Vladko Paper Accepted to AATSEEL 2027¶

Oleh Shynkarenko's paper "Aerotorpedoes Turn Back: A Loyal Text Destroyed Anyway" has been accepted for AATSEEL 2027, the annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. The conference takes place online on 18–21 February 2027.

The paper was submitted to the stream on canonical writers of the Stalin era. The stream had limited space, so the paper will be presented in the general conference program. Each paper is limited to twenty minutes. The list of accepted papers will appear on the AATSEEL program page by 25 November 2026.

The paper studies the fate of Vladko's 1934 novel, an orthodox text with epigraphs from Stalin and Voroshilov that was nonetheless withdrawn and destroyed within months of publication. Only a few copies of the 10,000-copy print run survive, while the author faced no punishment.

One of the reviewers asked: "What was Vladko's role in the reputation-shaping process? I am wondering about his agency, both in the case of Aerotorpedoes Turn Back and more broadly."

The question opens a new angle on the paper. The first draft treated the destruction of the novel as something done to Vladko by shifting politics. The full paper will also ask what Vladko did himself. He never mentioned the novel in public for the rest of his life, and it disappeared from his bibliographies. In 1936 he reworked its fragments for the collection 12 Stories to fit the new political line: the multinational capitalist coalition became Germany alone. Later he joined the Party and chaired the Ukrainian SSR's chief repertoire committee (1947–51), which made him part of the censorship system himself. His long career of revising his own books and building the image of the "Ukrainian Jules Verne" may also be read as reputation work. Loyalty protected the writer, but the writer also took part in shaping what loyalty meant.

See also the Volodymyr Vladko author page.