Four Years into Full-Scale War: The Gap between Past and Future

February 24, 2022 brought a decisive end to “The End of History.” Afterwards German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke of a Zeitenwende—and yet despite this declaration of "a turn in time," outside of Ukraine, Europeans have continued to sleepwalk. “The West has always been too late,” Ukrainian art curator Vasyl Cherepanyn wrote, as the Russian army shelled Ukrainian cities. This lecture will draw on Hannah Arendt’s essay of the same title (“The Gap between Past and Future”), which describes “an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet.” Is it possible to grasp this interval in time, this temporal rupture as it is happening? How is this experience of neo-totalitarianism similar to and different from the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century? Since there is no going back, only forward, what could a world “after the victory,” a post-post-truth world, mean?

 

 

Marci Shore received her BA from Stanford University, her MA from University of Toronto, and her Ph.D from Stanford University. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and subsequently assistant professor of history at Indiana University from 2002 to 2006. She is currently on leave from her position as Professor of History at Yale University and began teaching at the Munk School in the 2025-2026 academic year.

 

Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2004 she has been a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism,1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in March 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book project about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled In Pursuit of Certainty Lost: Central European Encounters on the Way to Truth.

 

 

This lecture marks the fourth anniversary of the start of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.