For many Ukrainians, 1991 was a crucial point when their long-held dream of independence came true. The image of the future life in independent Ukraine was then almost identical to folklore images of Ukraine as the land of milk and honey. "Living the Independence Dream" takes a multi-dimensional look at the period of regained independence as a time of advancement towards the realization of collective dreams shaping the post-Soviet nation, even through everyday disappointments, anxiety, and uncertainty. The collection features personal accounts of several generations of Ukrainians who found themselves displaced by political upheavals in foreign lands, as well as the voices of recently displaced people who left the Donbas or other regions of Ukraine following the outbreak of the Russian aggression. It revisits the legacy of Soviet dissidents and explores the ideologies of Ukrainian language revival and the ways that memory and language construct Ukrainian identity and generate vital energy amidst war.
The collection "Living the Independence Dream" aims to analyze the agency of contemporary Ukrainian people and the role of media, literature, and digital folklore in creating new messages, meanings, and values formed during the Independence decades.

Lada Kolomiyets is a DSc (Philology) in Translation Studies, Professor at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine, and Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, USA; Fulbright visiting scholar to the University of Iowa (1996-97) and Pennsylvania State University (2017-18). An interdisciplinary researcher in literature, folklore, and translation studies, she has published three monographs, several textbooks for graduate students, literary anthologies, numerous chapters in collective volumes and articles in Ukrainian and English in leading peer-reviewed journals. Her research interests focus on the history of literary translation, linguacultural and translation studies, cross-cultural communication, and post-communist transformation in Ukraine. Kolomiyets’ books include monographs such as “Conceptual and Methodological Grounds of Contemporary Ukrainian Translations of British”, “Irish, and North American Poetry” (2004) and “Ukrainian Literary Translation and Translators in the 1920s-30s” (2013, 2nd ed. 2015), among others, as well as book chapters in “Translation Studies in Ukraine as an Integral Part of the European Context” (2023), “Translation under Communism” (2022), “Translation and Power” (2020), “Protest and Dissent: Conflicting Spaces in Translation and Culture” (2020), “'A Sea-Change into Something Rich and Strange': Shakespeare Studies in Contemporary Ukraine” (2020), “National Identity in Literary Translation” (2019). She has held fellowships at Wenner-Gren Foundations (Sweden), the Harris Distinguished Professorship Foundation at Dartmouth College, and the University of Iowa. Kolomiyets is a poet-translator and member of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine, with published English-to-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-to-English translations of contemporary poetry.