A war frontier in Lithuania was engendered by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March of 2014 and the beginning of the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. This essay explores how the new war frontier emerged in Lithuania, becoming an integral part of the public sphere and civic life. I argue that the war frontier is a social institution of sovereign uncertainty, which engenders divisive politics of historical justice, protection of the majority’s rights, and dangers to liberalism. The geopolitical insecurity and sovereign uncertainty that define this Baltic frontier are essential to understand how Lithuania can be a strong ally of NATO and the EU, a proponent of democratic politics and liberalism, a claimant to regional security expertise to lead western countries, and at the same time undermine liberal ideals of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism.

In Serhiy Zhadan's recent novel Internat (2017), the protagonist epitomizes the quintessential east Ukrainian under scrutiny today, while his journey depicts working through trauma. His transformation portrays the ultimate shedding of melancholy when, in response to violence, the past is replaced by the present. I elicit some of the key symbols and features of this process, which I call triggered mourning, and attend to the role of real-time menace in initiating it. This article draws connections not only between the story's plot arc and the ongoing war, but also between Ukraine's past and present from the perspective of trauma theory. The four sections of the article (on the transformation, the void, the defect, and the antidote) propose and expand upon the notion that Internat is a synchronous war novel—a narrative that emerges parallel to, and closely entwined with, unfolding warfare—and examine its significance for scholarship on Ukraine, for Slavic studies, and beyond. Trauma studies in the context of literature are central to this analysis, with postcolonial studies providing some helpful illustrative parallels.

This article explores the ideological implications of the Gothic mode in Panteleimon Kulish's first novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). I show that the multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel—from Walter Scottian ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains, uncanny ethnic Others, and supernatural phantoms—produce an intricate play of temporalities, identities, and allegiances that ultimately create a highly ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dark period of chaos overcome by the country's incorporation into the Russian empire. Rather than dismissing Kulish's engagement with the Gothic as a tribute to the fashionable western trend, I argue that this mode serves as a conduit to some of the work's most pressing ideological and historical concerns and ultimately yields a more nuanced insight into the author's complex position as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire.