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

Introduction

Johanna Lindbladh and Anja Tippner: Tracing the Documentary: The Uses and Abuses of Factuality and Fictionality in Soviet Art and Beyond

Witnessing in Art: Theoretical Perspectives

Johanna Lindbladh: Implicated Witnessing: The Ethics of Documenting Testimonies in Belarusian and Ukrainian Witness Art

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

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

Documentary Practices in Theater and Film

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

Jeremy Hicks: Reflections on the Institutions and Sociology of Post-Soviet Independent Russian Documentary Film

Inga P.rkone-Redovi.a: Epics of Held Back: Latvian Film Director Dzintra Geka’s Essays on Genocide

Molly Flynn and Ielizaveta Oliinyk: Ukrainian Documentary Theater in the Context of War

Interview with Natalka Vorozhbyt by Johanna Lindbladh: Ukrainian Witness Theater Before and After the Full-scale Invasion: “Now We Need to Explain Ourselves to the World”

Documentary Practices in Literature

Eneken Laanes: “Looking for a Form”: Testimonial Discourse in Soviet Estonian Documentary Literature

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

Julie Hansen: Cognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory

Il’ia Kukulin: Looking for a New Access to Reality: Russian Documentary Poetry since 2008

Contributors

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 Artwi.ska, 2019), The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetics of Postcatastrophic Narration (edited with Anna Artwi.ska, 2022).