Rereading the City

A presentation of the book "Lwów: o odczytywaniu miasta na nowo" ("Lviv: Rereading the City," Krakow, 2015) took place as part of the Lviv Book Forum.

The book was presented by Yurko Prokhasko, philologist, essayist, and translator, and author Katarzyna Kotynska, literary critic, scholar at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and translator of Ukrainian literature.

The book discusses the literary image of Lviv in the context of discussions on local and national identity. Understanding the dependencies and relationships of Polish and Ukrainian discourses helps us to better understand the effect of memory - individual and collective, and trace the typological convergence of selected Lviv themes and motives in literature, written in different languages.

One of the main features of "Lviv literature" is the belief in a multicultural city, which Poles and Ukrainians invariably referred to as the most famous characteristic of Lviv. The author tries to show what elements are used to construct an idyllic picture of Lviv - and what in fact stands behind them. For the Leopolis multiplex myth often serves only as a convenient veil that allows one to ignore the real historical problems, discussions about identity, and attempts to mark urban space as ones culture against another culture.

The event was organized in collaboration with the International Cultural Centre (Krakow).