Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2015 8) 1511-1519 ~ ~ ~ УДК 82.0 Outside the University: (Re-)Constructing Self and Other in Marina Lewycka’s „A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” Oksana Blashkiv* Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities 2 Konarskiego Str., Siedlce 08-110, Poland Received 04.03.2015, received in revised form 05.05.2015, accepted 21.05.2015 Although Marina Lewycka’s novel „A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” is traditionally mentioned in the context of immigrant literature, it might prove to be more interesting if viewed from the perspective of the academic novel. <...> A satirical image of a desperate thirty-six years old Ukrainian woman Valentina ready to marry a widower in his eighties for the sake of naturalization in the UK often overshadows the image of the British university teacher and this man’s younger daughter Nadezhda, who goes through a tough process of identity (re-)construction while trying to protect her father from the second marriage. <...> The role of the university and education in general proves to be decisive in this process, uncovering the confl icting multiple identities. <...> Introduction „A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” by Marina Lewycka was published in 2005 and awarded the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, which is the only literary award for comic literature in the UK, and the Saga Award for Wit; it was also shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: nkovtun@mail.ru # 1511 # received universal acclaim as a satirical book, but not in Ukraine: there was no translation into Ukrainian until 2013, nor was there a particular literary critics, interest on the part of Ukrainian probably due ten years, to a stereotypical image of Ukrainians circulating within Western culture nowadays. <...> Viewed from the distance of novel serves as literary evidence of social and though, the rather Oksana Blashkiv. <...> In “Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature” (2010) the novel is mentioned in a broad context of East European images as presented in the British literature over the last decades (Korte, 2010). <...> Lechner (2010) focuses on the novels’ popularity building on the concept of “transcultural capital”, placing Tractors in line with White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002 <...>