Читать книгу Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian - Marco Puleri - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIntroduction From (Global) Russian to Ukrainian Culture— and Back Again
In the contemporary context, diasporization and hybridity have become conditions for novel ways of “translating the world” […] The question of whether we should talk about one global Russian culture or many finds an answer only provisionally and, paradoxically, locally. (Rubins 2019: 46)
Following a 2017 report based on data on language use from national censuses and the United Nations, collated by Euromonitor International, we witness how significantly “Russian has lost more ground than any other language over the past 20 years as newly independent former Soviet states have attempted to assert their linguistic sovereignty” (Johnson 2017). In his commentary emblematically entitled Russian Beyond Russia, Alexander Morrison (2017) observed how “language is harmfully intertwined with politics these days in Eurasia.” On the one hand, this followed former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev’s decision in 2017 to move the Kazakh language from the Cyrillic to the Latin script for the sake of national “modernization” (Nazarbaev 2017). On the other, the Kremlin elite is still implementing new policies for supporting “the Russian citizens and compatriots who live abroad, the defence of their rights, including the right to receive education in Russian,”1 within the framework of the 2015 Concept Russian School Abroad (Russkaia shkola za rubezhom; Prezident Rossii 2015).
In a wider perspective, these are only some of the measures undertaken in the realm of official policies affecting the public debate in the post-Soviet scene, where over the past decades we dealt mainly with categorical assumptions that rendered national languages and cultures as part of ←13 | 14→the new state ideologies. As highlighted by Sheila Fitzpatrick in her 2005 study Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 we witnessed an intense process of resignification of the old cultural symbols and social practices in the “new Europe.” Nonetheless, the new national models emerging from this historical rift have been shaped in the absence of new “proper verbal signifiers” (Oushakine 2000: 994) that have the potential to reflect ongoing social processes in the post-Soviet scene. It was in a “state of post-Soviet aphasia,” borrowing Serguei Oushakine’s definition (2000), that the culture of (post-Soviet) crisis—“revising the past, depicting the present, and foretelling the future”—became “comprehensive and ubiquitous” (Etkind 2017: 2).
It is especially the contested revision of the role and position of Russian language and culture in the region that still represents the true bone of contention in reframing the configuration of the post-Soviet political, cultural and social landscape. Its definition influences not only the creation of a definite and territorially bounded Russian identity, but also affects the emergence of “novel ways of ‘translating the world’ ” (Rubins 2019: 46) in the so-called Near Abroad. As emphasized by Kevin M. F. Platt (2019a: 3) in the introduction to the pioneering volume Global Russian Cultures, this is the result of the “process of global dispersion”—of “millions of ethnic Russians and others who identify with Russian language and culture”—that “has produced novel and thorny questions concerning Russian culture and identity,” not only in the former Soviet space but even globally.
Nowadays these “Russian” subjectivities, together with their extremely diverse range of political and social positions, lie at the core of an intense process of external appropriation or, alternatively, internal rejection in the post-Soviet national discourses. As testified by the so-called Crimean euphoria—that is, the dynamics of the public debate in Russia following the contested annexation of Crimea and the war in East Ukraine in 2014—geopolitical clashes in the region served as a catalyst for new political projections of the Russian idea (and cultural space) beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. It is especially the theorization and contested ideological appropriation of the concept of the Russian World (Russkii mir), which was “once created as an alternative to nationalism and imperialism in any form” and is now “strongly identified with them” (Nemtsev ←14 | 15→2019), that contributes to an understanding of the fluidity of the narratives implemented by political actors in the post-Soviet arena.
As retraced by Mikhail Nemtsev (2019), the origin of the concept is deeply rooted in the late Soviet years, when the historian and philosopher Mikhail Gefter introduced the idea of Russkii mir in his analysis of “the Soviet Union’s future prospects through his philosophy of world history” as “a possibility for humanity to save itself from self-destruction.”2 Throughout the 1990s, the concept was then “suitable for conceptualizing a ‘new Russian-language self-consciousness’ [Russkoiazychnost’ myshleniia] for post-Soviet people” in the work of “humanitarian technologists” in Eltsin’s times. It was only in the 2000s that we witnessed the political appropriation of this philosophical concept by the Kremlin, directly affecting its original “universal appeal” and tying it “to the geographical boundaries of the former Soviet Union” (Nemtsev 2019). The Russian world came thus eventually to be externalized beyond the borders of the Russian Federation, but within the blurred boundaries of the Russian cultural space.
In spite of the highly politicized narratives around Russkii mir, it is only through the lens of the dynamic changes occurring in post-Soviet societies that we can still understand where symbolic politics fails to represent a vivid picture of the Russian cultural space. When focusing on the local developments of Russian culture—and on its interrelation with local cultures, societies and traditions—we clearly witness how today “ ‘Russianness’ [Russkost’] is still deterritorialised,” or “largely ‘broken off’ from any geographic boundaries or ethnocultural traditions of the Russian ethnos” (Nemtsev 2019).
Interestingly enough, only in the 2010s did scholars in post-Soviet studies start to reconsider the role of the new Russian cultural phenomena emerging locally.3 In the aftermath of the dramatic political developments in the last ←15 | 16→decade, and following the specious misuse of cultural categories in the public debate, new research questions arose: “Could there ever be ‘another Russian World’?” (Nemtsev 2019); “Where is Russian culture properly located?” (Platt 2019a: 3), or “How can we even posit a single entity called ‘Russian culture as a whole’?” (Platt 2019a: 5). While “rethinking Russianness,” today, scholars and observers in post-Soviet studies wonder about “new ways of translating” the other Russian world in all of its diversity. This creates the ground for developing new analytical tools not only for an understanding of the new local places and shapes of Russian culture in the region, but also for better interpreting the heterogeneity of post-Soviet local scenes through the lens of the global—and transnational—location of culture.
From Russianness to Russophonia
Over the past 30 years much attention has been devoted, especially in the social and political sciences, to the role played by such “groups of people who are referred to variously (often interchangeably) as (ethnic) Russians, Russian speakers and Russophones” (Cheskin, Kachuyevski 2018: 3) in the post-Soviet scene (Brubaker 1996; Kolstø 1996; Laitin 1998; Zhurzhenko 2002b; Gorham 2011). Geopolitical developments related to the implementation of new nation-building policies and the formation of new national majorities and minorities in the former Soviet republics, the heritage of the Soviet policies of nationalities and ethno-federal structure, the emergence of new normative measures in the Russian Federation devoted to the protection of the alleged “Russian diaspora” and compatriots, and eventually the rise of migration flows within and beyond the former Soviet Union: all these factors have contributed to the methodological cul-de-sac affecting ←16 | 17→the creation of a solid research framework for the study of this complex mosaic of peoples, ideas and traditions as a whole.
Yet the problematic conceptualization and terminology adopted throughout the last years to define such a diverse and heterogeneous group of people—together with their political and social ideas, activities and behaviours—still deserves further discussion. A constructive point of departure has been proposed by the contributors to the previously mentioned volume Global Russian Cultures (2019). While retracing the background behind the title of the book, Platt highlights how the shared stance of the scholars who participated in the research venture is that Russians “have gone global” (or, better, “plural”): “Our use of the plural ‘cultures’ corresponds to our shared conviction that these formations must be seen as an interconnected web of distinct entities rather than a totality that can be captured in any definition or formula” (Platt 2019a: 4). Yet global Russian cultural life is “a highly complex area of study that varies across time, space, social environment, and the vagaries of individual cases” (Platt 2019a: 5). Focusing on the dialogical relations between cultural production and political forces—in post-Soviet Eurasia and globally—we witness how “ ‘being Russian’ or ‘performing Russian culture’ is everywhere subject to local constraints, but those constraints, and therefore the content of ‘Russianness’ as well, are distinct in each new context” (Platt 2019a: 6).
The kind of approach brilliantly described by the scholars who contributed to this research venture can help us deconstruct the multiplicity of labels and categories based on strictly exclusive territorial, linguistic and ethnic terms, especially whereas we understand that paradoxically, as in the case of Central Asia, the “Russophone cultural-linguistic space might continue to function here even without a larger presence of ‘Russians’ ” (Kosmarskaya, Kosmarski 2019: 90). Moving further to an understanding of the complexity of the “Russian-speaking” world, new insights emerge from the analysis undertaken by the Kazakhstani scholars who contributed to the thematic issue emblematically entitled When Global Becomes Local: Modern Mobilities and the Reinvention of Locality (2017) in the scholarly journal Ab Imperio. At the core of Akbota Alisharieva, Zhanar Ibrayeva and Ekaterina Protassova’s research proposal lies the opportunity to study Russian as a polycentric language, following the analogous case of the field of the so-called “World-Englishes,” which was first developed ←17 | 18→in the 1970s in the aftermath of the decolonization process (Kachru 1992; Bolton, Kachru 2006). Here again, “[i];n theoretical and pragmatical terms […] the use of the term ‘Englishes’ emphasizes the autonomy and plurality of the world varieties of the English language” (Kachru et al. 2006: 4). Similarly, nowadays the “Russian-speaking space” is influenced by the new demographic processes, national cultural standards and language practices which have followed the Soviet collapse since 1991:
As a result of the collapse of the USSR, the Russian-speaking area has reduced and changed its configuration. Russian speakers live in almost all countries of the world. Diaspora is growing, but it is not subordinate to a single center as before […] Russian philologists working outside the Russian Federation are faced with the question of how to describe new phenomena in Russian language, when this deviates from the previous standard and the interaction with local languages affects its vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation—even among those for whom it was the native language.4 (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 232)
Research provides preliminary evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Russian language in Kazakhstan, or “Kazakhstani Russian,” has acquired autonomy from the “global” Russian language.5 Such dynamics have been ←18 | 19→recognized even in other post-Soviet contexts where the cultural proximity of Russian with the state language, in spite of a “downgraded” official status, is more pronounced (see the Ukrainian case: e.g. Del Gaudio 2011). Yet these reassessments have implications well beyond the sphere of linguistics, as they redefine the terms in which social scientists—and even politicians—contemplate the issue of the “Russian speaking communities” in post-Soviet countries.6
The above-mentioned authors of the article “The Kazakhstani Russian: An Outsider’s Perspective” (“Kazakhstanskii Russkii: Vzgliad so storony”) further emphasize that whereby, on the one hand, “in Russian studies such analyses have just started,” today “the study of the variability of the Russian language is still tied to observe the exclusive normative model of Russian supported by the scientific and political resources of the Russian Federation” (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 234).7 Interestingly enough, on the other hand, here again the main factor affecting the actual and habitual use of the local varieties of Russian language “from below” is “the subjectivity of the speakers: how do people answer the question of who, strictly speaking, owns the language and who has the right to speak it?” (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 235).8
←19 | 20→
An answer to this question—and to the proliferation of cultural constructs that still tie categories such as “Russian” and “Russian-speaking” to territorially, ethnically or ideologically bounded labels—can be identified in the emerging field of “Russophonia.” Yet, as mentioned by Robert A. Saunders, still in 2014 a Google search for Russophonia only produced “a list of pages dedicated to ‘Russophobia’ or the ‘fear of Russians’ ” (2014: 1). While addressing a necessary practice of reflection on terminology, Dirk Uffelmann (2019: 208) used the term to describe “the global community of Russian language and culture,” significantly—and provocatively—switching the focus from the speakers to the set of speech acts. Disembodying language from its carriers, we can consider even the room for “Russophone Russophobia,” highlighting how nowadays a “critique of all that is constructed as Russia(n)—namely, Russian politics, mentality, culture, and above all language—if expressed in Russian, can collide with the performance of using the Russian language” (Uffelmann 2019: 214).
Eventually, the term “Russophonia” brings the attention to the performative acts of speaking Russian (and even speaking back to Russia), thus laying the ground for a new potential methodological orientation, with the aim to overcome contradictory ideological constructs based on ethnicity, nationality and territory.9 Most fundamentally, Russophonia highlights the self-conscious and autonomous nature of the performance that carriers of the Russian language are enabled to produce with their individual speech acts, finally switching the focus to the agency of these new cultural actors—thus creating the ground for an extremely interesting field of study aimed at an understanding of the multiplicity of Russian political and linguistic cultures and identities.
In-between (Literary) Russophonia
In the closing lines of the lecture given at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the occasion of the awarding ceremony, Sviatlana Aleksievich (b. 1948, ←20 | 21→Stanislav—today Ivano-Frankivs’k), the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015, reflected upon one of the most controversial issues mirrored by the kaleidoscope of post-Soviet identity:
I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. All are very dear to me. But in this day and age it is difficult to talk about love.10 (Alexievich 2015)
In an attempt to define the different cultural, historical and political affiliations of the writer Sviatlana Aliaksandrauna (in Belarusian)/Svetlana Aleksandrovna (in Russian) Aleksievich, a number of different labels have been adopted: (post-)Soviet, for her historical-cultural background; Belarusian, for her citizenship; Ukrainian, for being born in the Soviet Stanislav, today’s Ivano-Frankivs’k; and, finally, Russian, for her native language and artistic-literary instrument. Eventually, this created the ground for the rise of a contested reception of Aleksievich’s success in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, where she was at times appropriated or rejected along the “own/other” divide (Charnysh 2015).
In an article published the day after the awarding of the prize to Aleksievich, the Ukrainian journalist Vitalii Portnikov (2015) offered an interesting key to an understanding of this controversial issue. Reflecting upon the observers’ attempts to position the writer’s experience within the borders of a single national literary canon, the Ukrainian journalist highlighted how today at the core of the dispute lies “our inability to shift cultural frontiers” (nashe neumenie razdvigat’ kul’turnye granitsy; Portnikov 2015). For Portnikov, Sviatlana Aleksievich is a Belarusian writer “to the same extent that Joyce and Yates are Irish writers, Mark Twain and Hemingway are Americans, García Márquez is Colombian, and Vargas Llosa is Peruvian”11 (Portnikov 2015). According to Portnikov, “[i];n the ←21 | 22→contemporary world the national belonging of a writer is not determined by language, but by a choice of civilization”12 (Portnikov 2015).
Following Portnikov’s reflections, today it is still literature that can show us the path to undertake even while turning the gaze to the other “Russian World”—and to the diversity of its local historical and cultural experiences. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we witnessed the textualization of new speech acts that contributed to developing “new ways of translating the world” (Rubins 2019: 46)—that is, new tools and symbols able to reflect the reshaping of the cultural frontiers of modernity. As highlighted by Maria Rubins (2019: 21), “Russia has been no stranger” to the “global trends that informed much of the world’s cultural production in the last hundred years”: among these trends, we can mention the fall of multiethnic empires (i.e. the Tsarist empire in 1917) and totalitarian regimes (i.e. the Soviet Union in 1991), revolutionary cycles (i.e. the October Revolution in 1917, perestroika and the fall of the communist rule in 1985–1991), wars (i.e. the two World Wars in the first half of the century, and the Afghan war in late Soviet era, above all), massive migrations and displacement. These events created the ground for the “proliferation of hyphenated, hybrid, translocal and transnational identities” that make up today the so-called “archipelago of Russian culture,” borrowing Rubins’ definition (2019: 24).13
Whereas, following a geocritical approach, Rubins observed how globally “the interdisciplinary study of the archipelago has challenged the binary conception of mainland versus islands, recasting the entire cultural space as an archipelago” (2019: 25), in the 2000s the peculiar “glocalization” (Kukulin 2019: 171) of Russian language and culture in post-Soviet times has been the focus of studies adopting the postcolonial methodology for research on the post-communist region. It is also as a result of this emerging approach that in his review of the latest English editions of Aleksievich’s novels Second Hand Time (Vremia sekond-khend, 2013) and ←22 | 23→Chernobyl Prayer (Chernobyl’skaia molitva, 1993), emblematically entitled Neighbours in Memory, Serguei Oushakine (2016: 12) significantly came to describe Sviatlana Aleksievich as “the first major postcolonial author of postcommunism.”14
Notwithstanding the historians’ enduring reluctance to endorse the methodological hybridization between postcolonialism and post-communism, Aleksievich’s experience reveals once again the presence of multiple points of intersection between the two “post-”: postcolonial linguistic and cultural hybrids, textual and identity deterritorialization, conflictual binary discourses re-emerge in a different form—but, at the same time, akin to classical colonialism—in the cultural contexts of the new countries that have arisen from the ashes of Communism. It was significantly “[t];he opening up of Second world cultures to increased global contacts as a result of the policies of perestroika and glasnost and, even more so, the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the suddenly former USSR” that “highlighted this jarring omission” (Chernetsky 2007: 7) in postcolonial research.
Among the most productive points of contact between the two “post-,” we witness the revision of the so-called “East–West” divide in the heart of Europe, which opened the ground to global contacts and interdisciplinary research perspectives. The studies undertaken by the post-communist scholars who contributed to the volume Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures (2015), edited by Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik, reflect the original perspectives offered by this methodological orientation. As highlighted by the editors in the introduction to the book, the unifying idea behind all the contributions is to give voice to new actors in the contemporary debate on European identity.15 ←23 | 24→As argued still in 2012 by Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Şandru, the editors of a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, here we deal with “an inquiry that does not so much seek some postcolonial status for East-central Europe as it strives to find, theorize, and make productive spaces of difference within similar paradigms of subjection, subalternity and peripheralization” (Kołodziejczyk, Şandru 2012: 116).
Generally, drawing upon the path undertaken by the editors of the volume included in this book series, Postcolonial Slavic Literatures After Communism (2016), the proposed framework answers the need for exploring “not only the heuristic potential of postcolonial approaches to postcommunist cultures on the meta-theoretical level,” but also “literature’s specific contribution” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 14) to a broader understanding of post-communist societies. On the one hand, as emphasized by Klavdia Smola and Dirk Uffelmann (2016: 17), “for East and East-Central Europe, it might be useful to stress selected concepts of postcolonial studies such as hybridity or inbetweenness that are compatible with interpretative routines such as deconstruction […] or global paradigms such as transnationality or world literature.” On the other, whereas together with the editors of the volume we argue that “Slavic literatures after communism are postcolonial […] in a no more metaphorical way than the allegedly ‘classic’ cases of postcolonial literatures,” we can still maintain that they “need not, however, necessarily be postcolonial in the same respect” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 15). It is exactly following this path that we can go beyond the question posed by David Chioni Moore still at the dawn of the new millennium in his seminal essay “Is the ‘Post-’ in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” (2001), and eventually create the ground for a new epistemological approach to the post-communist—and, namely, post-Soviet—culture and society. As suggested by Smola and Uffelmann (2016: 14), we should reframe the main research question as follows: “on what levels are the literatures of postcommunist countries postcolonial?”16 The complexity ←24 | 25→and heterogeneity of a space where “neighboring cultures with mutual linguistic intercomprehension and cultural and religious similarities” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 15) were in a state of constant interaction and exchange prevents us from giving a univocal answer to this question.17 Nonetheless, the peculiar in-between position which emerges from the diverse historical experiences of Slavic cultures still represents one of the main characterizing traits of the postcolonial setting in Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, shared historical dynamics make the definition of new post-Soviet ethnic and national identities in Eastern Europe—together with the demarcation of the respective fields of national cultures—even more complex and contested than in overseas colonialism.18
Most fundamentally, regarding my research focus, the “trans-nationalization” of Russian culture also seems to regard a broader process taking place in the post-Soviet region as a result of a peculiar (post-)colonial experience in (post-)Soviet times. As emphasized by Susanne Frank, ←25 | 26→the ambivalent multinational Soviet literature “that emerged as a project of cultural and literary policy in the mid-1930s can be seen as not the least important part of political enterprise of nationalities policy in the Soviet Union” (Frank 2016: 193). This project, proclaimed as anti-imperial, still had some characteristics that allow identifying it as imperial: “the dominance of Russian as lingua franca and the language into which all (relevant) literary texts had to be translated was only one feature, others being dogmatism of one aesthetic doctrine—Socialist Realism—and universalism” (Frank 2016: 193). According to Frank, the heritage of this transnational project—that forged “a literary reality of dense intercultural entanglement” (2016: 201)—comes to still influence the “post-imperial” developments of post-Soviet literatures. Especially, when identifying its “unintended result” for “the space of Russian-language literature,” Frank recognizes that “nearly everywhere […] there are authors today who use Russian as their writing language” (2016: 213). This is “a group and a tendency in-between” (Frank 2016: 213), living at the crossroads between the processes of “nationalization and/as de-Sovietization” in former Soviet republics and “nationalization in Russia itself” (Frank 2016: 212). Recent literary developments in post-Soviet cultures could be thus included “on the one hand in the context of current global tendencies of literary transnationalization, and on the other in a historical perspective as effects and consequences of the project of Soviet multinational literature” (Frank 2016: 214).
Interestingly, it is also through the lens of the global decentralizing process of literary and cultural studies that the US scholar Naomi Caffee, in her dissertation “Russophonia: Towards a Transnational Conception of Russian-Language Literature” (2013), proposed the introduction of a new framework “for discussing literary works from past and present communities of Russian speakers regardless of citizenship or ethnic identity, both within and outside of the Russian Empire and its successor states” (2013: 20). On the one hand, Caffee identifies “Russophonia” as “the totality of social, linguistic, and geo-political environments in which Russian-speaking authors write and live,” while on the other—“taking a cue from postcolonial literary studies” and “especially from the disciplines of Francophone and Sinophone studies”—considers “Russophone” as describing “literature written in the Russian language” (2013: 20). Caffee ←26 | 27→defines “Russophone” as “the most accurate term available,” mainly in light of the misuse of ethnic and linguistic labels in public discourse.19
Even if the research area still remains quite vague in temporal and spatial terms, following Caffee’s proposal, the potential discipline of Russophone studies answers the need for providing “the crucial interdisciplinary space” for the analysis of “pressing contemporary issues” (Caffee 2013: 24). Among these, Caffee mentions “a preoccupation with establishing identity, and also with categorizing and hierarchizing identities” (2013: 36), which emerges quite clearly as a central theme in “Russophone literature”: this includes works that “often belong to more than one literary tradition concurrently,” and authors who “are acutely aware of this gap between traditions, between identities and between locations” (2013: 36).
In an attempt to analyse the dynamics characterizing “the very essence of culture’s ‘in-betweenness’” (Caffee 2013: 36) as experienced by Russophone authors today, we need to be aware that in the archipelago of Russian culture “each center” presents “a unique combination of local and global factors,” giving rise to “hybrid island identities” which are “subject to continuous redefinition” (Rubins 2019: 25). It is exactly these blurred dynamics in the field of global Russian culture that makes the investigation of its local centres and provisional status an extremely compelling field of research.
Today, the contested encounters of the Russian language and culture with other languages, cultures and traditions in the post-Soviet space raise “pressing contemporary issues” related to—and affected by—political and social developments, the presence (or, alternatively, the lack of) cultural institutions and, eventually, market dynamics. This reflects global tendencies affecting cultural practices in contemporary multicultural societies. It is no surprise that still in 1997, in his study Translating and Resisting ←27 | 28→Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Studies, Jonathan Hart could question the ambivalence of global cultural processes: “Can all the claims of different cultures find expression in a community or nation?” (1997: 138). The classification of subjectivities and cultural phenomena that do not necessarily respond to a knowledge paradigm based on the demarcation between the centre and the periphery, the superior and the inferior, discloses the need for new analytical criteria able to understand the complex dynamics of today’s cultural métissage.
As emphasized by Hart in his analysis of the developments of Francophone literature in the 1990s, the emergence of new narratives built around the cultural negotiation between centre and margin are the outcome of the global experience of migration, diasporization and hybridity.20 Looking at the rise of transcultural subjectivities in the post-Soviet space through the prism of global cultural dynamics, we may assume that cultures “based on a model of penetration and interconnectedness are to be understood as externally networked and internally hybrid, dynamic, and fluid constructs” (Hausbacher 2016: 417). It is not by chance that, while describing the globally emerging literary narratives through the lens of “transculturality,” Arianna Dagnino (2013: 4) comes to the conclusion that “what makes this kind of writing different is first and foremost its resistance to appropriations by one single national canon or cultural tradition.”
In this book I will focus on the case of the contemporary Ukrainian cultural process, in an attempt to understand the result of the interplay between literature, politics, market and identity. Most fundamentally, focusing on the perspective of Russophone intellectuals and literary actors, I will try to go beyond the binary opposition in the Ukrainian intellectual environment between the local Ukrainian-language and Russian-language literatures as separate realms, thus positioning the latter within the global developments in post-Soviet culture and society. Following these lines, the purpose and the core research questions of this study are threefold:
←28 | 29→
a) What are the different ways that Ukrainian literature and culture can be defined in 2019? Literature and culture produced in the Ukrainian territory? Literature and culture produced by citizens of Ukraine in any language (and, namely, also in Russian)?
b) What is the role and position of Russophone/Russian culture in Ukraine? How can the dynamics of Ukrainian culture lend insight into the possibility of a global Russian culture, or multiple Russian cultures, in the contemporary world?
c) And, eventually, may hybridity as an analytical tool help us address the global “pressing contemporary issues” that have arisen as a result of political and social developments in the post-Soviet space?
Recasting “Ukrainianness” through the Prism of “Russianness”
Framing Ukrainianness and Russianness: following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the national question has been at the core of the intellectual and political debate in Ukraine and Russia since the 1990s. As emphasized by Igor’ Torbakov, in post-Soviet times the ambivalent directions of nation-building policies in Ukraine and Russia reflected a complex process of “rebounding” the contested legacy of their historical encounter, revealing both symmetric and diverging features:
Not surprisingly, both Ukraine and Russia find themselves in a kind of postcolonial condition, because their histories had been closely entangled throughout the imperial and Soviet eras, and both have been struggling to adapt to the postimperial realities after 1991 […] The pattern of Ukraine’s and Russia’s hybridities and ambivalent behaviours during the postimperial period seem to be similar but one might also observe a crucial difference: “Ukraine is only a subaltern, whereas Russia is both subaltern and an empire.” (Torbakov 2016: 91)
Taking into account the historical dynamics of the contested Ukrainian–Russian encounter, the duplicity of the role of Ukraine in the imperial ventures—“as the core of the Russian and Soviet projects, on the one hand, and as the center of the anti-imperial and anti-Soviet resistance on the other”—and its special status as “a contested borderlands” (Hrytsak 2015: 733–734) between empires makes the postcolonial “not enough” to describe its complex dynamics. Though assuming that “Ukraine was not a classical colony of the Russian Empire” (Kappeler 2003: 178)—whereby it lacked most of the classical attributes of colonies, such as “geographic, cultural, and racial distance”—the paradox still lies in the fact that here, as ←29 | 30→emphasized by Georgii Kas’ianov, “[i];t is possible to consider Ukraine as an example of postcolonial syndromes without colonialism”21 (Volodarskii 2017a): these syndromes include the reframing of diverging memories, cultural categories and identity markers along rigid binary lines.
The cultural specificity of the Ukrainian postcolonial condition was thoroughly theorized already in the early 1990s by Marko Pavlyshyn, who highlighted how modern Ukrainian tradition “had been built up on a binary opposition between the self and the other, where the other was the intruder, the colonizer, the enemy” (1992: 48). Even today we can understand the historical complexity of Ukrainian postcoloniality only through the lenses of its oppositional relation with the external “hegemonic discourse” taking shape in the contemporary Russian Federation, where “[Belarusians and] Ukrainians are still regarded among the ethnic groups of the ‘near abroad’ as particularly close relatives, with whom one gladly cooperates and to whom one is ready to make certain concessions, but whom one does not recognize as socially and culturally equal or accept as independent nations with national states” (Kappeler 2003: 181). Interestingly enough, whereas on the one hand this kind of narrative shows how in the case of contemporary Russia “the postcolonial discourse has not undergone a social process of deconstruction” (Berg 2004) yet,22 on the other this also helps us ←30 | 31→clarify how still nowadays Ukrainian postcoloniality and “postcolonial syndromes” paradoxically emerge from the conflicts engendered by cultural proximity. Mykola Riabchuk puts it in historical perspective,
The simple truth is that Ukrainians were not discriminated against as Little Russians, i.e., as loyal members of a Russian regional subgroup, who recognize their subordinate position and do not claim any specific/equal cultural rights. But as Ukrainians, i.e., as members of a nationally self-aware and culturally self-confident group, they were not merely discriminated against, but also politically persecuted as dangerous “nationalists.” (2010: 12)
Here we may grasp the peculiar historical continuity of post-Soviet narratives with imperial and Soviet “hegemonic discourses,” which today still come to affect contemporary cultural and political dynamics in the region. Following these lines, according to Roman Dubasevych (2016: 38), the “term ‘postimperial’ thus seems for several reasons to better match the complex reality of the Ukrainian-Russian encounter.”23 Most fundamentally, the postimperial frame creates the ground for discussing the case of Ukrainian–Russian cultural relations in light of the contested annexation of Crimea to Russia (March 2014) and the armed conflict that erupted in Donbas (April 2014), since even “if before 2014 the anti-imperial tendencies in Ukraine never led to interethnic violence, they manifested themselves in symbolic struggle over cultural hegemony, embodied in the reluctance to recognize Russian as a second official language, and in multiple ‘memory wars’ ” (Dubasevych 2016: 136). According to Dubasevych’s insights, the present conflict could be thus interpreted “as an effect of a long-term alienation between Ukraine ←31 | 32→and Russia, Ukrainophiles and Russophiles, that has been growing since Ukrainian independence in 1991” (2016: 134).
In the Ukrainian intellectual environment these dynamics intensely affected the conceptualization of the national canon: today the litmus test for the meaning of Ukrainianness and attitudes towards it still remains the language question. The problem stems from the fact that in contemporary Ukraine, besides the people who identify themselves as ethnically Russian, there is also a large community of Russian-language Ukrainians.24 In light of the very complex and fluid ethnolinguistic pattern of contemporary Ukraine, the definition of the cumbersome nature of Russian language and culture in post-Soviet times thus continues to play a central role in the debate around the definition of the national identity.
In September 2017, while discussing the recent developments in defining “Ukrainianness” in the national debate, Ukrainian philosopher Serhii Datsiuk significantly declared that “in the coming decades the solution of the Ukrainian question is not possible without the solution of the Russian question”25 (Datsiuk 2017). This followed the publication of controversial commentaries by Galician intellectuals, such as Taras Prokhas’ko (2017), Iurii Andrukhovych (2017a; 2017b; 2017c) and Iurii Vynnychuk (2017), debating the Ukrainian question on the online platform Zbruch. In these commentaries, the Russian language was depicted as an attribute of the “enemy,” “a language of violence” (mova nasyl’stva), which is embodied by those Ukrainians who are not able even “to sleep” in the national language, that is, the “Ukrainian Russians” (Ukraïns’ki rosiiany)—the term used by Prokhas’ko (2017) in his column entitled “Do You Sleep in Ukrainian?” (Chy ty spysh ukraïns’koiu?) to address indiscriminately both ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. Paradoxically, in his analysis of the problematic relationship between literary text and territory within ←32 | 33→Russia, Il’ia Kukulin similarly came to the conclusion that “in an era of regret and anxiety over Russian state collapse and turmoil around its (re)expansion, the cultural problem of Russianness—whether conceived as an overarching matrix of many cultures and people, unique ethnic identity, or nation wrapped in an imperial destiny—has yet to be resolved” (Kukulin 2019: 181). Here we may witness the persistent entanglement between the solution of the “cultural problem of Russianness” (Kukulin 2019: 181) and the creation of a shared and inclusive “Ukrainianness” in the post-Soviet space.
Yet the developments of the national question should be viewed and interpreted within the broader context of the search for new self-identification in post-Soviet societies. Interestingly, it was only in the aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution in 2013–2014—the wave of protests starting in Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv on the night of November 21, 2013, after the Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend the signing of the association agreement with the European Union—that scholars and observers in post-Soviet studies started to highlight the emergence of a “civic turn” in codifying the national identity in Ukraine (Gerasimov 2014; Goble 2015; Kulyk 2015, 2016; Pavlyshyn 2016a). From this vantage point, Ukrainian “hybridity” (Gerasimov 2014: 32) appeared to be a new form of collective subjectivity, as it offered new terms to describe “Ukrainianness […] as an attribute freely chosen by people favourably disposed to the Ukrainian nation-state without regard to ethnicity or cultural orientation” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 76–77). The (re)emergence of this language of self-description in post-Soviet societies is the result of a long-term process, which still lacks a full-fledged explanatory model. According to the Ukrainian historian Andrii Portnov: “To define this new language, the new Ukrainian studies needs to analyze the specifically post-Soviet Ukrainian hybridity as a distinctive and autonomous subjectivity and fully accept that Ukraine is a complex and dynamic society, which requires nuanced inquiry” (2015: 730). Conceptualizing Ukrainian hybridity, we deal with “a fundamentally interdisciplinary research field in which history meets anthropology, economics, sociology, literary studies, political philosophy, and art history” (Portnov 2015: 731).
Indeed, it is especially the field of “literary politics” that since Ukrainian independence has seemed to privilege “the plurality and hybridity of ←33 | 34→national and cultural identities” (Rewakowicz 2018: 2). As suggested by Maria Rewakowicz in her recent work titled Ukraine’s Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, “the issue facing literary critics (which till now has not been adequately addressed) is to decide how to arrive at the body of texts that form a national literature” (2018: 2). And here the debate comes to emblematically include the ongoing negotiation around the actual content and shape of Ukrainianness.
Following Rewakowicz’s stance, it is the space of Ukrainian literature that in the long term better reflects the room for hybrid forms—and their contestation—in the post-Soviet space.26 Especially in the aftermath of the revolutionary cycles experienced by Ukrainians throughout the last decades (i.e. the Revolution on Granite in 1990, the Orange Revolution in 2004–2005, and the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013–2014), we may use and readapt the postcolonial categories to Ukraine as a post-Soviet (and post-Maidan) society for creating new tools for translating the new local dynamics. The proposed approach is aimed at creating a productive path to disembodying nation-ness in the post-Soviet space and, especially, at achieving an understanding of how, paradoxically, an answer to the eternal question on the role and position of global Russian culture can be found “only provisionally and, paradoxically, locally.”
The Long Road to Post-Soviet Transition: A Russophone Perspective
This book is aimed at deeply rethinking and better understanding the different approaches to the “Russian question” in Ukraine, by analysing both the political and cultural narratives that emerged before and after the Ukrainian–Russian clash of discourses which followed the contested annexation of Crimea to Russia and the military aggression against Eastern Ukraine in 2014. My study is based mainly on the results of a research carried out from 2012 to 2019, including interviews with prominent cultural figures ←34 | 35→(cultural journal/magazine editors, publishers, writers, scholars) conducted in Kyiv, Donets’k and Kharkiv on the eve of Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Through the lens of the intertwining of political and cultural developments in post-Soviet Ukraine (and parallel dynamics in Russia), throughout the sections of the present book it is possible to retrace the origins of the debate on hybridity and hybrid subjectivities in post-Soviet times.
Under the umbrella of the global decentralizing process of traditional literary and cultural studies, I mainly devote my attention to the provisional status of a “displaced transition” experienced by cultural actors and phenomena emerging “in between” national languages and traditions. The category of hybridity discussed in this research (and its variegated vocabulary in theoretical discourse, such as métissage, transculturation and creolization) was developed mostly by postcolonial studies to problematize the discourse of empire, by revealing the “in-between space” where the “meaning of culture” takes shape. By going further in defining the rather generalizing theory famously advanced by Homi K. Bhabha,27 I will follow Anjali Prabhu’s further theorization of hybridity. Turning to the legacy of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant,28 she attempted to reframe the concept by highlighting the need to demarcate “a particular framework or closing-off of an historical moment, action or geographical space as hybrid by also specifying the terms between or among which such hybridity occurs or is called up” (Prabhu 2007: 5):
←35 | 36→
I therefore think it is important to provisionally, but clearly distinguish between hybridity as a theoretical concept and a political stance that we can argue, and hybridity as a social reality with historical specificity […] For me, the most productive theories of hybridity are those that effectively balance the task of inscribing a functional-instrumental version of the relation between culture and society with that of enabling the more utopian/collective image of society. (Prabhu 2007: 2)
Following Prabhu’s analytical theory of hybridity, and adapting it to the case of post-Soviet Ukraine, we will see how hybrid subjectivities are first a product of a cultural debate that emerged in Imperial and Soviet times, and then the result of a political clash of national paradigms in post-Soviet times: nowadays these are subjected to a constant internal and external delegitimizing process, influencing the transitoriness—or provisionality—of this “third space,” as alternatively being subject to processes of cultural appropriation or peripheralization. In the proposed analytical framework, Ukrainian hybridity appears to be “tied to revolutionary social change,” and “linked to contingency and […] time-bound.”29 More importantly, Ukrainian hybridity entails practices of dis-identification, by providing “a way out of binary thinking,” (Prabhu 2007: 1) and responds to the possibility of a third space of enunciation, whereas it represents “a completely new political community that cannot rely on any preexisting ‘national’ structures to sustain itself” (Gerasimov, Mogilner 2015: 720). Finally, it is deterritorialized, whereas—in spite of the misuse of language categories in the political debate—Russian in Ukraine is becoming an ex-territorial language, which is not necessarily linked to a particular territory or entity and a particular ethnicity.
To my knowledge, this is the first book to investigate contemporary Ukrainian cultural developments through the lens of Russian-language literary production and the Russian-language intellectual community’s position. While Russian and Ukrainian cultural developments have been framed as the outcome of the Soviet collapse and the embrace of globalization (Chernetsky 2007), recent studies tend to privilege only one of the two aspects of the issue, which is here analysed in light of a constant ←36 | 37→dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian Studies. Furthermore, while in the volume authored by Maria G. Rewakowicz (2018) the focus seems to rely mostly on pre-Maidan developments, here I draw an analysis of the long-term outcomes of the debate on cultural hybridity, considering both “the phase of distinctly post-Soviet and transitional dynamics of the first two decades of independence” (Rewakowicz 2018: viii) and the subsequent crystallization of these dynamics in post-Maidan realities. Whereas Chernetsky (2019: 58) identifies the Orange Revolution of 2004 as the true starting point for “the process of rethinking and reclaiming identities by Ukraine’s Russian-language writers in the newly independent Ukraine,” in my opinion it is worth analyzing the phenomenon in a broader perspective, going from the early years of Ukrainian independence to the outcomes of the Euromaidan in 2013–2014 that “kicked into higher gear” (Chernetsky 2019: 59) the dynamics of the previous revolutionary cycle.
Here the prehistory of the phenomenon, which was the subject of my previous study (Puleri 2016), has been deliberately assigned to a marginal role, in order to privilege a focus on the present situation and to prevent any attempts at formulating historical and ideological projections. This book is not a history of Ukrainian Russian-language literature, nor does it include all its contemporary variants and actors: rather, the premise of this study is that, while looking at these plural literary phenomena, it is worth focusing on the profoundly diverse and heterogeneous range of positions, identities and forms emerging from their provisional status, and on the need to analyse them through the lens of the global tendency towards the transnationalization of cultural practices. This helps us describe Ukrainian hybridity as a “time-bounded” condition that, on the one hand, is deeply rooted in the Ukrainian social and political experience in post-Soviet times and, on the other hand, still answers to and follows global cultural dynamics and trends.
In this study I hence propose the use of new analytical tools for translating the recent social developments in Ukraine through the lens of literature.30 On the one hand, it is postcolonial multilingualism, symbolic ←37 | 38→“interstitiality” and pluricentric counternarratives to established social conceptions of identity, nation and culture that prominently emerge in the Russophone literary production. On the other, the “minor paradigm” elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1975) works as a useful methodological approach to interpret the “collective enunciation” conveyed by these cultural actors working in an intermediate space between the Ukrainian and Russian “great (or established)” literatures and narratives. As for the selection of the literary texts under scrutiny, I have opted for prose works by Andrei Kurkov, Aleksei Nikitin and Vladimir Rafeenko. The reasons behind this privileged focus are twofold: on the one hand, prose works by the mentioned authors are revealing for the heterogeneous evolutionary, regional, sociopolitical and market dynamics affecting the creation of full-fledged cultural discourses and narratives in post-Soviet Ukraine; on the other, the peculiar focus of Russophone prose on “the crowding out and displacement of experiences that are painful to protagonists and narrators alike and that compromise the integrity of their sense of self” (Kukulin 2018: 60) still represents an overlooked field of analysis in literary criticism.31
Finally, this is the framework for developing the two intertwining sections of the book, focusing respectively on the pre- and post-Maidan periods. In the opening chapter, after providing a brief overview of the historical background of the postcolonial situation in present-day Ukraine, I focus on the complex positioning of the Russophone literary phenomenon in the Ukrainian post-Soviet national canon. Analysing the conceptualization of the hybrid cultural elements in the post-Soviet area, it is possible to observe the rise of a contrast between the cultural “exclusivist” and “inclusivist” attitudes in the Ukrainian intellectual debate. It is the product of the renewed social and political clash between the Ukrainian and Russian ←38 | 39→“national systems” at the dawn of the Soviet collapse. The ideologization of the ethnolinguistic factor in the post-Soviet area gives birth to competing ideologies, which draw new “imagined borders” in the Ukrainian literary space, as being the result of the polarization of the Russian and Ukrainian respective national historical narratives.
The second chapter provides readers with a challenging reconstruction of the most widespread attitudes concerning the role of language for the definition of the boundaries of national culture among the foremost Russian-language writers and critics in contemporary Ukraine and Russia. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to a discussion of the role of anthologies, publishing houses and literary prizes in the process of cultural negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainian culture and Russian culture. At the crossroads between these seemingly binary juxtapositions, new cultural phenomena emerge under the sign of hybridity.
In the third chapter I propose a new understanding of the heterogeneous framework of enunciations conveyed by contemporary Ukrainian Russian-language writers. By reading and interpreting Andrei Kurkov’s (Death and the Penguin, 1996; The Good Angel of Death, 1998), Aleksei Nikitin’s (Istemi, 2011; Mahjong, 2012) and Vladimir Rafeenko’s works (The Moscow Divertissement, 2011), we may see a new artistic attempt to recompose the fragments of the existential mosaics left unbound in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
In the fourth chapter, which opens the second section of the book, I move to the recent cultural developments in the aftermath of the so-called “Ukraine Crisis” (2013–2014). The chapter approaches literary processes in Ukraine as emblematic for the general epistemological (and hence political) crisis in the country, and as an important litmus test allowing a diagnosis of the crisis. Deconstructing “Russianness” and “Ukrainianness,” I highlight the emerging positioning of Russophone authors in the aftermath of the Euromaidan “revolution of hybridity.”
The aim of the fifth chapter is to rethink the different approaches to “value-based” politics—and social subgroupings’ reactions to it—in the post-Soviet area through the lens of the post-Maidan Ukrainian scene. An accurate tracking of the policies normativizing the field of culture on the one hand, and of blurred cultural boundaries on the other, helps us question ←39 | 40→the fixed constructs of national and cultural identity when looking at the ever-changing post-Soviet social milieus.
In the final chapter I explore the current reshaping of the contested language issue in the post-Maidan intellectual debate. In this section I examine the preliminary outcomes of the still ongoing war in Donbas as an influence on the concept of the Ukrainian literary and social space, by analysing the main narratives of the “crisis” played and enacted by Russian-speaking literary actors, in light of the emerging “postcolonial ethics” stemming from their role in public debates. Here the peculiar cases of Aleksei Nikitin (Victory Park, 2014; The Orderly from Institutskaia Street, 2016), Aleksandr Kabanov (In the Language of the Enemy, 2017) and Vladimir Rafeenko (The Descartes’ Demon, 2014; The Length of Days, 2016) lie at the core of my analysis.
←40 | 41→
1 “[…] российским гражданам и соотечественникам, проживающим за рубежом, защите их прав, в том числе права на получение образования на русском языке.”
2 “Gefter called this alternative the ‘world of worlds’ [Mir mirov], comprising several communities, or ‘worlds’ which historically formed around large, developed cultures […] Thus the ‘Russian World’ […] can only exist and be understood in relation to other such worlds, the boundaries of which have nothing to do with boundaries of states. In essence, the ‘Russian World’ cannot be tied to any strictly territorial definition, nor to any specific form of governance” (Nemtsev 2019).
3 Still in 2007, in the concluding section of his Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization, Vitaly Chernetsky wondered about the jarring omission of Russian-language literary phenomena from post-Soviet research: “Another paradigm of post-Soviet writing that has not received detailed attention […] is one that, although of utmost importance, is still in its infancy; hopefully it will undergo a prodigious development in the near future. I have in mind postcolonial russophone writing that, in a way structurally analogous to similar developments in anglophone and francophone literature, develops the language medium in ways radically different from the metropolies’ national literary traditions” (Chernetsky 2007: 266).
4 “В результате распада СССР русскоязычное пространство сократилось и изменило свою конфигурацию. Русскоязычные живут практически во всех странах мира, диаспора растет, но она уже не подчиняется единому центру, как раньше […] Перед филологами-русистами, работающими за пределами Российской Федерации, встает вопрос о том, как описывать новые явления в русском языке, когда он отклоняется от прежнего стандарта, а взаимодействие с местными языками влияет на его лексику, грамматику и произношение даже у тех, для кого он являлся родным.”
5 “Although over 90 % of Kazakhs are proficient in Russian, as a result of a deliberate policy of transition to the Kazakh language and the increasing segment of English language learning, a ‘reversing language shift’ occurred. In the country the Russian-speakers are mainly non-Russian. At the same time, Russian language absorbs more and more ‘kazakhisms’ […] Moreover, in Kazakhstan people learn from textbooks written by local groups of authors based on local Russian-language works, use dictionaries and other handbooks published in the country, and here they read local press and watch local television in Russian (that’s true, along with the one produced by the Russian Federation)” (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 237–238; Хотя русским владеет более 90 % казахов, в результате целенаправленной политики перехода на казахский язык и увеличения доли английского языка в обучении произошел «обратный языковой сдвиг.» Носителями русского языка в стране являются сегодня преимущественно нерусские. В то же время русский язык принимает все больше казахизмов. Тем более что в Казахстане учатся по учебникам, написанным местными коллективами авторов с опорой на местные русскоязычные произведения, используют изданные в республике словари и иные пособия, здесь читают собственную прессу и смотрят местное телевидение на русском (правда, наряду с российским)).”
6 As also highlighted by the Polish scholar Tomasz Kamusella in his studies on contemporary language politics: “Atypically, Russian is the only ‘big’ language of worldwide communication shared by numerous countries which (as yet?) is considered not to be pluricentric or de-ethnicized. But having recognized the sociolinguistic dynamics of this plural reality of ‘world Russians’ on the ground, it is possible to reimagine monocentric Russian as a pluricentric language.” (Kamusella 2018: 169).
7 “В русистике подобные исследования только начинаются […] работа по изучению вариантности русского языка по-прежнему вынуждена ориентироваться на эксклюзивную и нормативную модель русского, поддерживаемую научным и политическим ресурсом РФ.”
8 “[…] субъектность носителей языка: как люди отвечают на вопрос о том, кому, собственно говоря, принадлежит язык и кто имеет право на нем говорить?”
9 As Uffelmann (2019: 208) puts it: “[…] both the conspiracy theory about ‘Russophone Russophobes’ and the metalinguistic deconstruction of this assumption reveal the multiplicity of Russian political and linguistic cultures as well as the fundamental—although mediated—autonomy of culture(s) from nations, state borders, and geographic fixity.”
10 “У меня три дома — моя беларуская земля, родина моего отца, где я прожила всю жизнь, Украина, родина моей мамы, где я родилась, и великая русская культура, без которой я себя не представляю. Они мне все дороги. Но трудно в наше время говорить о любви.” Translated by Jamey Gambrell.
11 “[…] в той же степени, в которой Джойс и Йейтс — писатели ирландские, Марк Твен и Хемингуэй — американские, Маркес — колумбийский, Льоса — перуанский.”
12 “В современном мире принадлежность писателя определяется не языком, а цивилизационным выбором.”
13 “A polycentric, nonhierarchical model of global Russian cultures may be visualized as an archipelago, a chain of islands that appear independent and isolated but in fact are interconnected in space, as well as time, often owing their origin to a series of volcanic eruptions” (Rubins 2019: 24).
14 “With her cycle Svetlana Alexievich has established herself as the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism: the daughter of a Ukrainian and Belarusian who uses the Russian language—the only language in which she is completely fluent—to collect and present, from her own subaltern perspective, subaltern accounts of the traumas inflicted by empire” (Oushakine 2016: 12).
15 “[…] this book uses the term ‘postcolonial Europe’ in a new way; rather than designating the former West European colonial powers, as it has been used by the postcolonial discourse, it indicates here the Central and East European countries formerly under Soviet domination, pointing to the fact that all of Europe is postcolonial, but in different ways, and arguing that this region should play a major role in the current debates in postcolonial studies on European identity” (Pucherová, Gáfrik 2015: 13–14).
16 “a) Are they postcolonial on the level of socio-political conditions? b) Or are they, alternatively, postcolonial on the level of a (post-) colonial mind? c) Or are they just postcolonial on the level of postcolonial modes of representation with the means of literature” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 14).
17 As highlighted by Ilya Gerasimov and Marina Mogilner (2015: 718), “the main limitation of modern postcolonial theories stems from their genealogical dependence on the phenomenon of colonizing empire and hence the inability to contemplate a truly postcolonial reality that is indifferent to the imperial past (not obeying imperial legacy or constantly struggling with it).”
18 It is not by chance that recently in a special issue of the Russian journal The New Literary Observer (2017), Smola and Uffelmann’s attention has been further devoted to the literary construction of postcolonial ethnicity in the yet overlooked field of non-Russian Russophone literatures in the Russian Federation and the Near Abroad: “The literary texts under scrutiny somehow problematise the relationship between Russian and non-Russian, starting with the ‘mirror’ (according to Lacan) merging in the context of Soviet multinational literature and ending with the models of de(con)struction and parody implemented by the authors of the latest period. By means of rhetoric, tropes, linguistic hybridity and performative analysis of ideological models, the authors under scrutiny critically rethink the same constructions of ethnicity” (Smola, Uffel’mann 2017: 425; Исследуемые нами литературные тексты так или иначе проблематизируют соотношение русского и нерусского –– начиная с их «зеркального» (по Лакану) слияния в контексте советской многонациональной литературы и кончая образцами де(кон)струкции и травестирования у авторов новейшего периода. С помощью риторики, тропов, языковой гибридности и перформативного анализа идеологических моделей выбранные нами авторы критически переосмысляют сами конструкции этнического).
19 “[…] first, because it is descriptive, rather than prescriptive; and second, because the term is not ethnically, politically, or geographically specific. Its only central criterion for inclusion is the participation in Russian-language discourse. As such it provides a space for viewing authors of a variety of cultural backgrounds and historical periods. Above all the introduction of Russophonia is an attempt to step away from the classification of literature by nationality (so beloved by the Soviets), and instead to rely on the social and linguistic realities inherent in the production of texts and the multi-faceted structuring of identity.” (Caffee 2013: 20–21).
20 “Cultural appropriation in the Francophone world is not simply a matter of assimilation of the Francophonie to France, of mimicking or imitating the colonizer. The local and the global are interrelated, and the old opposition of center and margin is no longer tenable” (Hart 1997: 157).
21 “Украину можно рассматривать как пример постколониальных синдромов без колониализма.”
22 As Mikhail Berg noted already in 2004: “For the Russian consciousness, the process of colonisation was more than controversial, since Russians, who saw themselves as an imperial nation, still nowadays feel not so much like colonisers as liberators (of European countries from the fascist yoke, of the countries in the Far East and Africa from the advancing American imperialism, and—even earlier—of the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia from the aggressive politics of Turkey […] in other words, the postcolonial discourse has not undergone a social process of deconstruction, and for this reason in the future we will also talk more often about a post-imperial, rather than postcolonial, situation—although they structurally and chronologically coincide in many respects” (Berg 2004; Для русского сознания процесс колонизации был более, чем противоречивым, так как русские, ощущавшие себя имперской нацией, до сих ощущают себя не столько колонизаторами, сколько освободителями — стран Европы от ига фашизма, стран Дальнего Востока и Африки от наступающего американского империализма, еще раньше бывших советских республик Кавказа и Средней Азии от агрессивной политики Турции — […] Иначе говоря, постколониальный дискурс не подвергся общественной процедуре деконструкции, поэтому в дальнейшем мы также будем чаще говорить о постимперской, а не постколониальный ситуации, хотя они структурно и хронологически во многом совпадают).
23 “First of all, it accounts for the spatial and historical proximity of both cultures, epitomized in the highly controversial Russian topoi of ‘bratskii narod’ [‘brother nation’] and Malorossiia [‘Little Russia’]. In addition and chronological continuation, it correlates with the involvement in the Soviet project where both, Russians and Ukrainians, undoubtedly stood much nearer to its foundation and the center of power, and were ‘more equal’ than any other representatives from the Asian, Caucasian or Baltic periphery” (Dubasevych 2016: 138).
24 “As the last national census of December 2001 indicated, more than 17 % of the population, that is, 8.5 million inhabitants, classified themselves as ethnically Russian. There is, apart from the Russians, the largest group of non-Russians, declaring Russian their mother tongue, mostly Ukrainian (14.8 % of all Ukrainians, that is about 5.5 million people), but also members of minorities other than Russian” (Besters-Dilger 2009: 7).
25 “вирішення українського питання без вирішення російського питання в найближчі десятки років неможливе.”
26 “In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Empire, the issue of the social role of the literary work and its creators has reemerged, primarily in the context of a newly earned freedom and the state’s seeming attempts at nationalizing agenda, forcing writers and intellectuals alike to negotiate cultural positions” (Rewakowicz 2018: 2).
27 “Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (Bhabha 1994: 2).
28 “Hybridity as it can be identified in Fanon is tied to revolutionary social change […] while most postcolonial theories of hybridity, in their wish to be revolutionary, tend to overstate the ability of hybridity to dismantle power structures. Glissant’s hybridity brings together reality and thought and challenges Marxian informed thinking to engage more consequentially to the idea of ‘difference.’ In this way, hybridity, as it can be gleaned from the thought of Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant […] reconnects more credibly to the impulse for the formation of postcolonial studies as a discipline” (Prabhu 2007: xiv).
29 “That is, the analysis of hybridity (and of specific instances of it) is obliged to account for historicity, while at the same time the impulses of this process are to valorize synchrony over diachrony” (Prabhu 2007: 5).
30 Amongst the most relevant Ukrainian cultural and social phenomena that are beyond the scope of this book, we should certainly mention the case of national minorities in the territory of Ukraine (i.e. among them, Bulgarians, Crimean Tatars, Romanians, Hungarians) and the role of the Ukrainian diaspora. This certainly deserves attention as well and demands different studies.
31 In light of the recognized “role reversal” in modern Russian literature, poetry has been described as more able to have global contacts and transnational connections. More often, literary scholars have devoted their attention to the peculiar concern of Russian-language poetry of the 2000s for analysing “the historical traumas of the contemporary mind” and “pointing to ways those traumas may be healed” (Kukulin 2018: 60).
