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