has become increasingly used in public urban contexts and by political and cultural leaders, some of whom had themselves been marginalized in the Soviet system […] In choices of language use and in debates about language, the previously dominant discourses clash with new discourses and practices elevating Ukrainian. (Bilaniuk 2014: 337)
Along these lines, the language issue still represents a contested benchmark even in defining what belongs—and what does not—to the national literary canon. As Grabowicz asserts, “[i];n the case of Ukrainian literature […] this confusion, which is essentially based on a dissociation of literature from its social context, has led to radical misconstructions of historical reality” (Grabowicz 1992: 221). Today, we witness the need to move further away from “the Romantic and quasi-metaphysical notion of literature as the emanation (the ‘spirit’) of a ‘nation’ ” and towards “a more rational, and certainly more empirical definition of literature as a reflection, product and function of a society” (Grabowicz 1992: 221).
Whereas “[d];espite their nationalised, politicised images, both Gogol’ and Shevchenko span the Russian-Ukrainian linguistic and cultural divide,” as argued by Uilleam Blacker (2014), in the aftermath of the post-Soviet historical rift “across contemporary Ukraine, there are dozens of writers, from sci-fi novelists to prize-winning poets, who operate across the two languages.” Among them, we deal here with those authors who belong to “the millions of people” who live outside of the political borders of the Russian Federation and “who consider Russian to be their mother tongue”62 ←64 | 65→(Chuprinin 2008: 6). In his study Russian Literature Today: Abroad (Russkaia literatura segodnia: zarubezh’e, 2008), Sergei Chuprinin presents a real dictionary of this literary production, which was divided by countries and cultural initiatives and realized through the support of local experts. As Chuprinin states, such a venture “is not free from inaccuracies” (ne svobodna ot nedostatkov; Chuprinin 2008: 6), especially since an in-depth analysis of Russophone literary phenomena emerging in different geographical areas of the world has not been carried out yet.63 The artistic and epistemological position of these cultural actors is emblematically described by Tlostanova as a condition of vnepolozhennost’ (2004: 105): this is a “positioning outside of” the national literary and cultural canons of modernity.
Along these lines, it is no surprise that today the issue of Russian-language literature in Ukraine is still the true bone of contention in the contemporary intellectual debate. In order to understand the peculiar characteristics of this artistic milieu, in the next section we will first analyse the dynamics of the contemporary debate on hybridity, highlighting the influence and impact of the new cultural standards, which were promoted by the controversial nation-building policies in post-Soviet Ukraine, on the making of an “external canon” of today’s Russophone literature.
Post-Soviet Russophonia in Ukraine: An Intellectual (and Political) Debate
In the post-Soviet intellectual debate, as argued by Tamara Hundorova (2001: 250) in her study The Canon Reversed, “the concept of a ‘complete’ literature and its role in the cultural sphere were the focus of intense interest in the early 1990’s” (2001: 252), whereas this answered “the vision of an ←65 | 66→innovative, highly-developed Ukrainian culture that was to arise under the new conditions of national independence and freedom.” This was followed soon by “the appeal to a European-type modern Ukrainian literature,” which could legitimate “the repossession of the literary canon” (Hundorova 2001: 253) after the collapse of the Soviet regime.
Within this frame of reference, throughout the late 1990s it was especially the great success of Russian-language mass literature that brought again to centre stage the debate on the issue of literary bilingualism in independent Ukraine:
The reverse canon of the 1990s embraced not only Ukrainian-language but also Russian-language mass literature. The preceding literary canon was monocultural and excluded works by Ukrainian authors written in Russian. In the 1990s Russian mass literature swamped the Ukrainian book market […] Some Russian-language authors, such as Andrei Kurkov and Marina and Sergei Diachenko, live and work in Ukraine and call themselves Ukrainian writers. (Hundorova 2001: 269)
In light of the rise of this highly successful literary phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine, the debate came to be around the definition of the role and position of Russian-language literature within the new national cultural model. In an article provocatively entitled “The Smell of Dead Words: Russophone Literature in Ukraine” (“Zapakh mertvogo slova. Russkoiazychnaia literatura na Ukraine,” 1998), the Russian philosopher and politologist Andrei Okara first addressed the issue in the broader public debate. His article was first published in Nezavisimaia Gazeta in Russia on February 25, 1998, and then reissued in Ukraїns’ka Pravda in Ukraine ten years later, thus offering a wider perspective on the peculiar reception of the question in both the countries. Okara analyses the “peripheral” position of this literary phenomenon, emphasizing its distance from both the Russian literary system and the Ukrainian one. According to the author, it is the same Russophone writers who do not know how to describe their own positioning in the contemporary cultural context:
It is still not clear how to relate to what is written in Russian in Ukraine: should we consider this literature as a Ukrainian national literature in Russian [ukrainskaia natsional’naia literatura na russkom iazyke]? Or as a separate branch of the All-Ukrainian cultural process, i.e. the literature of a national minority? Or maybe as a part of Russian [rossiiskaia] culture, i.e Russian [russkaia] literature in the New ←66 | 67→Abroad? Probably, the writers themselves are tormented in search of identification for their own literary production.64 (Okara 2008)
According to Okara, the birth of a real literary movement is not possible due to the different tendencies and heterogeneous forms of Russohone literature. He identifies two paths for the potential development of Russophone literature in Ukraine: a high literature and a mass literature. The first is considered of little interest, as it has an absence of real masters. The second is labelled as a mere commercial brand without any aesthetic value.
According to Okara, this bleak outlook relies on the status of the Russian language in Ukraine: a dead language, uprooted from the metropolis and from its natural place of development and characterization. To give life to a “high” literature in Russian, it is necessary to live in the “homeland of the Russian language.”65 Okara thus argues that the “peripheral” role of Russophone literature in the Ukrainian cultural context depends on the same function performed by the Russian language in Ukraine: the cultural “diglossia” of contemporary Ukraine, where “an elite culture” (elitarnaia kul’tura) is created in one language and the other language is used only in “everyday life” (v bytu), determines respectively the different paths and destinies of Ukrainophone and Russophone literary productions. Eventually, following Okara’s reflections, only a “high” literature in Ukrainian can prospectively take shape in post-Soviet Ukraine.
←67 | 68→
Okara’s article was soon followed by Mikhail Nazarenko’s response in his “About the Dead and Living Words” (“O mertvom i zhivom slove,” 1998), which originally appeared online in early September of the same year.66 Nazarenko, a Ukrainian Russian-language writer and professor of history of Russian literature at the Institute of Philology of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, dismantled Okara’s stance on the grounds of the vitality of Russian language and culture in post-Soviet Ukraine:
The reality is that for a rather large percentage of Ukrainian citizens the Ukrainian language is the second native language after Russian […] Clearly, their culture is and will always be on the border between the Russian culture and the Ukrainian one. And here the question is not about the existence of this culture—which is quite evident—but first of all on the self-determination, the self-awareness of this ←68 | 69→culture. Until recently it was part of the Russian/Soviet culture, thus no need for self-determination arose.67 (Nazarenko 1998)
According to Nazarenko, it is precisely the liminal position of Russian-language literature, at the crossroads between two linguistic and cultural systems, that provides the Ukrainian