Today, the contested encounters of the Russian language and culture with other languages, cultures and traditions in the post-Soviet space raise “pressing contemporary issues” related to—and affected by—political and social developments, the presence (or, alternatively, the lack of) cultural institutions and, eventually, market dynamics. This reflects global tendencies affecting cultural practices in contemporary multicultural societies. It is no surprise that still in 1997, in his study Translating and Resisting ←27 | 28→Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Studies, Jonathan Hart could question the ambivalence of global cultural processes: “Can all the claims of different cultures find expression in a community or nation?” (1997: 138). The classification of subjectivities and cultural phenomena that do not necessarily respond to a knowledge paradigm based on the demarcation between the centre and the periphery, the superior and the inferior, discloses the need for new analytical criteria able to understand the complex dynamics of today’s cultural métissage.
As emphasized by Hart in his analysis of the developments of Francophone literature in the 1990s, the emergence of new narratives built around the cultural negotiation between centre and margin are the outcome of the global experience of migration, diasporization and hybridity.20 Looking at the rise of transcultural subjectivities in the post-Soviet space through the prism of global cultural dynamics, we may assume that cultures “based on a model of penetration and interconnectedness are to be understood as externally networked and internally hybrid, dynamic, and fluid constructs” (Hausbacher 2016: 417). It is not by chance that, while describing the globally emerging literary narratives through the lens of “transculturality,” Arianna Dagnino (2013: 4) comes to the conclusion that “what makes this kind of writing different is first and foremost its resistance to appropriations by one single national canon or cultural tradition.”
In this book I will focus on the case of the contemporary Ukrainian cultural process, in an attempt to understand the result of the interplay between literature, politics, market and identity. Most fundamentally, focusing on the perspective of Russophone intellectuals and literary actors, I will try to go beyond the binary opposition in the Ukrainian intellectual environment between the local Ukrainian-language and Russian-language literatures as separate realms, thus positioning the latter within the global developments in post-Soviet culture and society. Following these lines, the purpose and the core research questions of this study are threefold:
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a) What are the different ways that Ukrainian literature and culture can be defined in 2019? Literature and culture produced in the Ukrainian territory? Literature and culture produced by citizens of Ukraine in any language (and, namely, also in Russian)?
b) What is the role and position of Russophone/Russian culture in Ukraine? How can the dynamics of Ukrainian culture lend insight into the possibility of a global Russian culture, or multiple Russian cultures, in the contemporary world?
c) And, eventually, may hybridity as an analytical tool help us address the global “pressing contemporary issues” that have arisen as a result of political and social developments in the post-Soviet space?
Recasting “Ukrainianness” through the Prism of “Russianness”
Framing Ukrainianness and Russianness: following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the national question has been at the core of the intellectual and political debate in Ukraine and Russia since the 1990s. As emphasized by Igor’ Torbakov, in post-Soviet times the ambivalent directions of nation-building policies in Ukraine and Russia reflected a complex process of “rebounding” the contested legacy of their historical encounter, revealing both symmetric and diverging features:
Not surprisingly, both Ukraine and Russia find themselves in a kind of postcolonial condition, because their histories had been closely entangled throughout the imperial and Soviet eras, and both have been struggling to adapt to the postimperial realities after 1991 […] The pattern of Ukraine’s and Russia’s hybridities and ambivalent behaviours during the postimperial period seem to be similar but one might also observe a crucial difference: “Ukraine is only a subaltern, whereas Russia is both subaltern and an empire.” (Torbakov 2016: 91)
Taking into account the historical dynamics of the contested Ukrainian–Russian encounter, the duplicity of the role of Ukraine in the imperial ventures—“as the core of the Russian and Soviet projects, on the one hand, and as the center of the anti-imperial and anti-Soviet resistance on the other”—and its special status as “a contested borderlands” (Hrytsak 2015: 733–734) between empires makes the postcolonial “not enough” to describe its complex dynamics. Though assuming that “Ukraine was not a classical colony of the Russian Empire” (Kappeler 2003: 178)—whereby it lacked most of the classical attributes of colonies, such as “geographic, cultural, and racial distance”—the paradox still lies in the fact that here, as ←29 | 30→emphasized by Georgii Kas’ianov, “[i];t is possible to consider Ukraine as an example of postcolonial syndromes without colonialism”21 (Volodarskii 2017a): these syndromes include the reframing of diverging memories, cultural categories and identity markers along rigid binary lines.
The cultural specificity of the Ukrainian postcolonial condition was thoroughly theorized already in the early 1990s by Marko Pavlyshyn, who highlighted how modern Ukrainian tradition “had been built up on a binary opposition between the self and the other, where the other was the intruder, the colonizer, the enemy” (1992: 48). Even today we can understand the historical complexity of Ukrainian postcoloniality only through the lenses of its oppositional relation with the external “hegemonic discourse” taking shape in the contemporary Russian Federation, where “[Belarusians and] Ukrainians are still regarded among the ethnic groups of the ‘near abroad’ as particularly close relatives, with whom one gladly cooperates and to whom one is ready to make certain concessions, but whom one does not recognize as socially and culturally equal or accept as independent nations with national states” (Kappeler 2003: 181). Interestingly enough, whereas on the one hand this kind of narrative shows how in the case of contemporary Russia “the postcolonial discourse has not undergone a social process of deconstruction” (Berg 2004) yet,22 on the other this also helps us ←30 | 31→clarify how still nowadays Ukrainian postcoloniality and “postcolonial syndromes” paradoxically emerge from the conflicts engendered by cultural proximity. Mykola Riabchuk puts it in historical perspective,
The simple truth is that Ukrainians were not discriminated against as Little Russians, i.e., as loyal members of a Russian regional subgroup, who recognize their subordinate position and do not claim any specific/equal cultural rights. But as Ukrainians, i.e., as members of a nationally self-aware and culturally self-confident group, they were not merely discriminated against, but also politically persecuted as dangerous “nationalists.” (2010: 12)
Here we may grasp the peculiar historical continuity of post-Soviet narratives with imperial and Soviet “hegemonic discourses,” which today still come to affect contemporary cultural and political dynamics in the region. Following these lines, according to Roman Dubasevych (2016: 38), the “term ‘postimperial’ thus seems for several reasons to better match the complex reality of the Ukrainian-Russian encounter.”23 Most fundamentally, the postimperial frame creates the ground for discussing the case of Ukrainian–Russian cultural relations in light of the contested annexation of Crimea to Russia (March 2014) and the armed conflict that erupted