Alesia Mankouskaya (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
alesia.mankouskaya.23@ucl.ac.uk

Multicultural Dimensions of Academic Drama in the Eastern Borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ukraine in the Long Seventeenth Century: Jesuit Influence and Orthodox Adaptation

My research examines the intersection of historical dramaturgy, philosophy of language and cultural studies in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, with particular attention to the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that are now Belarus and to neighbouring Ukrainian lands.

The project centres on three groups of theatrical texts: a 1653 manuscript by Simeon of Polatsk; seven intermezzos from the late seventeenth-century Orsha Codex; and Theophan Prokopovich’s *Volodymyr* (1705), performed at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. These works provide evidence of the linguistic, confessional and cultural hybridity of a region situated between Eastern and Western European intellectual and theatrical traditions.

Combining manuscript study, transcription and translation with dramaturgical, linguistic and philosophical analysis, I investigate how theatrical language functioned in performance and how linguistic variation was used to construct social, confessional and cultural identities. I treat dramaturgy as a distinctive linguistic form whose meaning is shaped not only by the written text but also by its intended performance before an audience.

A central methodological problem concerns the terminology applied to the languages and cultures represented in these sources. Categories such as Ruthenian, Old Belarusian, Old Ukrainian and Russian are historically unstable and have frequently been shaped by later national and imperial historiographies. My research therefore examines both the historical semantics of these terms and the consequences of their retrospective application.

Situated within a broader decolonial framework, the project seeks to recover Belarusian and Ukrainian theatrical traditions that have often been marginalised or incorporated into Russian imperial cultural narratives, while contributing to wider debates about language, performance, cultural transfer and the construction of historical identity.

Primary supervisor: Professor Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski