Explaining Ukraine Ukrainian culture: how to reassemble a broken picture - with Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta
Nov 27, 2025
In this enlightening discussion, Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, a leading Ukrainian public intellectual and director of the Mystetskyi Arsenal, delves into the fascinating complexity of Ukrainian cultural heritage. She reveals how generational dispossession has left a fragile cultural landscape and highlights the impact of recent conflicts on cultural wealth. Olesia shares insights on reconstructing lost movements like Boychukism and the revival of suppressed intellectual traditions, connecting cultural recovery to resilience against erasure.
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Generational Shift In Material Inheritance
- Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta observes her generation briefly inherited material goods after Soviet dispossession, marking a historic shift.
- The 2022 war reversed that gain as large-scale destruction again deprives Ukrainians of inheritable material heritage.
Restoring Culture From Fragments
- Cultural heritage in Ukraine is often reconstructed from fragments like crumbled murals or sketches.
- Curators assemble these bits to restore a larger cultural picture, accepting unavoidable gaps.
Boichukism Rebuilt From Scattered Remains
- Olesia describes Boichukism: a neo-Byzantine Ukrainian art movement whose members were executed and artworks destroyed in the 1930s.
- Only sketches, photos and few remains survived, forcing later curators to reconstruct the movement from fragments.