On January 25, 2024, Nadiia Pastukh presents the results of her research, “It Is Impossible to Put into Words:” Searching for Language in Stories About Personal Experiences of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, at the next online seminar in the Ukrainian Oral History Association’s “Field. Risks. War” series.
One way to understand how people interpret their experiences and incorporate them into their identity is by examining how they represent them verbally—through themes and ideas, past events, available intertextual resources, and, ultimately, the words and modes of expression they use. Nadiia Pastukh focuses on this search for common or similar narrative techniques in personal war experiences. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she has been documenting oral historical testimonies of Ukrainians both in Ukraine and abroad.
During this seminar, Nadiia discusses one stage of her research—an in-depth field study of the experiences of Ukrainian refugees from the war who found refuge in the German city of Bielefeld. In the second part, she presents initial findings on how these refugees try to construct their narratives of the unknown and difficult-to-explain experience of war.
Nadiia PASTUKH is a Candidate of Philological Sciences. Her research interests include Ukrainian traditional culture, particularly the folklore of the Ukrainian borderlands, the figurative system of Ukrainian folklore, folk narrative traditions, and the recording and analysis of oral narratives about traumatic and heroic events of the 20th and 21st centuries. This includes testimonies about crimes against the Ukrainian nation, resistance in the 1940s-1960s, and the ongoing experiences of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The recording of the seminar can be viewed here.