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).
Part I: From Culture to Politics— Displaced Hybridity/ies (1991–2013)
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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”