most productive theories of hybridity are those that effectively balance the task of inscribing a functional-instrumental version of the relation between culture and society with that of enabling the more utopian/collective image of society. (Prabhu 2007: 2)
Following Prabhu’s analytical theory of hybridity, and adapting it to the case of post-Soviet Ukraine, we will see how hybrid subjectivities are first a product of a cultural debate that emerged in Imperial and Soviet times, and then the result of a political clash of national paradigms in post-Soviet times: nowadays these are subjected to a constant internal and external delegitimizing process, influencing the transitoriness—or provisionality—of this “third space,” as alternatively being subject to processes of cultural appropriation or peripheralization. In the proposed analytical framework, Ukrainian hybridity appears to be “tied to revolutionary social change,” and “linked to contingency and […] time-bound.”29 More importantly, Ukrainian hybridity entails practices of dis-identification, by providing “a way out of binary thinking,” (Prabhu 2007: 1) and responds to the possibility of a third space of enunciation, whereas it represents “a completely new political community that cannot rely on any preexisting ‘national’ structures to sustain itself” (Gerasimov, Mogilner 2015: 720). Finally, it is deterritorialized, whereas—in spite of the misuse of language categories in the political debate—Russian in Ukraine is becoming an ex-territorial language, which is not necessarily linked to a particular territory or entity and a particular ethnicity.
To my knowledge, this is the first book to investigate contemporary Ukrainian cultural developments through the lens of Russian-language literary production and the Russian-language intellectual community’s position. While Russian and Ukrainian cultural developments have been framed as the outcome of the Soviet collapse and the embrace of globalization (Chernetsky 2007), recent studies tend to privilege only one of the two aspects of the issue, which is here analysed in light of a constant ←36 | 37→dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian Studies. Furthermore, while in the volume authored by Maria G. Rewakowicz (2018) the focus seems to rely mostly on pre-Maidan developments, here I draw an analysis of the long-term outcomes of the debate on cultural hybridity, considering both “the phase of distinctly post-Soviet and transitional dynamics of the first two decades of independence” (Rewakowicz 2018: viii) and the subsequent crystallization of these dynamics in post-Maidan realities. Whereas Chernetsky (2019: 58) identifies the Orange Revolution of 2004 as the true starting point for “the process of rethinking and reclaiming identities by Ukraine’s Russian-language writers in the newly independent Ukraine,” in my opinion it is worth analyzing the phenomenon in a broader perspective, going from the early years of Ukrainian independence to the outcomes of the Euromaidan in 2013–2014 that “kicked into higher gear” (Chernetsky 2019: 59) the dynamics of the previous revolutionary cycle.
Here the prehistory of the phenomenon, which was the subject of my previous study (Puleri 2016), has been deliberately assigned to a marginal role, in order to privilege a focus on the present situation and to prevent any attempts at formulating historical and ideological projections. This book is not a history of Ukrainian Russian-language literature, nor does it include all its contemporary variants and actors: rather, the premise of this study is that, while looking at these plural literary phenomena, it is worth focusing on the profoundly diverse and heterogeneous range of positions, identities and forms emerging from their provisional status, and on the need to analyse them through the lens of the global tendency towards the transnationalization of cultural practices. This helps us describe Ukrainian hybridity as a “time-bounded” condition that, on the one hand, is deeply rooted in the Ukrainian social and political experience in post-Soviet times and, on the other hand, still answers to and follows global cultural dynamics and trends.
In this study I hence propose the use of new analytical tools for translating the recent social developments in Ukraine through the lens of literature.30 On the one hand, it is postcolonial multilingualism, symbolic ←37 | 38→“interstitiality” and pluricentric counternarratives to established social conceptions of identity, nation and culture that prominently emerge in the Russophone literary production. On the other, the “minor paradigm” elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1975) works as a useful methodological approach to interpret the “collective enunciation” conveyed by these cultural actors working in an intermediate space between the Ukrainian and Russian “great (or established)” literatures and narratives. As for the selection of the literary texts under scrutiny, I have opted for prose works by Andrei Kurkov, Aleksei Nikitin and Vladimir Rafeenko. The reasons behind this privileged focus are twofold: on the one hand, prose works by the mentioned authors are revealing for the heterogeneous evolutionary, regional, sociopolitical and market dynamics affecting the creation of full-fledged cultural discourses and narratives in post-Soviet Ukraine; on the other, the peculiar focus of Russophone prose on “the crowding out and displacement of experiences that are painful to protagonists and narrators alike and that compromise the integrity of their sense of self” (Kukulin 2018: 60) still represents an overlooked field of analysis in literary criticism.31
Finally, this is the framework for developing the two intertwining sections of the book, focusing respectively on the pre- and post-Maidan periods. In the opening chapter, after providing a brief overview of the historical background of the postcolonial situation in present-day Ukraine, I focus on the complex positioning of the Russophone literary phenomenon in the Ukrainian post-Soviet national canon. Analysing the conceptualization of the hybrid cultural elements in the post-Soviet area, it is possible to observe the rise of a contrast between the cultural “exclusivist” and “inclusivist” attitudes in the Ukrainian intellectual debate. It is the product of the renewed social and political clash between the Ukrainian and Russian ←38 | 39→“national systems” at the dawn of the Soviet collapse. The ideologization of the ethnolinguistic factor in the post-Soviet area gives birth to competing ideologies, which draw new “imagined borders” in the Ukrainian literary space, as being the result of the polarization of the Russian and Ukrainian respective national historical narratives.
The second chapter provides readers with a challenging reconstruction of the most widespread attitudes concerning the role of language for the definition of the boundaries of national culture among the foremost Russian-language writers and critics in contemporary Ukraine and Russia. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to a discussion of the role of anthologies, publishing houses and literary prizes in the process of cultural negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainian culture and Russian culture. At the crossroads between these seemingly binary juxtapositions, new cultural phenomena emerge under the sign of hybridity.
In the third chapter I propose a new understanding of the heterogeneous framework of enunciations conveyed by contemporary Ukrainian Russian-language writers. By reading and interpreting Andrei Kurkov’s (Death and the Penguin, 1996; The Good Angel of Death, 1998), Aleksei Nikitin’s (Istemi, 2011; Mahjong, 2012) and Vladimir Rafeenko’s works (The Moscow Divertissement, 2011), we may see a new artistic attempt to recompose the fragments of the existential mosaics left unbound in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
In the fourth chapter, which opens the second section of the book, I move to the recent cultural developments in the aftermath of the so-called “Ukraine Crisis” (2013–2014). The chapter approaches literary processes in Ukraine as emblematic for the general epistemological (and hence political) crisis in the country, and as an important litmus test allowing a diagnosis of the crisis. Deconstructing “Russianness” and “Ukrainianness,” I highlight the emerging positioning of Russophone authors in the aftermath of the Euromaidan “revolution of hybridity.”
The aim of the fifth chapter is to rethink the different approaches to “value-based” politics—and social subgroupings’ reactions to it—in the post-Soviet area through the lens of the post-Maidan Ukrainian scene. An accurate tracking of the policies normativizing the field of culture on the one hand, and of blurred cultural boundaries on the other, helps us question ←39 | 40→the fixed constructs of national and cultural identity when looking at the ever-changing post-Soviet