Chiara and my family for tolerating the solitary activity of writing and supporting me every step of the way.
The transliteration of Ukrainian and Russian names, terms and geographic locations follows the Library of Congress system, without diacritic signs. In the case of Ukrainian Russian-language authors, I followed the transliteration system from Russian: throughout the book it is possible to find some exceptions, since in most cases these authors are bilingual in everyday life and present their own names also according to the Ukrainian transliteration system. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Russian and Ukrainian included in this book are mine, as are any errors or misinterpretations.
Contents
Introduction: From (Global) Russian to Ukrainian Culture—and Back Again
From Russianness to Russophonia
In-between (Literary) Russophonia
Recasting “Ukrainianness” through the Prism of “Russianness”
The Long Road to Post-Soviet Transition: A Russophone Perspective
Part I:From Culture to Politics—Displaced Hybridity/ies (1991–2013)
Chapter 1 The Missing Hybridity: Framing the Ukrainian Cultural Space
Ukraine: A Laboratory of Political and Cultural Identity/ies
Shifting Social Dynamics in Post-Soviet Ukraine
New (Old?) Cultural Standards in the Post-Soviet Era
Post-Soviet Russophonia in Ukraine: An Intellectual (and Political) Debate
In Search of a New Self-Determination
Chapter 2 Post-Soviet (Russophone) Ukraine Speaks Back
Ukraïns’ka Rosiis’komovna literatura versus Rosiis’ka literatura Ukraïny
The Self-Identification in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature in Russian
At the Intersection of Two Cultural Models
From Marginality to Minority
Chapter 3 A Minor Perspective on National Narrative(s): Deterritorializing Post-Imperial Epistemology
Andrei Kurkov: The Displaced Transition in Mass Literature
Of Other Spaces (and Of Other Times): Aleksei Nikitin’s Literary Heterotopias
Vladimir Rafeenko: The Ukrainian “Magical Realism”
Part II:From Politics to Culture—After Revolution of Hybridity (2014–2018)
Chapter 4 Hybridity Reconsidered: Ukrainian Border Crossing after the “Crisis”
Dialectic of Transition from Post-Soviet to Post-Maidan: Between Old and New Narratives
Moving Centripetally: Reconsidering Hybridity
The (Political) Acceleration of Cultural Change
Chapter 5 Values for the Sake of the (Post-Soviet) Nation
Towards Shifting Cultural Policies in the Post-Maidan Era
Envisioning Identity Markers after the Ukraine Crisis
At the Crossroads between Normative Measures and Blurred Cultural Boundaries in the Post-Soviet Space
Chapter 6 Towards a Postcolonial Ethics: Rewriting Ukraine in the “Enemy’s Language”
Demistifying Anticolonial Myths: The “Ukrainian Russians”
Transgressing the (National) Code: Recasting History and Language in Light of War
The End of the Transition?
In Place of a Conclusion: The Future of “Russianness” in Post-Maidan Ukraine
Bibliography
Index
Introduction From (Global) Russian to Ukrainian Culture— and Back Again
In the contemporary context, diasporization and hybridity have become conditions for novel ways of “translating the world” […] The question of whether we should talk about one global Russian culture or many finds an answer only provisionally and, paradoxically, locally. (Rubins 2019: 46)
Following a 2017 report based on data on language use from national censuses and the United Nations, collated by Euromonitor International, we witness how significantly “Russian has lost more ground than any other language over the past 20 years as newly independent former Soviet states have attempted to assert their linguistic sovereignty” (Johnson 2017). In his commentary emblematically entitled Russian Beyond Russia, Alexander Morrison (2017) observed how “language is harmfully intertwined with politics these days in Eurasia.” On the one hand, this followed former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev’s decision in 2017 to move the Kazakh language from the Cyrillic to the Latin script for the sake of national “modernization” (Nazarbaev 2017). On the other, the Kremlin elite is still implementing new policies for supporting “the Russian citizens and compatriots who live abroad, the defence of their rights, including the right to receive education in Russian,”1 within the framework of the 2015 Concept Russian School Abroad (Russkaia shkola za rubezhom; Prezident Rossii 2015).
In a wider perspective, these are only some of the measures undertaken in the realm of official policies affecting the public debate in the post-Soviet scene, where over the past decades we dealt mainly with categorical assumptions that rendered national languages and cultures as part of ←13 | 14→the new state ideologies. As highlighted by Sheila Fitzpatrick in her 2005 study Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 we witnessed an intense process of resignification of the old cultural symbols and social practices in the “new Europe.” Nonetheless, the new national models emerging from this historical rift have been shaped in the absence of new “proper verbal signifiers” (Oushakine 2000: 994) that have the potential to reflect ongoing social processes in the post-Soviet scene. It was in a “state of post-Soviet aphasia,” borrowing Serguei Oushakine’s definition (2000), that the culture of (post-Soviet)