Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian. Marco Puleri
in the current debates in postcolonial studies on European identity” (Pucherová, Gáfrik 2015: 13–14).
16 “a) Are they postcolonial on the level of socio-political conditions? b) Or are they, alternatively, postcolonial on the level of a (post-) colonial mind? c) Or are they just postcolonial on the level of postcolonial modes of representation with the means of literature” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 14).
17 As highlighted by Ilya Gerasimov and Marina Mogilner (2015: 718), “the main limitation of modern postcolonial theories stems from their genealogical dependence on the phenomenon of colonizing empire and hence the inability to contemplate a truly postcolonial reality that is indifferent to the imperial past (not obeying imperial legacy or constantly struggling with it).”
18 It is not by chance that recently in a special issue of the Russian journal The New Literary Observer (2017), Smola and Uffelmann’s attention has been further devoted to the literary construction of postcolonial ethnicity in the yet overlooked field of non-Russian Russophone literatures in the Russian Federation and the Near Abroad: “The literary texts under scrutiny somehow problematise the relationship between Russian and non-Russian, starting with the ‘mirror’ (according to Lacan) merging in the context of Soviet multinational literature and ending with the models of de(con)struction and parody implemented by the authors of the latest period. By means of rhetoric, tropes, linguistic hybridity and performative analysis of ideological models, the authors under scrutiny critically rethink the same constructions of ethnicity” (Smola, Uffel’mann 2017: 425; Исследуемые нами литературные тексты так или иначе проблематизируют соотношение русского и нерусского –– начиная с их «зеркального» (по Лакану) слияния в контексте советской многонациональной литературы и кончая образцами де(кон)струкции и травестирования у авторов новейшего периода. С помощью риторики, тропов, языковой гибридности и перформативного анализа идеологических моделей выбранные нами авторы критически переосмысляют сами конструкции этнического).
19 “[…] first, because it is descriptive, rather than prescriptive; and second, because the term is not ethnically, politically, or geographically specific. Its only central criterion for inclusion is the participation in Russian-language discourse. As such it provides a space for viewing authors of a variety of cultural backgrounds and historical periods. Above all the introduction of Russophonia is an attempt to step away from the classification of literature by nationality (so beloved by the Soviets), and instead to rely on the social and linguistic realities inherent in the production of texts and the multi-faceted structuring of identity.” (Caffee 2013: 20–21).
20 “Cultural appropriation in the Francophone world is not simply a matter of assimilation of the Francophonie to France, of mimicking or imitating the colonizer. The local and the global are interrelated, and the old opposition of center and margin is no longer tenable” (Hart 1997: 157).
21 “Украину можно рассматривать как пример постколониальных синдромов без колониализма.”
22 As Mikhail Berg noted already in 2004: “For the Russian consciousness, the process of colonisation was more than controversial, since Russians, who saw themselves as an imperial nation, still nowadays feel not so much like colonisers as liberators (of European countries from the fascist yoke, of the countries in the Far East and Africa from the advancing American imperialism, and—even earlier—of the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia from the aggressive politics of Turkey […] in other words, the postcolonial discourse has not undergone a social process of deconstruction, and for this reason in the future we will also talk more often about a post-imperial, rather than postcolonial, situation—although they structurally and chronologically coincide in many respects” (Berg 2004; Для русского сознания процесс колонизации был более, чем противоречивым, так как русские, ощущавшие себя имперской нацией, до сих ощущают себя не столько колонизаторами, сколько освободителями — стран Европы от ига фашизма, стран Дальнего Востока и Африки от наступающего американского империализма, еще раньше бывших советских республик Кавказа и Средней Азии от агрессивной политики Турции — […] Иначе говоря, постколониальный дискурс не подвергся общественной процедуре деконструкции, поэтому в дальнейшем мы также будем чаще говорить о постимперской, а не постколониальный ситуации, хотя они структурно и хронологически во многом совпадают).
23 “First of all, it accounts for the spatial and historical proximity of both cultures, epitomized in the highly controversial Russian topoi of ‘bratskii narod’ [‘brother nation’] and Malorossiia [‘Little Russia’]. In addition and chronological continuation, it correlates with the involvement in the Soviet project where both, Russians and Ukrainians, undoubtedly stood much nearer to its foundation and the center of power, and were ‘more equal’ than any other representatives from the Asian, Caucasian or Baltic periphery” (Dubasevych 2016: 138).
24 “As the last national census of December 2001 indicated, more than 17 % of the population, that is, 8.5 million inhabitants, classified themselves as ethnically Russian. There is, apart from the Russians, the largest group of non-Russians, declaring Russian their mother tongue, mostly Ukrainian (14.8 % of all Ukrainians, that is about 5.5 million people), but also members of minorities other than Russian” (Besters-Dilger 2009: 7).
25 “вирішення українського питання без вирішення російського питання в найближчі десятки років неможливе.”
26 “In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Empire, the issue of the social role of the literary work and its creators has reemerged, primarily in the context of a newly earned freedom and the state’s seeming attempts at nationalizing