Russia and Ukraine Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times

Russia and Ukraine Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times Drawing on colonial discourse and postcolonial theory to reinterpret key writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Myroslav Shkandrij shows how the need to legitimize expansion gave rise to ideas of Russian political and cultural hegemony and influenced Russian attitudes towards Ukraine. These notions were then challenged and subverted in a counterdiscourse that shaped Ukrainian literature. Concepts of civilizational superiority and redemptive assimilation, widely held among nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, helped to form stereotypes of Ukraine and Ukrainians in travel writings, text- books, and historical fiction – stereotypes that have been reactivated in ensuing decades. Both Russian and Ukrainian writers have explored the politics of identity in the post-Soviet period, but while the canon of Russian imperial thought is well known, the tradition of resistance – which in the Ukrainian case can be traced as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures in the seventeenth century – is much less familiar. Shkandrij demonstrates that Ukrainian literature has been marginalized in the interests of converting readers to imperial and assimilatory designs by emphasizing narratives of reunion and brotherhood and denying alterity. myroslav shkandrij is a professor in the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba. This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:33:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:33:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Russia and Ukraine Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times myroslav shkandrij McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:33:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2234-4 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Office of the President and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Manitoba. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Shkandrij, Myroslav, 1950– Russia and Ukraine : literature and the discourse of empire from Napoleonic to postcolonial times Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2234-4 1. Russian literature – 19 th century – History and criticism. 2. Russian literature – 19 th century – History and criticism. 3. Russian literature – 20 th century – History and criticism. 4. Ukrainian literature – 20 th century – History and criticism. 5. Imperialism in literature i. Title. pg3012.s46 2001 891.709’358 c2001-900261-1 Typeset in New Baskerville 10 /12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:33:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions For Natalka This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:33:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:33:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1 Literature and Empire 3 2 Imperial Borderlands in Russian Literature 35 3 Ukraine in Russian Imperial Discourse 67 4 Counternarratives in Ukrainian Literature 126 5 A Clash of Discourses 153 6 Modernism’s National Narrative 197 7 Subverting Leviathan 213 8 The Postcolonial Perspective 259 Conclusion 269 Notes 277 Bibliography 323 Index 347 This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:35:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:35:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant that allowed me to conduct research on this book and to the University of Manitoba for providing me with study leave and grants for travel. Without this support the book would not have been written. The University also contributed to publication costs. Canadian Slavonic Papers kindly allowed me to republish the discussion of Domontovych, which appeared in a modified version in that journal. Many individuals helped me along the way. In particular, I would like to thank George Grabowicz, Marko Pavlyshyn, John-Paul Himka, Walter Smyrniw, Serhy Yekelchyk, Edward Mozejko, and Marusia Petryshyn, who read parts of the manuscript at various stages and offered their comments and advice. I am also in debt to Jaroslav Rozumnyj, Frank Sysyn, Zenon Kohut, and Serhii Plokhii for suggestions and answers to questions in their fields of expertise; to Stepan Yarema for stimulating my interest in Petro Karmansky and for permission to use the manuscript of the latter’s Kiltsia rozhi ; and to Ievhen Nakhlik and Viktor Neborak for sharing their knowledge of literary Ukraine with me. Nevenka Koscevic, James Kominowski, and Vladimira Dzvonik at the University of Manitoba’s Dafoe Library Slavic Collection were enor- mously helpful in tracing sources and providing bibliographical data. Tami Kowal-Denisenko, Maryana Nikoula, and Natalia Lebedin sum- marized documents and helped me prepare sections of the text. The expertise of Joan McGilvray and Ron Curtis was much appreciated in preparing the manuscript for publication. This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:38:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions x Acknowledgments My wife Natalka Chomiak, as always, has acted as my first reader and constant adviser and encourager. Conversations with her sparked and sustained my interest in many of the issues raised in this book and continually provided insights. This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:38:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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 European 1 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, This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:43:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions xii Introduction 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 appropri- ateness 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

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