narratives

2 articles tagged with narratives were found.

Historical analogies in the Ukrainian media discourse at the time of war Framing stories about national resistance, international support, and crimes of the occupation army

This article provides an overview of the historical parallels used in the Ukrainian media discourse reflecting the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict in the period from February 2022 to February 2025. The research highlights the role of analogy frames in depicting wartime dynamics, internal processes of national consolidation, and the search for international solutions to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. Networks of analogies in media discourse, characteristic of Ukrainian political culture, are considered as a means of conceptualizing major components of the war scenario, in particular strategies of the military campaign, crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, and legal initiatives to hold the aggressor accountable. From a functional perspective, comparative resources in the wartime media are analyzed as a tool that supports basic cognitive and psychological needs of society members, such as confronting the challenges of a traumatic environment and searching for solutions under conditions of hostile activity.

By Lyudmyla Payluk et al September 23, 2025

TCHAIKOVSKY’S MAZEPA IN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR. Rescuing a cultural hero for a sovereign nation

This essay considers the myths surrounding the historical figure of Hetman Mazepa and their artistic expressions. More specifically, it compares and contrasts two recent stage versions of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa opera by theaters in Kharkiv in 2017 and Moscow in 2021, at the time of the Russian military operations on the territory of Ukraine. The desire of Ukrainian directors to return honors to the national hero is opposed by the Russian interpretation of the image of Mazepa as an archetype of a traitor. The essay shows how the Ukrainian version updated the plot and liberated the Mazepa myth from Russian and Soviet imperial distortions, thereby connecting the opera’s events with the contemporary struggle for a sovereign state. Meanwhile, underneath its modernist surface, the Russian version maintained the opera’s age-old metropolitan view of Ukraine as inferior.

Essay by Liubov Kuplevatska April 23, 2024