"My Ithaca Burned Down, Too.": A Letter from a Teenage Joycean and Ukrainian Refugee
Author: Vergara, José
Source: Literary Hub, Jan. 2023
Type of Publication: Translated Article
Description: A translation of a letter written by a Ukrainian teenager who read the Russian Ulysses, along with hundreds of others, as part of a project led by the popular book YouTuber Armen Zakharyan, an astute reader and critic with over 150,000 subscribers. In the lead-up to Bloomsday 2021, Zakharyan produced an episode on his channel about each chapter of Ulysses (in Russian). In late June 2022, he published this letter, which describes Ruslana's experience of moving from reading literature and connecting to Joyce's character to becoming a refugee herself, nearly overnight, on his social media, several months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Vergara has translated it along with a brief intro that Zakharyan provided.