In the News: Yuliya Komska; A Stained Glass in Lviv

The associate professor of German studies and Comparative Literature notes in the "Los Angeles Review of Books" that her father was a stained-glass artist in western Ukraine and says

mourning the loss of art "is not separate from mourning for the senseless

disruption and destruction of human life."

Read more at: https://dartgo.org/dnewskomskaglass

Yuliya Komska teaches  across the German Studies curriculum (including language) and in Comparative Literature, where she is also active in M.A. advising. Her teaching interests include, aside from the core German Studies courses, critical animal studies, circus cultures, biography, graphic arts and book illustration, Cold War culture, German environmentalism, propaganda, science fiction under socialism, civic language and linguistic justice, multilingualism and monolingualism, and belonging in Germany.

From the article:

A Stained Glass in Lviv

The bomb must have detonated at some distance, scattering a glass-shard rainbow near the armature that had once held the window together. It used to be an image that made sense: the lion, the woman, and the landscape. In that order, front to back. Almost a C.S. Lewis title. Grozed and cut after the paper sketches known as cartoons, slumped to shape in a hot kiln, painted with metal oxides, pinned down onto the blueprint with long needle-like nails, then leaded, scaled to the golden ratio, mounted. Not anymore.

Dazed, I walked over the kaleidoscopic remains as they crunched under my feet. The greens of the leaves and the grasses, the pinks of the skin, the purples of the toga folds with an embroidered blood-red border, the oranges of the lion's mane. In my mind's eye, I pictured how these shards must have rained down with a soft, waterfall-like rustle. Perhaps, I tried to convince myself, there had been no violent eruption of projectiles, small and sharp and multi-colored, but a gentle, slow, cinematic cascade in defiance of time and of war.