SUMMARY:

This is an invitation to the forum “Conceptualizing National Modernism” inspired by the publication of the new book by Galina Babak and Alexander Dmitriev, The Atlantis of Soviet National Modernism: The Formal Method in Ukraine (1920s–Early 1930s) (Moscow: NLO, 2021). Babak and Dmitriev offer an original theory of national modernism and a version of its history in the pre–World War II Soviet Union, focusing on Ukraine as a paradigmatic case. They aspire to reconsider widespread assumptions regarding the social and political functions of modernism in the first third of the twentieth century and the key aesthetic models of the period. The latter task is achieved through inquiring into the role of nationalism in “modernist philology.” Building on this agenda, AI’s editors have identified a few clusters of problems for discussion by the forum participants.