory to construct an alternative affirming narrative. It focuses on the episodes in Odesa's history during Ukraine's wars of independence in 1918–20 and the time it served as Ukraine's capital of filmmaking in the 1920s and seeks to reinsert this queer-positive narrative into the national literary canon. This article analyzes the project of utopian transgression the novel seeks to enact and situates it both in the domestic socio-cultural field and in the broader contexts of global countercultural practices. It also examines the challenges faced by post-communist societies struggling with the new conservative turn in national cultural politics.

Book review of Olha Rudakevych, translator. A Novel about a Good Person. By Emma Andiievska, edited and with an introduction by Marko Robert Stech, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies P, 2018. xiv, 224 pp. $29.95, paper.

Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification—historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article considers two representative examples of texts of this kind, which the author proposes to call heterotopic: Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein. It offers an attempt at defining this paradigm through a reading of these two novels, drawing upon Michel Foucault's usage of the term "heterotopia" for the purpose of designating the "other" cultural spaces of our civilization, as well as on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "minor literature" and the work of several other theorists. The texts of the kind exemplified by these two novels are considered as an instance of successful partaking in the project of cognitive mapping, which has been proposed by Fredric Jameson and others as the positive political edge of postmodern culture.