Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times by Myroslav Shkandrij (review)

humanities 417 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 >partial= appendix, unfortunately, is fraught with error, caught up in Longfield=s attempts to distinguish the works of foreign playwrights from Canadian playwrights, and those who are legitimate Manitobans. His appendix lists David Williamson as a Manitoba playwright, apparently confusing the Australian author of Emerald City with the Winnipeg writer David Williamson. A forgivable error, perhaps, if you didn=t actually see the play. Maybe you had to be there. (KEN MITCHELL) Myroslav Shkandrij. Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times McGill-Queen=s University Press. xvi, 354. $75.00 This is a selective thematic history of Ukrainian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The history focuses on negative portrayals of Russian political domination. The exposition is supplemented by a selective examination of the negative presentation of Ukraine in Russian works and a general introduction to Russian-Ukrainian political and cultural relations. The volume is divided into eight chapters, supplemented by an introduction , a conclusion, a bibliography, and an index. The first three chapters set the scene. Chapter 1 is a historical summary of the political and cultural realities of a territorially expanding Russian empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second chapter examines Russian literary responses to military campaigns of conquest. The focus is on Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Lermontov, and Khomiakov. Next comes a chapter on Russian depictions of Ukraine, including travel literature, history writing, Ryleev (>Voinarovskii=), Pushkin (>Poltava=), Gogol, and Belinskii. Chapter 4 presents what Shkandrij calls the >counternarratives,= that is, the Ukrainian-language texts that deliberately challenge the propriety of Russian political and cultural dominance in Ukraine. The focus here, as in the previous chapter, is on the Romantic period. The writers discussed are Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Shevchenko (>Kavkaz= and >Velykyi lNokh=), and SvydnytsNkyi (LiuboratsNki). In Chapter 5, Shkandrij examines the second half of the nineteenth century, both from the Russian perspective (government policy, textbooks, Grigorii Danilevskii) and the Ukrainian (Panteleimon Kulish, Drahomanov, Hrinchenko, Franko). The final three chapters show Shkandrij at his best, examining successively the modernist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods in Ukrainian literature. As in the previous chapters, he uses capsule portraits of particular writers and specific works to interpret various anti-Russian sentiments. These brief vignettes combine original and established interpretations and ideas to depict a constant political undercurrent in Ukrainian writing in the twentieth century. It is captured in the works of Lesia Ukrainka (>Boiarynia,= >Kaminnyi hospodar=), KarmansNkyi, (Kiltsia rozhi), Bulgakov (a Russian, 418 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 anti-Ukrainian view), KhvylNovyi, Domontovych (Divchynka z vedmedykom, Doktor Serafikus; but there is little of the essential political theme in these works), Malaniuk, Stus, and Andrukhovych (Moskoviada). Ukrainian literature is more often discussed in a political context than in an aesthetic one. So it is here. There is ample reason for this imbalance. The essence of Shkandrij=s message is convincing and indisputable: Ukrainian literature is characterized through history by a consistent pattern of politicized writing that asserts cultural and political autonomy in the face of Russian presumptions and claims to the contrary. His compilation of a representative (but not exhaustive) sampling of these facts and his wellresearched and sharp delineation of the various issues and debates will prove very useful to many students of Ukrainian literary history. The theoretical and terminological flavour with which he has imbued his survey may prove less resilient. Colonial theories are certainly appropriate and helpful in examining Ukrainian literature, but their value is interpretive rather than explanatory. The birth of modern Ukrainian literature in the early nineteenth century is not a counter-discourse stimulated by imperial expansion, but a tentative and uncertain development of the same Romantic sensibility that stimulated Russian patriots of this era. The qualities of ambivalence and politicization that Shkandrij sees in his chosen texts are present throughout Ukrainian literature by virtue of its inherent cultural position on its own, Ukrainian landscape. Not every feature of Ukrainian culture is related to Russian imperial intransigence. A number of minor blemishes detract from the otherwise very solid scholarly apparatus of this volume. Among these...