Conclusion

but he's smart, and don't you forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is, and damn if he didn't tell me.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

Representations of empire in Russian and Ukrainian literature can be viewed as parts of an extended rhetorical argument, a dialectic of the imagination in which one work is frequently answered by another.

Monologic readings of these texts grounded in the reading of either an “imperial” or an “emancipatory” master narrative have been most prevalent. The result has been a limiting of perspectives.¹ The imperial master-narrative emplotted an assimilationist story, presenting cultural loss as comedy and local resistance as tragic fragmentation. The coun­ternarrative reversed this plot by casting assimilation as tragic, elegizing cultural loss, and celebrating local resistance. By the late nineteenth century, with the rise of modernism, narratives of national emancipa­tion were dominant in Ukrainian writing. They were, however, chal­lenged by aestheticist, feminist, multicultural, and other discourses, each of which generated an ironic counternarrative of its own that complicated and sought to problematize the dominant tradition.

The analysis of this evolution and its underlying dialectic raises methodological issues, since it requires recognizing several narrative lines and avoiding the restriction or repression of alternative readings. There have been several suggestions for avoiding the imposition of an unwarranted homogeneity and for respecting internal heterogeneity, among them the examination of the simultaneity of discourses, the contrapuntal reading of works, the search for “figural resistance,”² and the study of canonized or “elite” works alongside historically margin­alized ones.³ By indicating a multiplicity of discourses and a plurality of voices within texts, these approaches aim to impede or avoid closing off areas of complexity and potential synthetic assessments. Both the focus on internal tensions and the juxtaposition of competing dis­courses have been employed in this account in order to demonstrate some of the complexity of texts situated at discursive junctures.

The fact of empire left its mark on literature’s themes and genres. They range from panegyrics to imperial grandeur, autocratic rule, and Russian messianism to descriptions of wars of conquest and to portray­als of non-Russian identities. Sometimes the empire is a deliberate and significant emphasis in a writer’s work. It is then that a concern with the fate of a divided society penetrates the work. Characters become absorbed in issues. They grapple with questions of political loyalty or ideology. In Irving Howe’s description of the political in literature, “They now think in terms of supporting or opposing society as such; they rally to one or another embattled segment of society; and they do so in the name of, and under prompting from, an ideology.”⁴ When this happens, the political within a text becomes visible in the ideas or ideologies that stir characters into “passionate gestures and sacri- fices.”⁵ Sometimes the governing ideas themselves become active char­acters, or politics subtly infiltrates personal lives, the claims of ideology come up against the pressures of private emotions, and “abstraction is confronted with the flux of experience, the monolith of the pro­gram with the richness of diversity of motive, the purity of the ideal with the contaminations of action.”⁶

This kind of examination remains useful in many texts where a political ideology is nearer to the surface.

The colonial and the anticolonial struggle to enthrone and dethrone not merely political opinions but patterns of imagery, narrative struc­tures, characterizations, and literary tropes. A semantic charge, for example, is given to points of the compass. It produces an imaginative geography in which the opposition of civilization and barbarism, higher and lower, are mapped onto the opposition between West and East, North and South.

Such metaphorical “argumentation” is richly present in the dis­course of empire that is reflected in Russian and Ukrainian literature. Typically, these binary patterns in imagery, characterization, and plot are inverted in anticolonial texts. Arresting critiques of metaphoric and metonymic structures that imperialists found pleasurable occur in Shevchenko’s “Great Vault.” His portrayals of seduced women are responses to numerous male-identified and self-gratifying accounts of colonized women in Russian literature, while his “Caucasus” explicitly rejects the imperial depiction of colonial war, even the language of tsarist edicts. Similarly, Anatoly Svydnytsky’s Liuboratskys is an answer­ing picture of the tragic effects of denationalization and the methods employed to instil a cultural inferiority complex.

Both colonial and anticolonial discourses have generally viewed the issue of imperial/national identity formation in terms of binary oppo­sitions.

The marginal situation and hybrid cultural forms have always held a particular interest for both Russian and Ukrainian literatures. Rus­sian writers have often viewed their culture as spanning, confronting, and combining two civilizations, particularly the European and the Asian, both culturally and geographically. Ukrainians have focused strongly on their culture’s relationship with its neighbours and on the exploration of taboos.⁸ Their writings have frequently refused the metaphors and myths not only of empire but of their own “essential- ists” (above all, the nineteenth-century populists), as the works of Khvylovy, Domontovych, and Andrukhovych testify. Throughout his­tory the literature written by Ukrainians has shown a high degree of sensitivity to hybridity’s attractions, dangers, and inevitabilities.

The cocktail of competing political and cultural attitudes on the territory of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ukraine produced or inspired writers who achieved fame far beyond its boundaries: Joseph

Conrad in English literature, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Bruno Schultz in Polish, Sacher-Masoch in German, Jan Potocki in French, and Sholom Aleichem in Yiddish.

A similar delight in confronting the exotic and exploring hybridity, was prominent among early nineteenth-century Russian-language writers like Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Grebenka (Hrebinka). Russian writers exhibited what John Bayley has described as a “curious purity,” a freshness of perceptions and earnestness in opinions that he attributed to the literature’s “awakening into self­consciousness.”⁹ The imperial project itself, by postulating a “tripar­tite” Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusan culture (triedinaia Rossiia, or Rus) and a multilingual literary production that would serve different social spheres (Russian for the intelligentsia, Ukrainian for the peasantry) alerted theorists of imperial culture to both the attractions and the dangers of mixed or combined cultural initiatives and forms. Although these experiments are today described as failures, it should not be forgotten that they drew many prominent intellectuals into a vigorous debate. A monolingual and monological view of Russian literature came to dominate Russian literature in the second half of the nine­teenth century. It was enforced by banning the publication of books published in Ukrainian and pushed many Ukrainian intellectuals into breaking entirely with Russian language and culture.

Western thinking concerning Eastern Europe, long captive to eigh­teenth-century Enlightenment views of the enigmatic “Orient” and exotic East, has often shown little awareness of these complexities. Many contemporary works, in fact, unconsciously repeat fantasies and biases that Larry Wolff has shown can be traced to eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe.¹⁰ Ukraine, perhaps even more than Russia, has been fair game for myth-creation and fanciful depiction. Naturally, the less audible the subject’s own voice, the less inhibited the fanta­sizing. Furthermore, the image of Ukraine has more often than not been filtered through hegemonic patterns of thought assimilated from Russian, Polish, or other writers. Ukraine’s subordinate political status has ensured that its presentation to the outside has most frequently been through the eyes and in the voice of others.

The Ukrainian counterdiscourse has attempted over the course of its evolution to present alternative images, to “represent” conscious­ness in both senses of the verb: politically by “speaking for” the nation (Kulish, Drahomanov, Franko, Khvylovy, and others addressed Russian, Polish, or Western audiences) and artistically by “showing” or “voicing” its point of view in literature. The same individuals sometimes played major roles in both political and artistic forms of representation.

There were many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who rep­resented aspects of the imperial viewpoint in literature: Khomiakov, Grebenka (Hrebinka), Gogol, and Bulgakov among them. Their creative writings, for the most part, yielded nuanced, textured articulations of the colonial viewpoint. The bluntest and most uncompromising state­ments came from political journalists like Belinsky, Struve, and Shulgin. These views, of course, were related to those of the government figures who controlled censorship, education, and the military and police and who were in a position to affect the fates of individual authors and literatures. There were large areas of agreement between Russian writers, journalists, and politicians on the issue of Ukraine’s cultural and political rights. Literary,journalistic, and administrative figures all contributed to a unified discourse of empire and the dissemination of hegemonic views. As this study has tried to demonstrate, literary works frequently draw their meaning and allow a richness of interpretation when viewed within the context of these cultural and political discussions.

There is, no doubt, a danger that the literature’s concern with politics will distract it from other aspects of the human experience. The need to promote imperial or national narratives has weighed heavily on both Russian and Ukrainian literatures. The image of the turncoat and trai­tor, of the guilt-ridden intellectual made impotent by ideology, of the colonizer-conqueror, or the patriot recur again and again. A culture that sees itself as selected by God to fulfill a mission or that sees itself as embattled will necessarily decry any falling away from cultural soli­darity. The more relaxed, “postcolonial” attitude can take root only when the threat of engulfment or apostasy has receded. Culturally enforced assimilation or brutally enforced hybridity entail very different relations to ambiguity than the playful artistic use of ambiguity. As Anne McClintock has pointed out, “The lyrical glamor cast by postcolonial theorists over ambivalence and hybridity is not always historically war- ranted.”¹¹ This having been said, however, endlessly rehearsing the nar­rative of national liberation or victimization is also stultifying.

At the present time many East European writers have begun inter­rogating their own nationalisms and monologic narratives, reaching beyond them for the kind of intercultural hermeneutics that postco­lonial theory has encouraged. If colonial discourse has improved our awareness of how hegemony becomes inscribed in literature and if anticolonial discourse has shown us how aesthetic strategies disinte­grate this hegemony, postcolonial theory, on the other hand, has illuminated the perplexing and often ignored contradictions, ambiv­alences, and ambiguities in literary texts that try to shake themselves free of the colonized past.