Introduction

In recent years discourses in European literature have been analysed with a view to understanding their relationship to imperial and colonial practices. The concepts and methodologies that have been developed have provided insights into how political hegemony can be crystallized and communicated or challenged and subverted.

Although Edward Said in his Culture and Imperialism, proposed that it was important to examine imperialisms other than Western European¹ and although other critics have drawn attention to the need “to complicate the view that Commonwealth literature and criticism are the only ones to see colonialism for what it is,”² the investigation of non-Western empires has only recently begun to attract sustained attention. The colonizer/colonized, hegemonic/subaltern relationship, it is argued here, is an appropriate lense through which to view the literatures of Eastern Europe, which have been heavily marked by a history of conquest and revolt, national self-assertion, and cultural competition.³ This book examines how a discourse of empire appeared in nineteenth-century Russian literature and gave rise to a counterdiscourse in Ukrainian literature.

Empires imagine and describe not only overseas dependencies but also contiguous territories. The construction of a literary Ukraine in Russian writings has analogies in the construction of other literary borderlands: the Caucasus, Poland, and Siberia. Early nineteenth-century writers like Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Mikhail Lermontov, and Aleksei Khomiakov developed narrative patterns, images, and tropes that constructed these areas as imperial frontiers by, for example, feminizing them and associating them with the antiquated, the rural, the violent, and the primitive. To the metropolitan civilization was ascribed a contrasting position of superiority, and it was associated with power and prestige, sophistication and modernity.

Such imaginative patterns stand in an analogous relationship to those that have been identified by colonial and postcolonial discourses dealing with other parts of the world. During this same post-Napoleonic period, the narrative structures, metaphors, and patterns of characterization that were to conceptualize Ukraine for almost two centuries were developed.

Some historians and political scientists have disputed the appropriateness of the term “colony” as applied to the politics and economy of Ukraine.⁴ This book contends that there is in fact evidence of systemic division along national grounds (sometimes even rationalized in racist terms). More pertinent, however, to the issue of discourse analysis is the fact that many of the literary and cultural phenomena treated in colonial and postcolonial studies are present in the literary descriptions of Ukraine. The legitimation of imperial expansion in Russian and Ukrainian literatures parallels that in texts that now hold canonical status in colonial and postcolonial studies. This fact suggests the appropriateness of methodologies that have analysed political and cultural hegemony in literatures dealing with other situations.⁵ The terms “colonial” and “postcolonial” as designations of the cultural situation of people who find themselves in, or are emerging from, cultural-political subjugation, it is therefore argued here, have relevance to Ukraine’s history and contemporary reality.⁶ In fact, one significant achievement of colonial and postcolonial discourse analysis has been to illuminate common features and facilitate comparisons between countries and phenomena that would previously have been dismissed as incommensurable or incongruent. Postcolonial studies now includes within its scope the experiences of Ireland, Scotland, and North America and explores connections with multicultural, feminist, and subaltern studies. The examples these countries provide, as well as the more “classical” experiences of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, can illuminate many aspects of Eastern European literatures.

This book argues not only that an imperialistic tradition aligned itself with Russian nationalism from the early nineteenth century but also that there existed an anti-imperialistic counterdiscourse, one that articulated and negotiated its positions against the claims of the dominant discourse, and one that has frequently been overlooked. The outlines of this countercurrent are visible both in the narrative and the metaphorical structures of the literary works themselves and in the wider intellectual debates that have reflected the relations of power between imperial and national forces. Works in Russian and Ukrainian literature are examined here in the light of this clash of discourses. The term counterdiscourse has, following Terdiman, been used to describe a tradition seemingly permanently locked in struggle with the one it is contesting, suffering the dependencies and complexes of opposition and continually being driven back within the rhetorical boundaries that it struggles to break down.⁷ For much of the two hundred years under consideration this description applies to the Ukrainian assertion of cultural and national claims that have been denied, censored, or simply ignored - to the extent that even today many Russian intellectuals find them fatuous. Whereas the archive of Russian imperial thought is well known, this counterarchive of resistance, which in the Ukrainian case can be traced at least as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures in the seventeenth century, is much less familiar. It has frequently been marginalized by the discourse of empire, in the interests of converting readers and listeners to the imperial design by emphasizing narratives of “reunion” and “brotherhood,” by denying alterity, and by requiring history to be seen through the assimilationist lense. Much of the counterarchive was uncovered in the nineteenth century by the Romantics and post-Romantics. Further attempts to recover subaltern voices were made in the latter part of the century by Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov, who anthologized folk-songs and used them to interpret history and popular political attitudes.⁸

Although much has been written on the national question in the West, surprisingly little analysis has been devoted to imperial ideas and hegemonic notions as they have been crystallized or refracted in Russian and Ukrainian literatures.

Some studies written in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, like Vasyl Sypovsky’s, broached the topic, but the line of investigation was essentially closed down at the end of the decade.⁹ Interest in the subject has been restimulated both by postcolonial studies and by the reassessment of Russian/Soviet history that followed the dissolution of the USSR into national states. Methodologies employed in discourse analysis and postcolonial theory have been drawn upon in the present study.¹⁰ In the Ukrainian context several interesting and ground-breaking studies in discourse analysis have recently been produced, among them studies by George Grabowicz, Solomiia Pavlychko, Tamara Hundorova, and Oksana Zabuzhko. The present study attempts to build upon them.¹¹ The concept of discourse employed in this account is a Foucauldian one: it focuses on a group of utterances and texts that appear to be regulated and that possess a coherence and act as a common force. A primary concern has been investigating the underlying rules and structures that produce texts, the systematicity that lies at the core of a discursive structure, and the interrelationship of discourses.¹² The study also draws upon recent Russian and Soviet histories that have highlighted the development of imperial and Romantic nationalist currents in Russian history, recontextualizing them within European and world history.¹³ Both discourse theory and the newer histories, of course, continue to rethink the relationship between national ideologies, imperial voices, and the voices of native resistance, often, as does this account, by examining wider, comparative frameworks.

Not all scholars are convinced that the paradigm of division between imperial and anti-imperial is suited for inquiry into the Russian national and imperial consciousness. Susan Layton has expressed doubts about its effectiveness in describing the Russian view of Asia because in her view interpenetration has blurred the boundary between cultures.¹⁴ Others have questioned the strength of the link between imperialism and nationalism in the early nineteenth century.

Paul M. Austin has asserted that Russian Romanticism was “surprisingly unnationalistic.”¹⁵ It is argued here, however, that there exists a large body of evidence indicating the dominance and increasing aggressiveness throughout the nineteenth century of a consolidating, hegemon- izing attitude based on Russian nationalism. Mark Bassin has argued that the alliance of the Russian imperial impulse with nationalist doctrine had already taken shape in the 1830s and 1840s.¹⁶ The expansionist element and the imperial vision were symbiotic and became inseparable from later articulations of Russian nationalism. Panslavism, Eurasianism, national bolshevism and other doctrines - all, in different guises - embraced expansionism, sometimes with messianic fervour. The contradictions and incompatibilities between imperialism and nationalism that have been identified by Hannah Arendt and others were not evident in Russia, where nationalists, whatever their attitude toward the state, embraced, in Bassin’s words, “the entirety of their unmistakably multinational empire, and did so with singular devotion.”¹⁷ The necessity of political-territorial expansion was viewed as axiomatic by reactionary conservatives, progressive liberals, and even socialist radicals.

The present study is in agreement with another thesis of Bassin, namely, that there was an intimate connection between the expansionist foreign policy and the domestic scene, with the latter normally providing the primary impulse. One interesting aspect of the Ukrainian situation is that within the imperial imagination it, in fact, straddled the domestic-foreign divide. I has sometimes been viewed as an organic part of Russia and sometimes as mysteriously different and exotic, and hence its conquest, subjugation, or full assimilation has been justified both in terms of bringing domestic peace and in terms of intervening abroad. The unanimity of Russian conservatives, liberals, and socialists on the question of Ukraine’s incorporation and assimilation stems in large part from the fact that the country has always been seen as an early and crucial test case of successful imperial expansion and assimilation.

Any challenge to its success has carried enormous consequences for the Russian self-image and has been dealt with in uncompromising terms. The dissolution of the Russian-Ukrainian link has always threatened the imperial identity of Russia itself, the symbiosis of nation and empire that Russian intellectuals have so frequently extolled. These intellectuals have always been called upon to provide justifications for imperial growth and to defend an increasingly monolithic conception of Russian identity. The very idea of a Ukrainian identity, of course, threatened both.

Because the literary and political history surveyed here cannot be easily condensed, the reader’s attention is directed in many places to scholarly works in social, political, and intellectual history. The intention has not been to give a complete account but to examine only some works and figures within a historical continuum, to trace the outline of the underlying discourse and counterdiscourse from the rise of modern nationalism in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to Ukraine’s independence in 1991.

Ukraine was, of course, the object of diplomatic calculations for other powers - the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire being among the most prominent.¹⁸ It has generated literary commentary in these states, and they, in turn, have figured strongly in Ukraine’s politics and in its self-imaging. For reasons of space, however, they cannot be considered in any depth in this account. After Russia, Poland has been the most influential political- cultural influence on modern Ukrainian literature. Although the primary focus in this book is on the Russian-Ukrainian context, the triangular Russian-Ukrainian-Polish discourse is also adumbrated here. It is an argument of this book that the Ukrainian voice has always existed within this wider three-cornered discourse without always being acknowledged. It is a voice that is audible in the three literatures and the wider discourse of empire that links and interpenetrates them. For most of the nineteenth century the Polish gentry was a leading force in Right Bank Ukraine (which was within the Russian Empire). At the same time it was dominant in Galicia (the Crown land of Austria) until the First World War. In the second half of the 1860s the Austrian government transferred the main levers of power in Galicia from Austrian bureaucrats to Polish magnates and gentry, who considered Ukraine’s independent political existence an unrealistic prospect and prepared for its inclusion in a future Polish state. The struggle of the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia was, therefore, directed primarily against Polish hegemonic claims. When the Polish state was reconstituted in 1918, it fought a war against the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (zunr), defeated it, and established its borders along the Zbruch river, thus reincorporating much of Western Ukraine. This Polish-Ukrainian relationship and the concomitant discourse it generated has only been touched upon, notably in connection with Petro Karmansky’s account of the revolution of 1917-20. Also largely untouched is the large body of diaspora writing, which has often reflected the counterdiscourse, while deflecting it in significant ways. The sections on Karmansky and Ievhen Malaniuk are only partial explorations of the rich and varied emigre experience.

The primary focus of this account, however, is the literary reflection of the Russian-Ukrainian political and cultural relationship.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

A modified form of the Library of Congress system of transliteration has been used in this book. The diacritic and apostrophe have been omitted throughout. In order to approximate English usage and pronunciation, within the text Ya- and Yu- have replaced Ia- and Iu- as the initial consonant in surnames, while -y has replaced -ii or -yi in surname endings. These modifications to surnames have not been made in the bibliography or in bibliographical references within footnotes. Whenever the issue seems clear-cut, the preferred spelling of names has been from the language of the nationality with which an individual is identified. Occasionally, names have been transliterated from two languages. This has been done in those cases where an individual wrote in two languages or where, like Gogol and Danilevsky, they identified themselves as Ukrainians but wrote in Russian. Place names are rendered according to the linguistic form used within present-day international boundaries. Ukraine has adopted the form “Kyiv” as the official transliteration of its capital city, and this form has been used throughout. In a few cases the commonly accepted English form has been retained: Volhynia, Galicia, Dnieper.

For works in Russian and Ukrainian mentioned in this book, the English translation of the title is given first, followed by the transliteration in parentheses. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Russia and Ukraine

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Source: Shkandrij Myroslav. Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times. Carleton University Press,2001. — 370 p.. 2001

Introduction

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