Art of Witnessing

Anja Tippner is a Full Professor of Slavic Literatures at Hamburg University. She works on concepts of documentation and life-writing as well as representations of the Holocaust and extreme experiences in Russian, Polish, and Czech literature. Her current research focuses on documentary and collaborative (life-)writing. Johanna Lindbladh is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Lund University. She studies memory processes in literature, film and theatre dealing with (traumatic) experiences during and after the Soviet era. Her current research focuses on conceptualizations of testimony in art as well as in court, psychotherapy and everyday conversation.

• Prologue: Witnessing in Art. Ukrainian Voices from the WarOlexii KuchanskyiIntroduction: Performing the Documentary: The Uses and Abuses of Factuality and Art Johanna Lindbladh and Anja TippnerPART I. Witnessing in Art. Theoretical PerspectivesA Crowd in Every Face: The Documentary Image in Concentrationary ArtLibby SaxtonThe Methods of Second-Hand Testimonies Exemplified by Svetlana Aleksievich’s Artistic and Dialogic PracticesJohanna LindbladhDocumenting as Teamwork: Problems of Collaboration in Documentary Art in Belarus and RussiaAnja TippnerPART II. Documentary Art on Screen and StageUkrainian Documentary Theatre in the Context of WarMolly Flynn/ Ielizaveta OliinykReading the Soviet Time Speeches: Contemporary Russian Theatre’s ReflexionElena GordienkoThe Sociology of Contemporary Russian Documentary FilmJeremy HicksMelodrama, Truth Telling and the Memory of War in the Soviet Cinema of the ThawVioleta DavoliūtėThe Ethnography of Damaged Life: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema between Document and DreamOlha BriukhovetskaPART III. Documentary practices in literatureTowards a Testimonial Mode: Documentary Literature and the Memory of WWII in Ülo Tuulik’s In the Way of the War (1974)Eneken LaanesLudmila Ulitskaya’s ‘Novel in Documents’, Daniel Stein, InterpreterFiona BjörlingCognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanova’s