ORIENTAL STUDIES AT THE FACULTY OF CULTURE AND ARTS AT THE IVAN FRANKO NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF LVIV: THE SUMMARY OF TWO DECADES

The article is dedicated to the development of the Oriental Studies area at the Faculty of Culture and Arts during the two decades since its establishment in 2004 at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv; looking closely at the program in its three most important spheres of functioning: educational – as a component of the faculty’s educational programs, scholarly – as an aspect of the research activities of faculty members, and artistically educational – as element of the cultural enrichment of all the participants of the educational process at the Faculty of Culture and Arts and the university community as a whole. The functioning and specifics of Oriental Studies at the Faculty of Culture and Arts have been analyzed taking under consideration the period of its formation within the Department of Theatre Studies and Acting, as well as the historical context of the establishment and development of Oriental Studies at Lviv University, which, according to the research by Yarema Polotniuk, was inspired by the multicultural environment of the city and the region in general, and could be roughly divided in a few historical periods: early period of the XIX cent., interwar stage, period of stagnation after WWII and the phase of revival after the proclamation of Ukraine’s Independence in 1991. The specifics of the faculties and their divisions as well as the scholarly interests of those who were invited to teach at the Lviv University from the very beginning influenced the development of the main areas of the Oriental Studies at the University of Lviv, namely linguistics and literature. The other directions of the Oriental Studies, specifically those of theatre and music areas, which have been developing at the Faculty of Culture and Arts since its establishment at the University, are aimed to fill a gap in the researches and university studies of those elements of culture that, on together with language, but in their own way, identify a society and become “the true source of historical information” (Hoshovskyi, 1971) and, thus, cannot be omitted from university curriculums. Besides the chronologically first course at the faculty, titled “Theatre Cultures of the East”, which introduces the main problematics of Oriental Studies in the area of theatre studies on the basis of Indian, Japanese and Chinese cultures, other disciplines as well as scholarly work and artistic-educational activity have concentrated mostly in the frames of ethnomusicological and musicological areas of the faculty and, due to the individual scholarly interests of the faculty members, objective circumstances in Ukraine during the two decades of the faculty’s development (as, for instance, the occupation of Crimea by the Russian federation and, as a result an internal resettlement of Crimean Tatars, including to Lviv) as well as the need to develop scholarly endeavors of Ukrainian researchers who in different periods of Ukrainian history have raised questions from the Oriental studies discourses in their work, representing such branches of the Oriental studies as musical Indology, Armenian Studies, Jewish Studies and most recently musical Turkology.