© Hartwig Klappert

Jurko Prochasko  [ Ukraine ]

Jurko Prochasko was born in 1970 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He studied German literature in Lviv from 1987 to 1992 and has conducted research on visits to Austria and Germany. Since 1993, Prochasko has worked as a literary scholar at the Institute of Literature at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Lviv, where he focuses on the reception of Galicia in Polish literature and literary studies, among other topics. At the end of the 1990s, he completed his training as a psychoanalyst in Altaussee, Austria. Prochasko was actively involved in the Orange Revolution (2004) and the Kiev Maidan. In his work as a literary scholar, author, and translator, he is considered one of the most important cultural mediators between Ukraine and Germany, and advocates on behalf of Ukraine’s connection to the European Community. »One can’t imagine a better cultural ambassador for Ukraine. He is a stranger to even the softest of nationalistic tones« (Martin Pollack). In 2014, in the context of the »Bewegliche Territorien« (tr. Movable Territories) event series, presented in collaboration with the German Academy for Language and Literature and the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation, Prochasko, together with Yurii Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, and Tetiana Maliarchuk, spoke about the current situation and perspectives in Ukraine after the Euromaidan.

In 1999, Prochasko founded the Ukrainian Association of Translators. In 2008, he was awarded the Friedrich Gundolf Prize by the German Academy for Language and Literature, as well as the Österreichischer Staatspreis für literarische Übersetzung (tr. Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation). In 2007, he curated the Lviv exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. In 2010, he was inducted as a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts. In 2011/2012, he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and in 2014/2015, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Prochasko has translated works by Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Ernst Jünger, Catalin Dorian Florescu, Katja Petrowskaja, and Michael Ende, as well as works by Polish writers, into Ukrainian. He is a member of the Ukrainian PEN Center and writes for the liberal democratic online magazine »Ji«, which appears in German, Polish, and Ukrainian, and which was a dissident magazine from 1989 to 1991 that became independent with the independence of Ukraine. Prochasko teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute, which he co-founded, at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, where he also lives.

 

Bibliography

 

In other languages:

 

Galizien-Bukowina-Express

Eine Geschichte der Eisenbahn am Rande Europas

[Mit Magdałena Blaszczuk u. Taras Prochasko]

Turia + Kant

Wien, 2007

[Ü: Jurko Prochasko u. Maria Weissenböck]

Mythos Czernowitz

Eine Stadt im Spiegel ihrer Nationalitäten

Deutsches Kulturforum Östliches Europa

Potsdam, 2008