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The Art of Witnessing: Documentary Art, Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltics book cover

1st Edition

The Art of Witnessing Documentary Art, Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltics

Edited By Johanna Lindbladh, Anja Tippner Copyright 2026
294 Pages
by Central European University Press

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reinforced the dynamics of decolonization that had already gained traction after the pollical transformations post-1991. Especially, Ukrainian artists have been creating works that address these traumatizing as well as transformative experiences of the war by keeping records and analyzing the ongoing events at the same time. All over the region,... Read more

Introduction

1. Tracing the Documentary: The Uses and Abuses of Factuality and Fictionality in Soviet Art and Beyond

Johanna Lindbladh and Anja Tippner

Witnessing in Art: Theoretical Perspectives

2. Implicated Witnessing: The Ethics of Documenting Testimonies in Belarusian and Ukrainian Witness Art

Johanna Lindbladh

3. Documenting as Teamwork: Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin’s Book on the Leningrad siege as a Case Study of Collaborative and Collective Writing

Anja Tippner

4.“No Other Certainty in History”: Sergei Loznitsa Constructing, Reconstructing, and Deconstructing the Historical Film Image

Irina Sandomirskaia

Documentary Practices in Theater and Film

5. The Ethnographic Moment of Lithuanian Poetic Documentary: Last Summer of a Homestead (1971) by Robertas Verba

Violeta Davoliūtė

6. Reflections on the Institutions and Sociology of Post-Soviet Independent Russian Documentary Film

Jeremy Hicks

7. Epics of Held Back: Latvian Film Director Dzintra Geka’s Essays on Genocide

Inga Pērkone

8. Ukrainian Documentary Theater in the Context of War

Ielizaveta Oliinyk and Molly Flynn

9. Ukrainian Witness Theater Before and After the Full-scale Invasion: “Now We Need to Explain Ourselves to the World”

Interview with Natalka Vorozhbyt by Johanna Lindbladh

Documentary Practices in Literature

10.“Looking for a Form”: Testimonial Discourse in Soviet Estonian Documentary Literature

Eneken Laanes

11. The Truth of Literature or Mundane Reality? Ludmila Ulitskaia’s “Novel in Documents,” Daniel Stein, Interpreter

Fiona Björling

12. Cognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory

Julie Hansen

13. Looking for a New Access to Reality: Russian Documentary Poetry since 2008

Ilya Kukulin

Index

Biography

Johanna Lindbladh is Associate professor of Slavic Languages at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. Among her publications are “Transferring Ukrainian Experiences of War Across Boarders: The Case of Natalka Vorozhbyt’s drama Bad Roads (2025); “Representations of the Chernobyl Catastrophe in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema” (2019); The Poetics of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narration (edited, 2008).

Anja Tippner is professor of Slavic literature at Hamburg University. Her most recent publications are Narratives of Confinement, Annihilation, and Survival: Camp literature in a Comparative Perspective (edited with Anna Artw□ińska, 2019), The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetics of Postcatastrophic Narration (edited with Anna Artw□ińska, 2022).

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