In the Ukrainian intellectual environment these dynamics intensely affected the conceptualization of the national canon: today the litmus test for the meaning of Ukrainianness and attitudes towards it still remains the language question. The problem stems from the fact that in contemporary Ukraine, besides the people who identify themselves as ethnically Russian, there is also a large community of Russian-language Ukrainians.24 In light of the very complex and fluid ethnolinguistic pattern of contemporary Ukraine, the definition of the cumbersome nature of Russian language and culture in post-Soviet times thus continues to play a central role in the debate around the definition of the national identity.
In September 2017, while discussing the recent developments in defining “Ukrainianness” in the national debate, Ukrainian philosopher Serhii Datsiuk significantly declared that “in the coming decades the solution of the Ukrainian question is not possible without the solution of the Russian question”25 (Datsiuk 2017). This followed the publication of controversial commentaries by Galician intellectuals, such as Taras Prokhas’ko (2017), Iurii Andrukhovych (2017a; 2017b; 2017c) and Iurii Vynnychuk (2017), debating the Ukrainian question on the online platform Zbruch. In these commentaries, the Russian language was depicted as an attribute of the “enemy,” “a language of violence” (mova nasyl’stva), which is embodied by those Ukrainians who are not able even “to sleep” in the national language, that is, the “Ukrainian Russians” (Ukraïns’ki rosiiany)—the term used by Prokhas’ko (2017) in his column entitled “Do You Sleep in Ukrainian?” (Chy ty spysh ukraïns’koiu?) to address indiscriminately both ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. Paradoxically, in his analysis of the problematic relationship between literary text and territory within ←32 | 33→Russia, Il’ia Kukulin similarly came to the conclusion that “in an era of regret and anxiety over Russian state collapse and turmoil around its (re)expansion, the cultural problem of Russianness—whether conceived as an overarching matrix of many cultures and people, unique ethnic identity, or nation wrapped in an imperial destiny—has yet to be resolved” (Kukulin 2019: 181). Here we may witness the persistent entanglement between the solution of the “cultural problem of Russianness” (Kukulin 2019: 181) and the creation of a shared and inclusive “Ukrainianness” in the post-Soviet space.
Yet the developments of the national question should be viewed and interpreted within the broader context of the search for new self-identification in post-Soviet societies. Interestingly, it was only in the aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution in 2013–2014—the wave of protests starting in Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv on the night of November 21, 2013, after the Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend the signing of the association agreement with the European Union—that scholars and observers in post-Soviet studies started to highlight the emergence of a “civic turn” in codifying the national identity in Ukraine (Gerasimov 2014; Goble 2015; Kulyk 2015, 2016; Pavlyshyn 2016a). From this vantage point, Ukrainian “hybridity” (Gerasimov 2014: 32) appeared to be a new form of collective subjectivity, as it offered new terms to describe “Ukrainianness […] as an attribute freely chosen by people favourably disposed to the Ukrainian nation-state without regard to ethnicity or cultural orientation” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 76–77). The (re)emergence of this language of self-description in post-Soviet societies is the result of a long-term process, which still lacks a full-fledged explanatory model. According to the Ukrainian historian Andrii Portnov: “To define this new language, the new Ukrainian studies needs to analyze the specifically post-Soviet Ukrainian hybridity as a distinctive and autonomous subjectivity and fully accept that Ukraine is a complex and dynamic society, which requires nuanced inquiry” (2015: 730). Conceptualizing Ukrainian hybridity, we deal with “a fundamentally interdisciplinary research field in which history meets anthropology, economics, sociology, literary studies, political philosophy, and art history” (Portnov 2015: 731).
Indeed, it is especially the field of “literary politics” that since Ukrainian independence has seemed to privilege “the plurality and hybridity of ←33 | 34→national and cultural identities” (Rewakowicz 2018: 2). As suggested by Maria Rewakowicz in her recent work titled Ukraine’s Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, “the issue facing literary critics (which till now has not been adequately addressed) is to decide how to arrive at the body of texts that form a national literature” (2018: 2). And here the debate comes to emblematically include the ongoing negotiation around the actual content and shape of Ukrainianness.
Following Rewakowicz’s stance, it is the space of Ukrainian literature that in the long term better reflects the room for hybrid forms—and their contestation—in the post-Soviet space.26 Especially in the aftermath of the revolutionary cycles experienced by Ukrainians throughout the last decades (i.e. the Revolution on Granite in 1990, the Orange Revolution in 2004–2005, and the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013–2014), we may use and readapt the postcolonial categories to Ukraine as a post-Soviet (and post-Maidan) society for creating new tools for translating the new local dynamics. The proposed approach is aimed at creating a productive path to disembodying nation-ness in the post-Soviet space and, especially, at achieving an understanding of how, paradoxically, an answer to the eternal question on the role and position of global Russian culture can be found “only provisionally and, paradoxically, locally.”
The Long Road to Post-Soviet Transition: A Russophone Perspective
This book is aimed at deeply rethinking and better understanding the different approaches to the “Russian question” in Ukraine, by analysing both the political and cultural narratives that emerged before and after the Ukrainian–Russian clash of discourses which followed the contested annexation of Crimea to Russia and the military aggression against Eastern Ukraine in 2014. My study is based mainly on the results of a research carried out from 2012 to 2019, including interviews with prominent cultural figures ←34 | 35→(cultural journal/magazine editors, publishers, writers, scholars) conducted in Kyiv, Donets’k and Kharkiv on the eve of Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Through the lens of the intertwining of political and cultural developments in post-Soviet Ukraine (and parallel dynamics in Russia), throughout the sections of the present book it is possible to retrace the origins of the debate on hybridity and hybrid subjectivities in post-Soviet times.
Under the umbrella of the global decentralizing process of traditional literary and cultural studies, I mainly devote my attention to the provisional status of a “displaced transition” experienced by cultural actors and phenomena emerging “in between” national languages and traditions. The category of hybridity discussed in this research (and its variegated vocabulary in theoretical discourse, such as métissage, transculturation and creolization) was developed mostly by postcolonial studies to problematize the discourse of empire, by revealing the “in-between space” where the “meaning of culture” takes shape. By going further in defining the rather generalizing theory famously advanced by Homi K. Bhabha,27 I will follow Anjali Prabhu’s further theorization of hybridity. Turning to the legacy of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant,28 she attempted to reframe the concept by highlighting the need to demarcate “a particular framework or closing-off of an historical moment, action or geographical space as hybrid by also specifying the terms between or among which such hybridity occurs or is called up” (Prabhu 2007: 5):
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I therefore think it is important to provisionally, but clearly distinguish between hybridity