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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