You are cordially invited to the Faculty’s Literature Seminar, which will be held in English, and will take place on Tuesday, 23April, at 5 pm in Kazimieras Būga Auditorium.
This time our speaker will be the post-doctoral research fellow at the Faculty of History at Vilnius University Dr Sergii Gurbych. The topic of his presentation: Cultural Identity of Authors and Characters in Migrant Literature.
The abstract of the presentation
What happens when a migrant author shares the experiences of a migrant character with a reader from another culture? Inevitably, some concepts in the story cannot be directly translated into another language without losing context. Should the context be explained in detail? Should the author seek a concept as close as possible in the reader’s culture? Or, on the contrary, should the reader be left to interpret everything independently to achieve a detachment effect? Each writer resolves these questions themselves. In his presentation, Sergii Gurbych, author of Mother Tongue, Other Tongue: Soviet-born Jewish Writers in Their New Language Environment, discusses how these issues were addressed in the novels by Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjaznowa, and Alina Bronski, three contemporary authors who immigrated to Germany from Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Russia.
Biographical note
Dr. Sergii Gurbych is currently engaged in postdoctoral research at the Faculty of History, Vilnius University. He earned his PhD from the Jewish Studies Department at Heidelberg University, focusing on modern Israeli literature. His latest book, Mother Tongue, Other Tongue: Soviet-born Jewish Writers in Their New Language Environment, explores cultural and national identity through the novels of migrant authors who adopted the language of their new countries. Dr. Gurbych’s current research intersects Archival studies, Identity studies, and Digital Humanities, particularly examining the personal identity of Lithuanian Jewish community members during the interwar period
