Memorial landscape of Ukrainian culture: the past and the present

Abstract

The current state of the memorial landscape of Ukrainian culture is conceptualized in the article as a complex, multi-layered, diverse and modern formation, weakly associated with ancient tradition. Despite superficial discontinuity of functioning of the memorial space of Ukrainian culture in the 19th — early 21st centuries, its consolidation and transition from mechanical combination of different chronological layers to structured system take place. The main component of the cultural memory of Ukraine is a complex of places of memory, which includes memorials in honour of socio-political and cultural figures and numerous monuments dedicated to the Cossacks. They refer to the state independence of Ukraine and liberty of Ukrainian people from the early Modern Period. However, until recently the most common Soviet segment is shifted to the periphery of the Ukrainian memorial space.
The acceleration of positive transformation of this space can be connected simultaneously with the implementation of still dominant model of memory of civic, humanistic contents and finding more modern forms of its representation. The functioning of the memorial landscape in modern Ukrainian culture will face the problems of specificity of Ukrainian frontier and insufficient unification of the society around its own memorial «core». The above threats can be neutralized by the mass official public memorial policy. The number of its examples has been constantly growing since the early 2000’s.