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  • Westland: Polen und die Ukraine in der russischen Literatur von Puškin bis Babel' by Mirja Lecke
  • Alessandro Achilli (bio)
Mirja Lecke, Westland: Polen und die Ukraine in der russischen Literatur von Puškin bis Babel' (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016). 409 pp. ISBN: 978-3-631-65773-7.

Mirja Lecke's German-language monograph was published in the series Postcolonial Perspective on Eastern Europe, which was inaugurated in 2012 and includes two monographs and three collections of essays so far, spanning the cultural space between Russia and the Balkans through Poland. As stated at the beginning of its lengthy introduction, the book is to be seen in the context of the evolution of the study of Russian culture to the study of the culture(s) of or in Russia, which constitutes one of the most significant developments of Slavic and East European studies in the past twenty-five years. Lecke, a professor of Slavic Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, presents her work as a contribution to a global understanding of the image of the zapadnyi krai (Western Borderlands – "Westland" in German) in Russian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A variegated, multilingual, and multiethnic part of the Russian empire, the Westland has received critical attention as to several aspects of its historical and cultural peculiarities,1 but has never been the subject of a comprehensive study of its literary representation by the dominating imperial culture.2

While obviously referring to canonical titles of postcolonial studies from Edward Said – whom she explicitly retains as a key to understanding the literature but not the history of Russia (P. 21) – to Homi Bhabha and merging them with Mikhail Bakhtin, on the one hand, and Aleksandr Et-kind, on the other, Lecke is able to use and rethink theory without succumbing to its limitative effects, as is often the case with studies that clearly draw on a specific theory or methodology. By emphasizing texts rather than bare methodology, Lecke manages to concentrate on problems rather than on solutions, prompting readers and researchers to further investigate those issues. The vast corpus of [End Page 309] analyzed texts includes prose, poetry, and drama. An intriguing element of Lecke's – solid albeit not ostentatious – theoretical construction lies precisely in her attempt to establish a link between literary genres and the thematization of specific national entities. While the representation of Poland is generally addressed in historical novels, historical dramas, and odes, Ukraine is relegated to the humbler domain of short stories and humorous sketches, which displays the different levels of "dignity" conceded to Poland and Ukraine in the imperial narration.

Another merit of Lecke's monograph is its broadening of the spectrum of authors and texts in the analyzed sampling. The list encompasses both first-class writers, such as Pushkin and Gogol, and less read and discussed authors, at least today, such as Aleksey K. Tolstoy and Vladimir Korolenko. In this way, Lecke also contributes to a much-needed revision of the canon of nineteenth-century Russian literature, reevaluating writers who enjoyed high popularity in their lifetime and afterward (e.g., M. N. Zagoskin, A. I. Kuprin). In this way, she reconstructs the view of Poland and Ukraine that these writers promoted among Russian readers shaping their imagination and prejudices, or providing formative influence over subsequent generations of writers and readers (Faddey Bulgarin [Jan Tadeusz Bułharyn], Aleksey Khomyakov). A thoroughly text-focused approach highlights the complexity of the problem, thus helping to avoid simplistic generalizations and stifling schemata. Moreover, a problematizing outlook seems to be the only possible approach to the study of complex, intertwined linguistic and ethnic identities, in which the boundaries of Russianness, Polishness, Ukrainianness and, last but not least, Jewishness seem to be less clear-cut than they might appear at first glance.

Although the choice of authors and texts may not always be evident to the reader and it remains unclear how many equally relevant writers could have been included in the analysis within the chosen methodological framework, the structure of the volume seems perspicuous and logical.

The first chapter, which follows the introduction, is devoted to Alexander Pushkin and Adam Mickiewicz. Lecke makes a...

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