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Chapter 1 The Missing Hybridity: Framing the Ukrainian Cultural Space

At the end of the 1980s, all was still simple and straightforward. On political maps a huge part of the planet was uniformly painted red. This was the monolithic “evil empire,” the one and indivisible Soviet Union. But suddenly the country of victorious socialism was tearing apart in colourful scraps. Armenia! Kazakhstan! Uzbekistan! Kyrgyzstan! Tajikistan! And more! And more!… The Western world was in confusion. There used to be one country, now there were many. And each one, apparently, had its own history and culture, hopes and claims, disappointments, misfortunes and blood… How to relate to them? What to expect from them? What do they bring to the world?³² (Volos 2005: 439)

In the opening lines of the prologue to his novel Khurramabad (2000), the Russian writer Andrei Volos (b. 1955, Stalinabad—now Dushanbe) introduces us to the pressing cultural and political issues that have arisen from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In his novel Volos, the son of Russian immigrants in Soviet Tajikistan, aims to retrace the historical encounter between different languages, cultures and traditions in the former Soviet republic, in order to eventually shed light on the reasons behind the sociopolitical upheaval that shook the Central Asian state in ←43 | 44→the early 1990s.³³ While posing as a cultural mediator of one of the fifteen new nation states, or “colourful scraps,” that had arisen from the ashes of the “one and indivisible” USSR, Volos highlights the urgency of engaging with the investigation of the profound cultural and political consequences of the tremendous historical rift that globally affected the region.³⁴

It is undeniable that the dissolution of the Soviet system has brought into being a radical transformation that has deeply affected the reconfiguration of the political and cultural mapping of the post-Soviet space. Throughout the 1990s, the elaboration of new national cultural models in the former fifteen union republics took shape on the basis of the ideal “return to (post-ideological) normality”: languages, cultures, histories and traditions that had been neglected by Soviet rule could now come to life again after the unexpected explosion of the Soviet system. It is no surprise that in his last work, entitled Culture and Explosion (Kul’tura i vzryv, 1992), the prominent Soviet semiologist Iurii Lotman also devoted his attention to the complex dynamics of cultural change in the territory of the former Soviet Union. In his analysis of the explosive processes of cultural development, still in 1992, Lotman emblematically identified the dynamics taking place in the region as following the traditional concepts of binarism (2009: 171).³⁵

Following Lotman’s reflections, we can describe the process experienced in most of the newly born post-Soviet states at the dawn of the collapse ←44 | 45→of the Union as “the moment of exhaustion of the explosion” (moment izcherpaniia vzryva), which is “not only the originating moment of future development but also the place of self-knowledge: the inclusion of those mechanisms of history which must themselves explain what has occurred”³⁶ (Lotman 2009: 15). In such a stage of cultural development, we witness the emergence of rigid binary schemes (i.e. self vs. other; superior vs. inferior; centre vs. periphery) for describing the complexity of much more nuanced realms. Thus, a new system of signification exists to take shape from the overthrow of the old symbolic values of the previous era: such is the case of the post-Soviet region, where the flaws and faults of (Soviet) internationalism came to be contested and overruled by the new (post-Soviet) national revivals arising in the former union republics. In some cases, this gradually brought also the unreflective reactualization of the binary opposition between the (Soviet) colonizer and the (post-Soviet) colonized in national political and cultural debates.³⁷ Nonetheless, as Lotman (2009: 65) notes in his analysis of the unpredictable outcomes produced by the collision of different systems of signification in the history of culture, more often than not “the newly formed phenomenon appropriates the name of one or other of the colliding structures, such that something which is, in principle, new lies hidden under an old façade.”³⁸

Similarly, more than a decade later, in her study Post-Soviet Literature and the Aesthetics of Transculturation (Postsovetskaia literatura i estetika transkul’turatsii, 2004), Madina Tlostanova shed light on the ambivalence of the colonial model in the Soviet era and on its outcomes for the post-Soviet epistemological process. She argues that, while the whole system of signification—including language, customs and festivities of the ←45 | 46→empire—was forged by the Soviet “colonizer,” in the USSR, the colonial model “was made complex by the Soviet ideology, which in its discourse and external semiotic manifestations disguised itself as a supranational discourse, becoming a hybrid form of imperial configuration”³⁹ (Tlostanova 2004: 194). This explains the complex dynamics of the post-Soviet cultural field, where today we deal with “categorical assumptions” that make “the national language and literary canon” an integral “part of state ideology”⁴⁰ (Tlostanova 2004: 385) in the new nation states that have arisen since the explosion of the USSR.

Most fundamentally, the study of post-Soviet cultures reveals a controversial reception of transcultural subjectivities and phenomena: throughout the recent history of the region the cultural processes of appropriation, which hybrid subjectivities have been subjected to, trace back every attempt at methodological categorization to imperial/colonial binarism. Hybridity thus came to be blurred within the complex framework of ethnic groups, religions and languages. Following these lines, Tlostanova (2004: 192) in her study symbolically describes hybrid subjectivities as a “missing actor” (otsutstvuiushchii akter) in Imperial and Soviet hegemonic narratives.⁴¹

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Despite these controversial dynamics, if “on the one hand, the official Russian epistemology does not include in the field of its attention and reflection the category of hybridity due to negative attitudes towards mediality and cultural mixing,” on the other “the very history of the Russian and Soviet empires with their huge number of examples of mixed marriages, ethnic groups, religions and languages, offers a large number of subjectivities that match the hybrid model”⁴² (Tlostanova 2004: 192–193). Thus, even today the creation of new interpretive paradigms for the study of transcultural—and transnational—traditions still relies on the deconstruction of the organic bonds of nations with language, territory and literature in the post-Soviet space. I believe that the reflective adoption of postcolonial analytical tools for the study of post-Soviet societies can play a valuable role in achieving a better understanding of the reasons behind the current polarization of cultural practices and political orientations in the region—and namely in this work, in investigating the debate around the position of the “(post-)imperial” Russian language and culture in nowadays Ukraine. It is no surprise that, among the post-Soviet countries, it is especially Ukraine, with its “high degree of cultural, social and political diversity,” that arises as “a prime laboratory for the study of modern politics and culture” (Kasianov, Ther 2009: 2).

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Ukraine: A Laboratory of Political and Cultural Identity/ies

In his article provocatively entitled “Does Ukraine Have a History?” (1995), Mark Von Hagen, in the early 1990s, described how the “experienced past” of the post-Soviet country was still in search of legitimacy. Retracing the critical historical junctures affecting the configuration of the territory of modern Ukraine, Von Hagen clarified that the question “must be seen as a part of a greater dilemma of eastern and central Europe” (1995: 659): a region that was long subject first to the rule of great dynastic monarchies, that is, to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Tsarist empire and the Habsburg monarchy, and then, after the First World War, to either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. By virtue of its position on the map of Europe, Ukraine played the crucial role of a borderland “not only of different state formations” but also “of different civilizational and cultural zones” (Plokhy 2007: 37): on the one hand, this deprived it of “full historiographical legitimacy” (Von Hagen 1995: 660) in light of the statehood it had acquired only recently, while on the other it “contributed to the fuzziness and fragmentation of Ukrainian identity” (Plokhy 2007: 38).

Still nowadays, the heterogeneous historical experiences that took shape in the regions making up contemporary Ukraine hinder the actualization of a shared narrative of the past, which could function to legitimize the new state. In the 1990s, the canonization of the great national history, which was developed in opposition to the hegemonic discourses of the Polish and Russian “neighbours” during the second half of the nineteenth century and revamped in the aftermath of independence, saw the rise of a strongly contested reception.⁴³

Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866–1934) and the so-called populist school of Ukrainian historiography elaborated a national history of the Ukrainian people: its founding ideals were embodied by the myth of Cossack origins and its ideals of freedom and equality. As Andreas Kappeler notes ←48 | 49→(2009: 57): “This national myth was diametrically opposed to the ‘aristocratic’ values of the Polish nation and ‘despotic’ nature of Russia.” The appropriate metaphor proposed by Mykola Riabchuk in his essay “The Ukrainian Friday and Its Two Robinsons” (Ukraïns’kyi Piatnytsia i ioho dva Robinzony, 2013) embodies the complex directions drawn by the Polish and Russian hegemonic discourses throughout the course of modern history to essentialize the Ukrainian alternative as a choice of civilization between the “West” and the “East,” that is, between a “European-oriented” system of values and an Eastern Orthodox Slavic one. Eventually, as Yaroslav Hrytsak (2004: 232–233) notes, the post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography adopted the interpretation of Ukraine as a “civilizational borderland,” promoting it as “[t];he only major addendum to ‘Hrushevs’kyi’s scheme’.”

Still in the post-Soviet era the “teleological” character (Plokhy 2007: 30) of the Ukrainian national narrative seemed to take shape from the need to “reclaim” one’s own past, (re)creating a new (old?) system of signification based on a binary opposition to the experience of imperial oppression. However, while in the early twentieth century the national narrative was there to challenge the “All-Russian” imperial narrative and the hegemonic ambitions of a much more “westernized” Poland (Plokhy 2005), it was in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR that the definitive canonization of this “old” paradigm in the “new” state led to the crystallization of the exclusive character of contemporary Ukrainian history.⁴⁴

Despite these controversial dynamics, as Kappeler (2009: 63) notes, “[m];any personalities of Ukrainian history cannot adequately be described as Ukrainians, Russians, Poles or Jews, but their lives and historical roles have to be told as multiethnic or transethnic.” Similarly, and even more decisively, in his reconstruction of the Ukrainian cultural experience throughout the centuries, Vitaly Chernetsky (2019: 51) argues that “[i]f there is a recurring theme that can be traced through the history of Ukrainian culture, is ←49 | 50→that of hybridity and overlapping/contested identifications.” In his analysis of premodern and modern developments, Chernetsky highlights the constant interconnection between the definition of political and cultural identities in Ukrainian imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet history. In particular, the “intertwined yet distinct political and cultural realities” of Ukrainian and Russian communities, territories and languages “produced continual shifts and contestation of cultural identities” (Chernetsky 2019: 51). It is also in light of these dynamics that until “recently, the dilemmas of hybrid and split identification faced by cultural producers with ties to Ukraine more often than not remained unsolved” (Chernetsky 2019: 50).

In contextualizing the Ukrainian cultural legacy, it is worth wondering about the specific cultural positioning of authors such as Nikolai Gogol’, Taras Shevchenko, Hryhorii Skovoroda and others who worked between languages, traditions, and cultures.⁴⁵ As Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj (2003: 322) stressed, “these individuals were products of a cross-cultural experience generally unfamiliar to ethnic Russians, but typical for members of Ukrainian society.” This experience was “essentially liminal” and “dualistic in terms of language and institutions” (Ilnytzkyj 2003: 322). Whereas still at the end of the sixteenth century “Ukrainian literary texts were composed in at least three languages (Ruthenian, Polish, and Latin)” (Chernetsky 2019: 53), throughout the nineteenth century, especially, the Imperial cultural system was reconceptualized into distinct national models based on romantic vernaculars as part of an ongoing and ever-changing process, establishing new ideological frontiers between the emerging literary phenomena. The rise of the Ukrainian literary system within the “All-Russian” cultural context was thus “filtered” by the use of the Imperial lingua franca. This phenomenon gave birth to a large body of literature in Russian written by Ukrainian authors, which emerged in a composite self-positioning pattern:

Some writers, like Vasilii Kapnist, Somov, Narezhnyi and Gogol, maintained their regional Ukrainian identities while embracing Russian national identities; ←50 | 51→some, like Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Mykola Markevych, and Mykhail Drahomanov, existed as “all-Russian”; and others, like Taras Shevchenko, Panteleimon Kulish, Marko Vovchok and Mykola Kostomarov, enjoyed a more or less separate Ukrainian identity. (Ilchuk 2009: 21)

This artistic phenomenon arose from the contact between the different cultural and identity affiliations held by Ukrainian in-between literary actors. As George G. Grabowicz (1992: 232) observed, this literary production “should indeed be considered part of Ukrainian literature,” even if “there was an inescapable sense for virtually all these writers that Ukrainian literature was a subset of Imperial, All Russian literature.” Nonetheless, the Ukrainian writers who gained success at the “centre” of the empire played the important role of cultural mediators between the Russian and Ukrainian societies. In their literary depictions, the Ukrainian “periphery” was transformed and adapted to make it accessible to Russian readership: “Implicitly if not explicitly, their work tended to minimize or aestheticize the differences between Russia and Ukraine, thus discounting the inherent autonomy or ‘otherness’ of the Ukrainian historical and cultural experience” (Andriewsky 2003: 184).

The case of Nikolai Gogol’/Mykola Hohol’ (1809–1852) definitely embodies the fluid cultural dynamics of his epoch. The definition of his national identity has been at the core of intellectual and political debates in Russia and Ukraine, where his literary experience has been included in both the Russian canon (as Nikolai Gogol’) and in the Ukrainian one (as Mykola Hohol’). Reading his works, critics have mainly categorized it according to two different periods: the Ukrainian period (1829–1836), including the works devoted to “national” themes, and the Imperial period (1836–1852). Nevertheless, throughout the last decades a huge body of literature on Gogol’ has appeared, focusing especially on the hybrid aspects of this literary figure (e.g. see Grabowicz 1994; Luckyj 1998; Ilnytzkyj 2002; Bojanowska 2007). Edyta M. Bojanowska (2007: 6), in her study entitled Nikolai Gogol. Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism, stresses how the author’s national identity “cannot be framed as an either/or question […] Whether Gogol was a Russian or a Ukrainian is thus the wrong question to ask.” The periodization of Gogol’’s literary production into two distinct artistic phases seems to address the complex duality of the author’s experience by means of abstract ideological terms, ignoring the extraordinary ←51 | 52→patchwork of language, cultural and political elements involved in the formation of his identity. Gogol’’s in-between positioning underlies the ambivalence of the literary space imagined by the author. As Myroslav Shkandrij (2001: 115) stressed, “Gogol brought a Ukrainian consciousness to St. Petersburg, that is, structures of thought and feeling that were deeply critical of Russian society, which he drew upon throughout his creative life.” Ilnytzkyj (2002), moreover, has tried to define the artistic experience of Gogol’/Hohol’ as the outcome of the intersection between three cultural paradigms: the Ukrainian tradition, the Russian model and the Imperial paradigm. This entails a positioning “between cultures” that, as observed by Yuliya Ilchuk (2009), implies an artistic experience moving in an intermediate space “between languages.” It is the presence of Ukrainian and hybrid Russo–Ukrainian forms that confers a “defamiliarizing effect” onto Gogol’’s literary language: “Positioned on the ‘interstices’ of two cultures, Gogol existed in the in-between space of cultural ambivalence that diluted the imaginary essence of the Russian nation through a ‘distorted’ Russian language” (Ilchuk 2009: 19). Thus, Gogol’ gives birth to a transcultural identity model, which lies outside the rigid parameters of national canonization:

[…] I only know that I would grant primacy neither to a Little Russian over a Russian nor to a Russian over a Little Russian. Both natures are generously endowed by god, and as if on purpose, each of them in its own way includes in itself that which the other lacks—a clear sign that they are meant to complement each other.⁴⁶ (Gogol’ 1952: 418)

Gogol’’s/Hohol’’s “two-souledness” (dvoedushie) reflects the duality of the Ukrainian cultural experience: in the author’s epoch, as stated by Grabowicz (1992: 224), “the very idea of what is to be a Ukrainian writer (and indeed a ‘Ukrainian’) was in a state of becoming.” Nonetheless, in those same years the publication of Taras Shevchenko’s The Bard (Kobzar, 1940) would offer to Ukrainian intelligentsia “the articulation of an entire cultural language—a language grounded in the Cossack past, its heroic ←52 | 53→epics (dumy) and folklore, as well as a profound sense of loss and victimization” (Andriewsky 2003: 192). The new discourse was then capable of deconstructing and demystifying the entire theoretical framework elaborated by the centre of the Empire. Following these lines, it was the ideologization of literary frontiers between the All-Russian and Ukrainian cultural systems that gradually led to the harsh contestation of dual and hybrid cultural experiences:

By the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, however, those who still tried to maintain a dual Ukrainian-Russian identity were, increasingly, struggling with the issue of a divided loyalty. George Luckyj has described the choice for Ukrainians as the thorns of a dilemma: Gogol or Shevchenko? Empire or Ukraine? (Shkandrij 2001: 31)

The categorization of Nikolai Gogol’’s and Taras Shevchenko’s artistic experiences in alternative “literary spaces” makes clear their respective roles in the Ukrainian cultural paradigm through the lens of ideology.⁴⁷ As Shkandrij (2001: 108–109) emphasized: “[a];t the same time as Shevchenko was indicating the irreconcilability of Ukrainian and Russian interests, Gogol was attempting to resolve the conflict between his ‘two souls’.”

Following these lines of thought, it is no surprise “that during the Soviet period practically no efforts were made by Soviet scholars to look at Russian-language literary texts written in Ukraine as a distinct coherent corpus” (Chernetsky 2019: 57). Actually, even in post-Soviet times, the ideological legacy of the Imperial and Soviet experience has led to a failure to assimilate the notable duality of the national culture. This has happened precisely because the prehistory of “hybrid subjectivities” still “underwrites the complex processes of transformation currently underway”:

[…] precisely because Russian political and cultural imperialism has for centuries compelled Ukrainian authors to write in Russian, contemporary Ukrainian society possesses a well-developed capacity to accept Russophone linguistic and literary realities as parts of a larger Ukrainian continuum. If Nikolai Gogol’s writings are claimed as Ukrainian even if composed in Russian, it follows that ←53 | 54→exclusionary attitudes toward linguistic practices in contemporary Ukrainian literature are illogical. (Chernetsky 2019: 51)

Paradoxically, in the contemporary context, “[e];ven though it is clear to all that there is a vast difference between a forced or imposed hybridity and a freely-assumed one, the imperial-Soviet experience has made this issue a painful one for Ukrainian intellectuals” (Shkandrij 2009). Nonetheless, today it is just this kind of duality that could open the way to a new epistemological and cultural understanding of the inherent hybridity of post-Soviet realities.

Shifting Social Dynamics in Post-Soviet Ukraine

As the British historian Andrew Wilson (2000) retraces in his analysis of contemporary Ukrainian politics, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse the ground was finally ready for the emergence of a full-fledged independent state and “unexpected nation.”⁴⁸ While adopting this definition, Wilson, in the preface to his work The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (2000), symbolically addressed the surprise of the international community at witnessing the rise of a “new nation” in Europe with such “pronounced patterns of ethnic, linguistic, religious and regional diversity” (Wilson 2000: xi). Still, in 2016 Volodymyr Kulyk’s reflections seemed to confirm the peculiar persistence of this complex background, by which the Ukrainian scholar could ascertain how throughout the history of independent Ukraine “profound disagreements on the content of national identity stemmed from dissimilar ethnolinguistic profiles and historical trajectories of different regions” (2016: 593). Nevertheless, despite the stiff competition emerging in intellectual and political debates, during the last decades, the social dynamics describing the “content of national identity” were not static but rather constantly fluid and unpredictably shifting.

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According to the last national census conducted in 2001,⁴⁹ more than 130 ethnic groups live in the territory of Ukraine: among them, Ukrainians (77.8 per cent) and Russians (17.3 per cent) are the largest ones, while other major national groups are Belarusians (0.6 per cent), Moldovans (0.5 per cent), Crimean Tatars (0.5 per cent), Bulgarians (0.4 per cent), Hungarians (0.3 per cent) and Romanians (0.3 per cent). The official state language is Ukrainian (67.5 per cent of citizens indicated it as their mother tongue), but Russian (29.6 per cent) is still spoken by a large portion of the population.

Interestingly enough, “despite a decline in the population as a whole” and the insignificant migration rate of ethnic Russians to the Russian Federation, in 2001 “the number of people who declared their nationality as Ukrainian actually increased since the last Soviet census” (Stebelsky 2009: 77).⁵⁰ This was first explained as the result of an “ethnic shift” in the self-identification of Russians, who now came to reidentify themselves as Ukrainians (Kuzio 2003). However, in his comparative analysis of the data reported in the last Soviet census in 1989 and the national one in 2001, Ihor Stebelsky (2009) reflected further on the reasons behind the controversial shift in self-identification among the population of Ukraine. He contested the categories used in the first Ukrainian national census, addressing the subtle nuances around the determination of ethnic and language-based identities in post-Soviet times. Stebelsky argued that in 2001, while many people re-identified as Ukrainians, most of them still declared Russian as their native language. He explained this discrepancy as the result of the Soviet nationalities policies, in which “the Soviet Union allowed for Ukrainian as a separate ethnicity, ←55 | 56→but continued to confer a much higher status on the Russian language and culture” (Stebelsky 2009: 78–79). This background led then to a situation where “many Ukrainians have adopted Russian as their preferred language, developed ‘multiple’ or ‘hybrid’ identities, and some (notably in Crimea) have become Russian in terms of their ethnic self-identification” (Stebelsky 2009: 79). Following these lines, Stebelsky (2009: 98) significantly emphasized that it was mainly “[s];ociopolitical perceptions of identity” that “probably played a significant role in the way people responded in 2001.” Most fundamentally, in post-Soviet Ukraine ethnic identity is no longer a legal category in Ukrainians’ internal passports: this suggests that, at the dawn of the 2000s, “the identification of non-Ukrainians as citizens of Ukraine” would emblematically imply a passage “to state or civic identity” (Stebelsky 2009: 80) rather than an ethnic one.

Accordingly, we can also grasp the complexity of the Russian–Ukrainian nexus through combining the ethnic criterion with the linguistic one: looking at contemporary Ukraine through these lenses, we can see three major groups in the country, that is, Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and Russian-speaking Russians (Arel, Khmel’ko 1996). Among these, throughout the last decades sociological research has emblematically reported that the last two groups do not represent a cohesive “community,” and that their identity/ies are much more fragmented than would be expected.⁵¹

As outlined in a study conducted by researchers at the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), the definition of the ethnolinguistic structure of Ukraine can be fully comprehended only “when considering the phenomenon of individual bi-ethnicity” (Khmel’ko 2004: 15).⁵² According ←56 | 57→to surveys conducted throughout 1991–2003, Valerii Khmel’ko identified Ukrainian–Russian bi-ethnors as “the second largest ethnic group in Ukraine” (Khmel’ko 2004: 17). KIIS sociologists thus developed a “scale of bi-ethnicity,” which they projected over the territory of Ukraine:

The farther westward, the more monoethnic Ukrainians and the fewer Ukrainian-Russian bi-ethnors and monoethnic Russians we have. Conversely, the farther East and South, the fewer monoethnic Ukrainians, and the more Ukrainian-Russian bi-ethnors and monoethnic Russians […] among monoethnic Ukrainians the share of Ukrainophones is more than twice the share of Russophones, while among Ukrainian-Russian bi-ethnors, by contrast, the share of Ukrainophones is more than four time less than the share of Russophones.⁵³ (Khmel’ko 2004: 18)

These results were corroborated by other studies undertaken throughout the first decades of the twenty-first century. According to comparative research on the citizenship identities of young people in the L’viv and Donbas regions conducted by Antonina Tereshchenko in 2005–2006, it appears that “only the Donbas region in the East shared the characteristics of the traditional borderland […] in particular, with respect to cultural hybridity and undecidability as regards people’s identification” (Tereshchenko 2010: 152). Moreover, the results of a 2016 survey, Changes in the Identity of Russians and Russophones in Ukraine (Zminy identychnosti Rosiian ta Rosiis’komovnykh v Ukraïni), further revealed the dynamic evolution of the idea of nation throughout the 2000s (see UCIPR 2016). As analyst Iulia ←57 | 58→Kazdobina concludes, “a number of Russian speakers started developing their Ukrainian civic identity long before the start of the current Russian aggression [that is, the war in East Ukraine starting in 2014],” and today, “it seems that for Russian speakers, bilingualism is a way to preserve their identity while at the same time integrating into the Ukrainian political nation, where Ukrainian is gradually replacing Russian as the lingua franca” (Business Ukraine 2017).⁵⁴

The cases reported above suggest that throughout the last decades there has not been a real and static dividing line, based on the ethnolinguistic traits of the population, between the generally assumed social collectivities of “Ukrainians” and “Russians,” and “Russian speakers” and “Ukrainian speakers” in Ukraine. Indeed, this dividing line was fluid and subject to hybridizing trajectories and intersections with other identity markers. In an attempt to grasp the fluid character of post-Soviet identity affiliations, Peter W. Rodgers in 2008 recognized the regional category, rather than the ethnolinguistic one, as a suitable parameter for describing contemporary Ukraine. In his study Nation, Region and History in Post-Communist Transitions: Identity Politics in Ukraine, 1991–2006, Rodgers provided a tentative model for describing the regional composition of contemporary Ukraine: it was conventionally articulated in ten regions, according to the combination of linguistic, cultural and historical affiliations. He distinguished the Crimean Peninsula from other regions, as being “the only area of Ukraine, with an ethnic Russian majority”—according to the 2001 national census (58.5 per cent)—and the “least supportive of Ukraine’s state independence” (Rodgers 2008: 56), possessing a unique degree of political autonomy in the country until the contested annexation to the Russian Federation in March 2014. Then, he identified a southern region, including the areas of Kherson, Odesa and Mykolaïv. These territories, which were absorbed as new industrial centres into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century with the status of the province of “New Russia” ←58 | 59→(Novorossiiskaia guberniia), are characterized by a greater diffusion of the Russian language and culture, but “the region today is less urban, and ethnically Russian than other parts of Ukraine to the east” (Rodgers 2008: 57).⁵⁵ Rodgers further identifies the north-central region (Poltava, Kirovohrad, Cherkasy, Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy), acknowledging its historical specificity: this was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until the mid-seventeenth century, and includes the historical lands that were inhabited by Cossacks. It passed then under Russian control with the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), which ended the Russian–Polish war. As Rodgers (2008: 57) notes in his classification: “Although these areas were under Moscow’s control for a similar period of time as lands to the east and in the south, they have always retained a more ‘Ukrainian’ political outlook.” Significantly, even if in the late Imperial and Soviet eras the main urban centres were predominantly Russified, nowadays the population is mostly made up of Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians. Rodgers distinguishes then the western region (L’viv, Ternopil’ and Ivano-Frankivs’k) from the west-central one (Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Khmel’nyts’kyi, Rivne and Volyn’): while both are inhabited mostly by Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, the first is usually described as the historical region of Galicia (Halychyna), where under Habsburg rule the national movement emerged.⁵⁶ In the south-west region (Chernivtsi, Zakarpat’ska oblast’), Rodgers further identifies two distinct regions, Bukovyna and Zakarpattia: both were under Habsburg rule up to 1918 and have a large number of national minorities in their territories, but developed divergent historical experiences, bordering respectively modern Romania and Hungary. Finally, according to Rodger’s scheme, we have the east-central region (Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovs’k, Kharkiv) and the eastern one (Donets’k, Luhans’k). Historically, both are industrialized and ←59 | 60→Russified areas, but while the first one shows a distinct attitude towards the convergence of Ukrainian and Russian cultural legacies, the second was instead a true “showcase of socialism” (Rodgers 2008: 63), and today has turned out to be tied to a Soviet regional identity, with a predominantly Russian-speaking population.⁵⁷

Indeed, in his study, Rodgers (2008: 55) significantly identifies the potential flaws in his classification and admits that “drawing regional boundaries in Ukraine is fraught with difficulties,” especially because “such boundaries are often more fluid than rigid.” Together with Lowell W. Barrington and Erik S. Herron (2004), who previously presented a framework made up of eight distinct regions, Rodgers states that the urgency behind a more nuanced regional classification of Ukraine lies in the need to overcome the essentialization of the “divisions of Ukraine into macroregions such as ‘Eastern Ukraine’ and ‘Western Ukraine’,” which “fail to illuminate inherent differentiation among areas with contrasting historical, economic and demographic profiles” (2008: 55).⁵⁸ This kind of essentializing approach emerged consistently after the 1994 presidential elections in Ukraine, which saw the victory of Leonid Kuchma, who supported the “upgrade” of the status of the Russian language in the country and a ←60 | 61→political rapprochement with Russia, over the incumbent Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of Ukraine (1991–1994), who promoted Ukrainian as the sole state language and the country’s distancing from Russia. In public debates the voting patterns were first explained by “a neat dividing line between Ukrainian speakers to the West and Russian speakers to the East” (Rodgers 2008: 50). The essentialization of internal divisions into a binary scheme expanded then its scope from political to polemical debates in the mainstream media: the so-called two Ukraines discourse portrayed a nation split into a European-oriented, nationalist and Ukrainian-speaking West and a Russian-oriented, Soviet nostalgic and Russian-speaking East.⁵⁹ In her commentary entitled The Myth of Two Ukraines, Tatiana Zhurzhenko (2002a), at the dawn of the 2000s, observed how this controversial debate was sharpened by the so-called “ ‘Huntingtonization’ of the Ukrainian political discourse,” that is, the projection of regional differences into a clash between “two civilizations.” Paradoxically, “the most important factor of this ‘Hungtingtonization’ ” of internal divisions was an “external one”:

After the end of the Cold War and the initial euphoria caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall Ukraine found itself “in between” the new emerging geopolitical realities: between an enlarging EU and NATO on the one side, and a rather shaky re-integration of the former Soviet republics, dominated by Russia, on the other […] This uncertainty has been interpreted ideologically as a conflict of two cultural orientations and two mutually exclusive identities: European culture embodied by Western Ukraine and pan-Slavic or Eurasian culture embodied by Eastern Ukraine. (Zhurzhenko 2002a)

Whereas in the course of Ukrainian history the essentialization of the exclusive character of the national narrative took shape along an oppositional relation to external imperial hegemonic discourses, today the internal regional divisions—be they language, ethnic or historically based—re-actualize when the borders imagined by competing binary discourses ←61 | 62→harden.⁶⁰ Apparently, it is especially in the field of “literary politics” (Rewakowicz 2018: 2) where the room for “rethinking” the Ukrainian literary canon in light of contemporary sociocultural dynamics has been also hindered by such an epistemological approach.

New (Old?) Cultural Standards in the Post-Soviet Era

In the history of Ukraine, as emphasized by Marko Pavlyshyn (2016a: 78), it is especially literature that has played an important role “vis-à-vis the Ukrainian nation,” and even today “the participation of a national literature in nation-building” is taken “as axiomatic” (2016: 79). In the aftermath of the post-Soviet historical rift, the debate was not around “the possibility of a national literature,” but on “the shape that it, and its history, should take” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 79–80). While reframing the new national literary canon, it is no surprise that the question of literary bilingualism was emblematically ignored. This approach follows the dynamics of Ukrainian history, in which “[i];n the absence of a Ukrainian state, and with Ukrainian literary activity taking place in a geographical space shared by representatives of other cultures […] Ukrainian literary history writing from its inception had little cause or opportunity to do otherwise than focus on phenomena marked by their language as Ukrainian” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 81). As highlighted by George G. Grabowicz (1992: 221), at the dawn of Ukrainian independence:

[…] the Russian-language writings of Ukrainian writers are most often treated as something of an embarrassment, like a skeleton in the closet; for some they are a hedging on the writer’s national commitment. For many others, including most Western critics, this is largely a terra incognita. For virtually all, however, language is seen as determining literature: what is written in Russian belongs in the category of Russian literature.

Nonetheless, the ethnic–linguistic criterion is misleading in determining the demarcation of the Ukrainian canon from the Russian one, especially since the hybrid cultural forms have always been of particular interest for ←62 | 63→Russian and Ukrainian literatures.⁶¹ As Grabowicz argues, “language, thematic focus, ethnic origin and even territorial ties—may play a greater or less role, the issue of whether a given writer is […] a Russian or a Ukrainian writer must be resolved with finer tools.” Whereas we consider literature as the reflection of the composite sociocultural prism of an era, “if that society is, among other things, bilingual, so too will be its literature” (Grabowicz 1992: 222).

In post-Soviet Ukraine, the presence of a multicultural society characterized by an intense dialogue and contact between its heterogeneous cultural agents generates the need to create new interpretive models aimed at “rethinking” the Ukrainian canon in light of contemporary dynamics. This is especially true as we consider that “at no time in modern history prior to Ukraine’s regaining independence in 1991 had there been an opportunity or need to conceptualize, let alone construct, an overarching civic national identity that would encompass the many ethno-cultural groups inhabiting Ukraine” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 76–77). Thus, today it is also scholars in Ukrainian Studies who face the difficult task of creating new tools that can reflect the novelty of contemporary social and political developments:

A major task facing Ukrainian Studies, both in and outside Ukraine, is that of rethinking and recasting the canon of national culture […] An essential component will be the orientation of ukraïnistyka towards other cultural or minority segments in Ukraine—the Russians, Poles, Jews and so on. This is now a juridical fact and the form of the political system: Ukraine has defined itself as a multiethnic society and its new passports no longer have the Soviet-era rubric of “nationality.” But the central paradigm of ukraïnistyka as a whole […] is implicitly still ethnically Ukrainian […] A reorientation in a genuinely pluralistic direction […] would go far toward revitalizing the discipline. (Grabowicz 1995: 686–687)

←63 | 64→

Despite the vitality of Ukrainian Studies throughout recent decades, the issues raised by Grabowicz still remain unaddressed. Even today, alternative outlooks on the configuration of the “Ukrainian nation” lie in the different historical narratives of the area, leading to the institutionalization of cultural standards:

The case of Ukraine after the fall of Soviet power […] presents a vivid example of a system in which both linguistic and social values have been shifting. The Ukrainian language, which had been marginalized and denigrated relative to Russian, has become increasingly used in public urban contexts and by political and cultural leaders, some of whom had themselves been marginalized in the Soviet system […] In choices of language use and in debates about language, the previously dominant discourses clash with new discourses and practices elevating Ukrainian. (Bilaniuk 2014: 337)

Along these lines, the language issue still represents a contested benchmark even in defining what belongs—and what does not—to the national literary canon. As Grabowicz asserts, “[i];n the case of Ukrainian literature […] this confusion, which is essentially based on a dissociation of literature from its social context, has led to radical misconstructions of historical reality” (Grabowicz 1992: 221). Today, we witness the need to move further away from “the Romantic and quasi-metaphysical notion of literature as the emanation (the ‘spirit’) of a ‘nation’ ” and towards “a more rational, and certainly more empirical definition of literature as a reflection, product and function of a society” (Grabowicz 1992: 221).

Whereas “[d];espite their nationalised, politicised images, both Gogol’ and Shevchenko span the Russian-Ukrainian linguistic and cultural divide,” as argued by Uilleam Blacker (2014), in the aftermath of the post-Soviet historical rift “across contemporary Ukraine, there are dozens of writers, from sci-fi novelists to prize-winning poets, who operate across the two languages.” Among them, we deal here with those authors who belong to “the millions of people” who live outside of the political borders of the Russian Federation and “who consider Russian to be their mother tongue”⁶² ←64 | 65→(Chuprinin 2008: 6). In his study Russian Literature Today: Abroad (Russkaia literatura segodnia: zarubezh’e, 2008), Sergei Chuprinin presents a real dictionary of this literary production, which was divided by countries and cultural initiatives and realized through the support of local experts. As Chuprinin states, such a venture “is not free from inaccuracies” (ne svobodna ot nedostatkov; Chuprinin 2008: 6), especially since an in-depth analysis of Russophone literary phenomena emerging in different geographical areas of the world has not been carried out yet.⁶³ The artistic and epistemological position of these cultural actors is emblematically described by Tlostanova as a condition of vnepolozhennost’ (2004: 105): this is a “positioning outside of” the national literary and cultural canons of modernity.

Along these lines, it is no surprise that today the issue of Russian-language literature in Ukraine is still the true bone of contention in the contemporary intellectual debate. In order to understand the peculiar characteristics of this artistic milieu, in the next section we will first analyse the dynamics of the contemporary debate on hybridity, highlighting the influence and impact of the new cultural standards, which were promoted by the controversial nation-building policies in post-Soviet Ukraine, on the making of an “external canon” of today’s Russophone literature.

Post-Soviet Russophonia in Ukraine: An Intellectual (and Political) Debate

In the post-Soviet intellectual debate, as argued by Tamara Hundorova (2001: 250) in her study The Canon Reversed, “the concept of a ‘complete’ literature and its role in the cultural sphere were the focus of intense interest in the early 1990’s” (2001: 252), whereas this answered “the vision of an ←65 | 66→innovative, highly-developed Ukrainian culture that was to arise under the new conditions of national independence and freedom.” This was followed soon by “the appeal to a European-type modern Ukrainian literature,” which could legitimate “the repossession of the literary canon” (Hundorova 2001: 253) after the collapse of the Soviet regime.

Within this frame of reference, throughout the late 1990s it was especially the great success of Russian-language mass literature that brought again to centre stage the debate on the issue of literary bilingualism in independent Ukraine:

The reverse canon of the 1990s embraced not only Ukrainian-language but also Russian-language mass literature. The preceding literary canon was monocultural and excluded works by Ukrainian authors written in Russian. In the 1990s Russian mass literature swamped the Ukrainian book market […] Some Russian-language authors, such as Andrei Kurkov and Marina and Sergei Diachenko, live and work in Ukraine and call themselves Ukrainian writers. (Hundorova 2001: 269)

In light of the rise of this highly successful literary phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine, the debate came to be around the definition of the role and position of Russian-language literature within the new national cultural model. In an article provocatively entitled “The Smell of Dead Words: Russophone Literature in Ukraine” (“Zapakh mertvogo slova. Russkoiazychnaia literatura na Ukraine,” 1998), the Russian philosopher and politologist Andrei Okara first addressed the issue in the broader public debate. His article was first published in Nezavisimaia Gazeta in Russia on February 25, 1998, and then reissued in Ukraїns’ka Pravda in Ukraine ten years later, thus offering a wider perspective on the peculiar reception of the question in both the countries. Okara analyses the “peripheral” position of this literary phenomenon, emphasizing its distance from both the Russian literary system and the Ukrainian one. According to the author, it is the same Russophone writers who do not know how to describe their own positioning in the contemporary cultural context:

It is still not clear how to relate to what is written in Russian in Ukraine: should we consider this literature as a Ukrainian national literature in Russian [ukrainskaia natsional’naia literatura na russkom iazyke]? Or as a separate branch of the All-Ukrainian cultural process, i.e. the literature of a national minority? Or maybe as a part of Russian [rossiiskaia] culture, i.e Russian [russkaia] literature in the New ←66 | 67→Abroad? Probably, the writers themselves are tormented in search of identification for their own literary production.⁶⁴ (Okara 2008)

According to Okara, the birth of a real literary movement is not possible due to the different tendencies and heterogeneous forms of Russohone literature. He identifies two paths for the potential development of Russophone literature in Ukraine: a high literature and a mass literature. The first is considered of little interest, as it has an absence of real masters. The second is labelled as a mere commercial brand without any aesthetic value.

According to Okara, this bleak outlook relies on the status of the Russian language in Ukraine: a dead language, uprooted from the metropolis and from its natural place of development and characterization. To give life to a “high” literature in Russian, it is necessary to live in the “homeland of the Russian language.”⁶⁵ Okara thus argues that the “peripheral” role of Russophone literature in the Ukrainian cultural context depends on the same function performed by the Russian language in Ukraine: the cultural “diglossia” of contemporary Ukraine, where “an elite culture” (elitarnaia kul’tura) is created in one language and the other language is used only in “everyday life” (v bytu), determines respectively the different paths and destinies of Ukrainophone and Russophone literary productions. Eventually, following Okara’s reflections, only a “high” literature in Ukrainian can prospectively take shape in post-Soviet Ukraine.

←67 | 68→

Okara’s article was soon followed by Mikhail Nazarenko’s response in his “About the Dead and Living Words” (“O mertvom i zhivom slove,” 1998), which originally appeared online in early September of the same year.⁶⁶ Nazarenko, a Ukrainian Russian-language writer and professor of history of Russian literature at the Institute of Philology of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, dismantled Okara’s stance on the grounds of the vitality of Russian language and culture in post-Soviet Ukraine:

The reality is that for a rather large percentage of Ukrainian citizens the Ukrainian language is the second native language after Russian […] Clearly, their culture is and will always be on the border between the Russian culture and the Ukrainian one. And here the question is not about the existence of this culture—which is quite evident—but first of all on the self-determination, the self-awareness of this ←68 | 69→culture. Until recently it was part of the Russian/Soviet culture, thus no need for self-determination arose.⁶⁷ (Nazarenko 1998)

According to Nazarenko, it is precisely the liminal position of Russian-language literature, at the crossroads between two linguistic and cultural systems, that provides the Ukrainian Russophone writer with a peculiar role with respect to the Russian and Ukrainian traditions. In his view, the birth of a “marginal” cultural phenomenon involves a slow process of self-definition within the new literary space:

So, if before 1991 (the date is, of course, conditional) the Russophone writer of Ukraine [russkoiazychnyi pisatel’ Ukrainy] thought to be part of a well-defined system, then now, in order to preserve his own identity, he has to realise his own particular position in relation to the literary processes in Russia and Ukraine […] Everything new in art is created as usually in marginal areas, “on the margins” of the ossified official culture. There is no other way. Otherwise, the only alternative can be assimilation, or “internal emigration.” The Ukrainian school of Russian literature (or the Russian school of Ukrainian literature?) has not taken shape yet, and, probably, will not take shape soon, but, nevertheless, it will arise.⁶⁸ (Nazarenko 1998)

Okara’s and Nazarenko’s positions reflect the two main directions of the cultural debate in the 1990s.⁶⁹ Language as an instrument of artistic ←69 | 70→expression and its social role in the new post-Soviet nation are the main issues around which the alternative interpretations of the position of the Russophone phenomenon within the frame of the Ukrainian national canon took shape. There is no doubt that the debate intensified especially in light of the unprecedented freedom and opportunities enjoyed by cultural actors in the national literary arena in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. As retraced by Ihor Kruchyk in his 2014 article “Children of a Soviet Widow” (“Dity radians’koї vdovy”), “under the new circumstances some writers founded their own publishing houses or journals,”⁷⁰ and much more often than in Soviet times we witnessed the publication of Russian-language anthologies and the birth of literary prizes and festivals. Broadly speaking, on the one hand in Ukraine, together with “the possibility of publishing,” “the construction of de-ideologised hierarchies” in the literary field became conceivable; on the other in Russia, “magazines and publishing houses began to print ‘new Russians’ from Ukraine much more intensely than it was in Soviet times” (Kruchyk 2014).⁷¹

It was throughout the 2000s, then, that the highly controversial internal political debate in Ukraine, together with the deterioration of social and political relations with the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin, further polarized the intellectual community around the language issue. Whereas at the dawn of the new millennium Taras Kuzio could observe how the Ukrainian “post-Soviet nation- and state-building project” was “therefore bound up with a debate over how this identity will be constituted and in what manner its neighbours will be ‘Others’ ” (2001: 358), it was still language that represented “an important aspect of creating difference for the ‘Self’ in the relation to the ‘Other’ ” (2001: 348). Within this frame, in the national intellectual and political context we gradually witnessed the formation of “language ideologies” (Kulyk 2007), marking conventional boundaries between the Ukrainophone and the Russophone discourses:

←70 | 71→

I distinguish these discourses on the basis of respective language ideologies, which represent the language processes of Ukraine as a relationship of interaction/struggle between the two main languages and their language groups (or rather ethnical-language, following the traditional tie between language and ethnicity, and the absence of a clear distinction between ethnic and language identities in Ukrainian society), and I define them as Ukrainophone [ukrainofonnyi] and Russophone [rusofonnyi] […] The characterising trait of the Russophone and Ukrainophone discourses is their orientation in defense of the interests of their “own” group at the expense of the “other’s” interests.⁷² (Kulyk 2007: 300)

Thus, the language debate came to be not only “about ‘form’, but also about ‘content’ ” (Zhurzhenko 2002b: 17). As Zhurzhenko emphasized (2002b: 17), the language debate involved broader cultural perspectives on the content of the national identity, especially whereby gradually “[i];n independent Ukraine a hierarchy of cultures (and languages) has emerged and Ukrainian has turned out not to be dominant.” The contested ideologization of culture in the internal political debate led historical memory and language categories to acquire a conventional social relevance, reflecting the interests of competitor groups on a regional and a national scale (Zhurzhenko 2002b; Bilaniuk 2005; Moser 2013). Thus, even if the country’s cultural policies were generally “flexible and gradualist” and “the identities and cultural practices associated with them” have been “very fluid” (Giuliano 2019), it was paradoxically after the so-called “revolutionary cycles” in 2004–2005 (“Orange Revolution”)—and then in 2013–2014 (“Euromaidan Revolution”), as emphasized by Minakov (2018: 61), that “the Ukrainian political space converted itself into a ‘conservative situation’ ”. In this ideological field “created by binary oppositions,” it is the state that offers “value orientations for sociopolitical interaction” (Minakov 2018: 58). Deprived of space for ideological opponents, “ongoing political antagonism in Ukraine has come to characterize relations […] between ←71 | 72→ethno-linguo-cultural groups” (Minakov 2018: 62) supporting two different types of conservatism: “one calling for the preservation of ‘national statehood’, and another one characterized by a desire to protect Soviet ‘achievements’ and to overcome ethnicity” (Minakov 2018: 62). The ideological field has thus been alternatively appropriated and used by regional financial–political groups (see Minakov 2019) while promoting their political campaigns, creating the ground for polarization and contestation over opposite identity projects in the Ukrainian public debate. Thus, the Orange Revolution—a series of civil protests taking place primarily in Kyiv from November 2004 to January 2005, which brought about the decision to annul the victory of Viktor Ianukovych in the run-off vote of the 2004 presidential elections following allegations of electoral fraud—first “opened the Pandora’s box of identity politics and deepened regional cleavages in Ukraine” (Zhurzhenko 2014a: 255). On the one hand, Viktor Iushchenko’s Our Ukraine appropriated and rehabilitated Ukrainian nationalism in the “essentialized” version of Galicia in the West, and on the other Viktor Ianukovych’s Party of Regions in the “electoral fortresses of Donetsk and Luhansk drew on neo-Soviet symbols and narratives” (Zhurzhenko 2014a: 255). Until 2014, as Gorbach (2019) emphasized, “this kind of polarization was a game for two players,” which “used this tool to easily harvest votes in their respective, more or less equally sized, regions.”

It was not by chance that in 2011 Abel Polese, in his study on language and identity in Ukraine, could still wonder: ‘Was it really nation-building?’ (Polese 2011).⁷³ State interference in cultural processes made harsher the struggle in the domestic sphere, which came to have a rather contradictory ←72 | 73→pattern in terms of state-led policies on the eve of Euromaidan. Thus, if under Leonid Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine (1994–2005), we witnessed an ambivalent course of national cultural policies,⁷⁴ it was in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution that under Iushchenko (2005–2010) the new political elite “sought to build an inclusive civic identity but put it on a strong Ukrainian ethnocultural basis” (Kulyk 2016: 593). The tension then reached its zenith during Viktor Ianukovych’s presidency (2010–2014), when in July 2012 the new law On the Fundamentals of the State Language Policy (Pro zasady derzhavnoï movnoï polityky)—n. 5029-VI, submitted by deputies Serhii Kivalov and Vadym Kolesnichenko, was passed. Eventually, this new bill on the protection of minority languages secured the official use of Russian in many regions “not alongside but instead of Ukrainian” (Riabchuk 2015: 147).⁷⁵ Riabchuk’s commentary on the passing of the law clearly reveals the impact of the controversial cultural policies adopted under Ianukovych’s presidency on the intellectual debate:

The bright idea of European bilingualism has been rejected by Ukrainophones because they do not believe it is viable in a lawless post-Soviet country, quite reasonably suspecting that any bilingualism here would be Soviet, rather than European. And Russophones are not interested in European bilingualism because they still enjoy the Soviet-style bilingualism that suits their needs much better. All they need is merely to legitimize their right to ignore Ukrainian and to preclude any possibility of changes. The Kivalov-Kolesnichenko bill is just one of many attempts to ensure the dominance of one group over another. (Riabchuk 2012)

←73 | 74→

The proliferation of commentaries and interviews in which contemporary writers and literary critics debated the language issue, in the period shortly preceding the outbreak of the Euromaidan protests in November 2013, highlights the high level at which the political discourse interfered in the cultural one. Between February and March 2013, for instance, Iryna Troskot, lead editor of the web portal LitAktsent,⁷⁶ gathered together in a debate with some of the main representatives of Ukrainian literature. In her introduction entitled On the Language and the Debate (Pro movu i dyskusiiu), Troskot describes this venture as an attempt to understand “the importance of the language criterion for defining the author’s belonging to the national culture”⁷⁷ (Troskot 2013) in light of the urgency of the matter. All the writers taking part in the discussion “write, speak and think in Ukrainian” (Troskot 2013).⁷⁸ If on the one hand the poet and prose writer Marianna Kiianovs’ka (b. 1973, Nesterov—today Zhovkva) argues that the language is only “one of the instruments of spiritual transformation”⁷⁹ (LitAktsent 2013a)—mentioning many artistic personalities who have worked between different languages and cultures throughout history, on the other Taras Prokhas’ko (b. 1968, Ivano-Frankivs’k) considers it as the product of environmental factors that determine a specific type of mentality. For Prokhas’ko, “literature embodies the life of the language” and its possible articulations: it follows that “for one literature” we will have only “one language”⁸⁰ (LitAktsent 2013a). Along the same lines, Liudmyla Taran (b. 1954, Kyiv) attributes to the language a “symbolic power”⁸¹ (LitAktsent 2013b).

←74 | 75→

In contrast, the reflections offered by Volodymyr Dibrova (b. 1951, Donets’k), a Ukrainian prose writer who moved to the United States in the 1990s, reveal a more complex picture. Dibrova identifies three different approaches to the issue. First, for the literary critic it is a question of a theoretical nature: “the writers who write in a language, but consider themselves, or are considered, belonging to another literary system are today a rare case”⁸² (LitAktsent 2013b). Second, for the writer the definition of his identity affiliation is not “a central or significant issue for the purposes of his artistic production”⁸³ (LitAktsent 2013b). The language is an artistic “instrument,” which the writer uses in order to distance himself from his political, ideological and religious convictions (LitAktsent 2013b). Finally, Dibrova argues that it is the perspective of the Ukrainian reader that highlights “the contradiction in terms of the contemporary cultural situation”⁸⁴ (LitAktsent 2013b). This is rooted in the belief that todays’ factor of consolidation in Ukrainian society is not the State, nor the territory or ethnic origins, but the language itself. Following these lines, Tetiana Maliarchuk (b. 1983, Ivano Frankivs’k), Ukrainian-language and—since 2014—German-language prose writer, underlines how the language question gradually made the same actors of the contemporary cultural scene “soldiers” (soldaty) in a “war of words.” According to Maliarchuk the question becomes quite complex when the state identifies itself in “language and culture”:

Today’s Ukraine is not monocultural. But none of the parties wants to accept it. Among these, the Russian and the Ukrainian sides are the strongest ones […] These two forces can be defined in terms of relationships that I conventionally divide into assimilation, opposition and collaboration. I hope I will never experience the first of these. The last one would be ideal, but for some reason no one supported the example of Switzerland with its four official languages and dozens of dialects.⁸⁵ (LitAktsent 2013c)

←75 | 76→

Serhii Zhadan (b. 1974, Starobil’s’k) then highlights the contradictions of the language criterion for the definition of the national literary canon, “especially in a country like ours where literature is created in two languages”⁸⁶ (LitAktsent 2013c). Zhadan addresses the emblematic case of “the literature written in Russian,” pointing out that it “is automatically recognized as part of the cultural heritage of Russian literature, while the same possibility that this body of texts could belong to the Ukrainian culture is ignored in most of the cases”⁸⁷ (LitAktsent 2013c). The reasons behind this exclusion can be recognized in the identification of the Russophone literary phenomenon with the remains of the imperial legacy, as argued by Petro Tarashchuk (b. 1956, Vinnytsia). According to the Ukrainian translator and journalist, “the insidious discourses on Ukrainian literary bilingualism are an attack on the Ukrainian language”⁸⁸ (LitAktsent 2013d), a new stage of the “linguicide” (lingvotsyd) orchestrated over the centuries by Russia. Along these lines, according to Prokhas’ko, the same concept of “Russophone literature of Ukraine [rosiis’komovna literatura Ukraїny]” is “nonsense”⁸⁹ (nonsens; LitAktsent 2013a). The “pro-Ukrainian beliefs” (proukraїns’ki perekonannia) of a Russophone writer are not enough to make him an integral part of national literature:

We can talk about a writer who lives in France and writes in German, but we will not consider him part of French literature. In the same way, we will consider as a Ukrainian writer who writes in that language. For this reason, I cannot consider ←76 | 77→the works […] written in Russian as part of Ukrainian literature, although they may reveal another kind of mentality than that typical of the north of Russia, or express pro-Ukrainian or even nationalistic beliefs. It will not be Ukrainian literature.⁹⁰ (LitAktsent 2013a)

A possible answer to Prokhas’ko’s stance is offered by the poet Natalka Bilotserkivets’ (b. 1954, Kuianivka), who argues for “the distinction between the concept of literature as a purely linguistic phenomenon, and that of national culture as a polyphonic phenomenon”⁹¹ (LitAktsent 2013e). In her opinion, this approach could be useful to free us “from the various speculations about who is to be considered a Ukrainian writer and who is not”⁹² (LitAktsent 2013e). Similarly, according to Ostap Slyvyns’kyi (b. 1978, L’viv), a poet and professor of Polish literature at the Ivan Franko National University of L’viv, such speculations around the “indeterminacy” of Russophone literature arise precisely from the clash between “the institutions of the Ukrainian national literature and the Russian one”⁹³ (instytutsiї ukraїns’koї ta rosiis’koї natsional’nykh literatur; LitAktsent 2013 f).

Finally, the question about the role and position of Russian writing in contemporary Ukraine is properly raised by Vira Aheieva and Rostyslav Semkiv, literary critics and professors at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, in their articles published in LitAktsent following the writers’ commentaries. In “Can There Be a ‘Russian Literature of Ukraine’?” (“Chy mozhe vidbutysia ←77 | 78→‘rosiis’ka literatura Ukraїny’?”), Aheieva shifts the attention to the role played by the cultural institutions, and in particular to the dynamics of the literary market and cultural policies. Opening her contribution with the assumption that “the home of a writer is his language”⁹⁴ (Aheieva 2013), Aheieva identifies the reasons behind the inconsistency of the Russian literature of Ukraine in the failure of Soviet institutions to develop such a cultural paradigm even under conditions of full support. According to Aheieva, today the problem finds its origins in the lack of a true cultural policy in post-Soviet Ukraine: with “state support for the publication of books and the growth of the national literary market,” the question concerning the role of Russophone literature “would probably not be of great interest to most of our citizens”⁹⁵ (Aheieva 2013).

In his “The Cold War of Language” (“Kholodna movna viina”), Semkiv then investigates the role of Russophone literature through the lens of the new relational dynamics between the old Russian “metropolis” (metropoliia) and the Ukrainian “former colony” (kolyshnia koloniia). As emphasized in the very title of the article, according to the scholar, today we witness the beginning of a new “cold war” of language: the former “centre” does not renounce its sphere of influence, while in Ukraine the imperial legacy is dangerously tolerated for the sake of “democratic openness” (Semkiv 2013a). Semkiv (2013a) does not deny “the right of a local author to write in the Russian language and to identify himself as a Ukrainian writer,” but excludes room for “institutional recognition”⁹⁶ (instytutsiine vyznannia; Semkiv 2013a): the inclusion of the literary production in Russian in the national canon “cannot take place until the Northern neighbor takes concrete steps of institutional support of our culture within its borders”⁹⁷ (Semkiv 2013a). Eventually, Semkiv recognizes the existence of a contemporary Russophone literature in Ukraine, but emblematically describes it ←78 | 79→as the “quintessence of the colonial/postcolonial condition” (kvintesentsiia kolonial’noï/post kolonial’noï sytuatsiï). The hybridity experienced by the Russophone writer, which is described in the article as a “drama” (drama), is seen by Semkiv as the true motivation behind his belonging to the Russian canon: “(unless he declares something different), to him (or to her) the center of gravity will always remain the capital of the old metropolis”⁹⁸ (Semkiv 2013a).

In Search of a New Self-Determination

Analysis of the extremely heterogeneous ideas about the frame of the Ukrainian cultural space, which has been under scrutiny in this chapter, may help disclose the reasons behind the polarization of the post-Soviet intellectual debate on Russophonia: the complex prehistory of hybridity and the ideological projection of the present onto the past cultural experience; the persistence of old cultural standards in the face of new sociopolitical realia; and, last but not least, the misuse of cultural categories in the contemporary political debate. All these factors contributed to the current state of displacement of Russophone literature, lying in-between the Ukrainian and Russian cultural systems.

As Kruchyk (2014) emphasized, “the Russian literature of Ukraine [Rosiis’ka literatura Ukraïny] is currently experiencing a painful period of self-determination.”⁹⁹ Most fundamentally, this process plays an undeniable role in the demarcation of both the boundaries of the national literary space and the national identity project in Ukraine. Today, the ←79 | 80→alternative conceptualizations of cultural categories in the political discourse are mirrored in a still ambivalent national literary space: interestingly, over the last decades, among Russophone intellectuals a process of reflection has taken shape with the aim of voicing the long-awaited self-determination.

←80 | 81→

32 “Еще в конце восьмидесятых годов все было просто и понятно. Огромный кусок планеты на политических картах однородно закрашивался красным. Это была монолитная «империя зла,» единый и неделимый Советский Союз. И вдруг страна победившего социализма стала расползаться на разноцветные лоскуты. Армения! Азербайджан! Казахстан! Узбекистан! Киргизия! Таджикистан! И еще! И еще!… Западный мир пришел в замешательство. Была одна страна –– стало много. И в каждой, оказывается, –– своя история и культура, свои собственные надежды и претензии, свои разочарования, беды и кровь… Как к ним относиться? Чего от них ждать? Что они несут миру?”

33 In 1992–1997, in Tajikistan, one of the most violent civil wars in the post-Soviet space erupted, leading to “over 50,000 deaths and more than 250,000 refugees” (Heathershaw 2009: 21).

34 Indeed, in Khurramabad Volos’ narrative about post-Soviet Tajikistan remains quite open to new ideological projections of the Soviet experience. As Clemens Günther and Svetlana Sirotinina (2019: 88) put it: “Although the novel is not free from traces of Soviet nostalgia, their characters are not longing for a return to the Soviet Union but rather for a utopian Eurasian space in whose hybridity they could peacefully co-exist.”

35 Most fundamentally, as the Soviet semiologist further develops in his semiotic theory of culture: “In binary structures, moments of explosion rupture the continuous chain of events, unavoidably leading not only to deep crises but also to radical renewals” (Lotman 2009: 169) [В бинарных структурах моменты взрыва могут разрывать цепь непрерывных последовательностей, что неизбежно ведет к глубоким кризисам, но и к коренным обновлениям (Lotman 2000: 144)].

36 “В сфере истории это не только исходный момент будущего развития, но и место самопознания: включаются те механизмы истории, которые должны ей самой объязнить, что произошло” (Lotman 2000: 23).

37 This was still harshly criticized in 2012 by the British scholar Neil Lazarus. While resisting the idea of the USSR as an imperial power, Lazarus pointed to the alleged “experientially based and viscerally felt ‘post-communism’ of scholars in the post-Soviet sphere” (2012: 121).

38 “[…] новое явление очень часто присваивает себе наименование одной из столкнувшихся структур, на самом деле скрывая под старым фасадом нечто принципиально новое” (Lotman 2000: 63).

39 “[…] усложнялась советской идеологией, которая на словах и в своих внешних семиотических проявлениях маскировалась под наднациональный дискурс, в результате сама становясь гибридной формой имперской конфигурации.”

40 In her study, Tlostanova extensively argues for the urgency of addressing “the deconstruction of previously categorical assumptions concerning the lasting organic connection of the territory, the state and people, language, literature and nation, according to which the national language and literary canon became part of state ideology” (2004: 385; деконструкция прежде непререкаемых представлений о прочной органической связи территории, государства и народа, языка, литературы и нации, в соответствии с которыми национальный язык и национальная канонизированная литература становились частью государственной идеологии).

41 As Tlostanova puts it: “[…] the hybrid, interethnic and intercultural identification was not recognised or was reduced to a single dominant element, thus greatly simplifying the psychological model and the epistemological configuration of the hybrid subject. The writer was thus forced, unintentionally, to reach out to a well-defined ethnocultural and linguistic model, and rarely had the possibility of finding his own realization as a hybrid subjectivity, in the full sense of the word (2004: 194; […] гибридная межэтническая и межкультурная идентификация отрицалась или сводилась к одному доминирующему элементу, заметно упрощавшему психологический рисунок и эпистемологическую конфигурацию гибридного субъекта. Писатель тем самым невольно был вынужден тяготеть к определенной этнокультурной модели и языковой, редко имея возможность реализовать себя в полном смысле слова как гибридного индивида).

42 “[…] с одной стороны, официальная российская эпистемология не включает в поле своего внимания и осмысления категорию гибридности в силу отрицательного отношения к медиальности и культурному смешению […] с другой стороны, сама история Российской и Советской империй с их огромным количеством примеров смешанных браков, этносов, религий и языков, представляет большое количество реальных субъектностей, отвечающих гибридной модели.”

43 As the Ukrainian historian Georgii Kas’ianov (2009: 11) notes: “The year 1991 became the turning point […] Nationalized history began to fulfill important instrumental functions: legitimize the newly established state and its attendant elite; establish territorial and chronological conceptions of the Ukrainian nation; and confirm the appropriateness of that nation’s existence as a legal successor in the consciousness of its citizens and neighbours alike.”

44 As Andreas Kappeler put it in 2009: “Ukrainian history was mostly a narrative of suffering and martyrdom under the rule of foreign elites and states. Poles, Russians and Jews living in Ukraine were perceived as agents of foreign rule and oppressors of the Ukrainian people. There was no positive place for them in the Ukrainian national narrative and in the collective memory of Ukrainians, nor is there one today” (2009: 57).

45 Here my research will be mainly focused around the complexity of Ukrainian–Russian relations. An analysis of the colonial history of Polish domination in Western Ukraine and its impact on Ukrainian culture and society, which has been the focus of several studies published in the last decade (e.g. see Korek 2007; Ładykowski 2015), lies outside the scope of this work.

46 “Знаю только то, что никак бы не дал преимущества ни малороссиянину перед русским, ни русскому пред малороссиянином. Обе природы слишком щедро одарены Богом, и как нарочно каждая из них порознь заключает в себе то, чего нет в другой, — явный знак, что они должны пополнить одна другую.”

47 The controversial reception of Gogol’ and Shevchenko has been under the focus of several studies for decades (e.g. Luckyj 1971; Grabowicz 1982). In this section I touched on some of the crucial points of the issue; however, an in-depth analysis of the debate lies outside the scope of this book.

48 According to the British scholar, after the unexpected explosion of the USSR in Ukraine, symptomatically “there was no real revolution” (Wilson 2015: 102). Wilson identifies the alliance between the Communist elite and the “minority nationalist movement” as the key to understanding the reasons behind the political opportunity to support Ukrainian independence in 1991. In his view, this explains “why the country tried to have two catch-up revolutions in 2004 [i.e. the Orange Revolution] and 2014 [i.e. the Euromaidan Revolution].”

49 See: http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/ (08/2019). The second All-Ukrainian population census was postponed several times throughout the second decade of the 2000s. At the time of the writing of this book (July 2019), the new census has been scheduled to be held in late 2020.

50 As Ihor Stebelesky (2009: 77) highlights in his study entitled Ethnic Self-Identification in Ukraine, 1989–2001: Why More Ukrainians and Fewer Russians?: “While their numbers [i.e. the numbers of Ukrainians] increased from 37.4 to 37.5 million, or by 122.6 thousand, the number of those who declared their nationality Russian decreased from 11.4 to 8.3 million, or by about 3 million people. As a result, the share of the declared Ukrainians and Russians shifted dramatically, from 72.7 and 22.1 percent in 1989, to 78.1 and 17.3 percent, respectively, in 2001.”

51 In his comprehensive reconstruction of Russians’ and Russophones’ identity formation in Ukraine, Kulyk (2019a) retraced the origins and nuances of the sociological debate around the issue in the last decades. For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting that here we report only some of the crucial dynamics of the point in question.

52 As the KIIS sociologist Valerii Khmel’ko explained in an interview for Radio Liberty: “[…] after the standard question about nationality—what nationality do you consider yourself—we also ask another question: do you consider yourself only a Ukrainian or only a Russian, or to some extent do you consider yourself both? As a result, it turned out that a quarter of the population consists of people who—in one way or another—do not consider themselves monoethnic. Most of these people […] are Russian-Ukrainian bi-ethnors” (Fanailova 2014a; […] после стандартного вопроса о национальности, кем вы себя считаете по национальности, задаем еще дополнительный вопрос: считаете ли вы себя только украинцем или только русским, или в какой-то мере считаете себя так же и другим. В результате выяснилось, что у нас четверть населения –– это люди, которые в той или иной мере себя считают не одноэтничными. Больше всего таких людей […] это русско-украинские биэтноры).

53 “Чим далі на Захід, тим більше моноетнічних украïнців, і тим менше украïно-російських біетнорів та моноетнічних росіян. І навпаки, чим далі на Схід і Південь, тим менше моноетнічних укрaїнців, і тим більше украïно-російських біетнорів та моноетнічних росіян […] серед моноетнічних украïнців частка украïномовних більш ніж вдвічі перевищує частку російськомовних, а серед украïно-російських біетнорів, навпаки, частка украïномовних більш ніж вчетверо менше за частку російськомовних.”

54 The study was conducted by the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research (UCIPR) and based on six focus groups from regions under the control of the Kyiv government (L’viv, Kyiv, Kramators’k, Kharkiv, Vinnytsia and Kherson, April–May 2016).

55 Since 2014, in the aftermath of the contested annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, the term “Novorossiia” has emblematically experienced a new resurgence in Russian nationalist circles, based on its dual meaning in announcing a “new Russia” including the territories of the former imperial province (Laruelle 2016).