Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics by Marco Puleri (review)

People in Ukraine keep speaking and creating in Russian. But no one seems to know what to do about it. What should the status of their language be in Ukraine? How should the cultural artifacts they produce be treated? It is challenging to answer these questions because to find the solutions, one first needs to understand who the Russian speakers in Ukraine are exactly, what culture they are more a part of, Ukrainian or Russian, and whether speaking and creating in Russian makes them closer to the ideology of the country Ukraine is now at war with. So far, there is no consensus on this matter. A possible explanation for this absence could be one offered by Ilya Gerasimov: that the positionality of Russian speakers in Ukraine is so peculiar that the available ontological and epistemological tools cannot serve to describe it since the Ukrainian revolution and its aftermath involve an unprecedented historical process in the making in which conventional categories and models are becoming obsolete (P. 39).¹

To be sure, some propositions for redefining the status of Russian in Ukraine have been made. The Ukrainian politician Boris Filatov, the American historian Timothy Snyder, and the Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov have, at different times, suggested reappropriating Russian as a Ukrainian cultural good and institutionalizing it so that Ukraine develops its own center of Russian that would be independent from the Russian Federation. However, while such propositions have been made, they do not seem to be supported by substantial theoretical grounds that would clearly explain what Russophone culture in Ukraine is and why one would want to support it.

Marco Puleri's new book offers precisely this theoretical substantiation and attempts to define the scope of Russophone culture in Ukraine through the lens of hybridity. The author proposes viewing Ukrainian Russophone culture as both Ukrainian and Russian and explains how and why it can be accepted as a valuable element of the Ukrainian cultural scene. He achieves this by first analyzing the works of Russophone Ukrainian writers and then extending his analysis of literary works to the broader cultural processes in Ukraine. His work demonstrates how these writers function within the literary markets of the two countries, how they reappropriate literary works from both literary traditions, and how they permeate their works with the peculiar local language, which, uttered using Russian words but relying on syntax emerging from the Ukrainian political realities, is both Ukrainian and Russian.

Chapter 1 of Puleri's book provides a brief historical overview of how the current positionality of Russophone Ukrainian writers has emerged and outlines what is so problematic about it from the postcolonial perspective. Analyzing examples of Gogol and Shevchenko, Puleri shows that hybridity has a long history in Ukraine and is an inalienable feature of Russophone Ukrainian literature. He also argues that the drawing of ethnolinguistic borders in Ukraine is a part of the political and cultural clash between Ukraine and Russia.

Chapter 2 develops this analysis from the vantage point of literary markets. Here the author reconstructs the most common language ideologies and the ways Russian is perceived in Ukraine. He also traces the impact of the literary markets of Ukraine and Russia on how these perceptions emerged. Russophone Ukrainian authors, Puleri suggests, have long been perceived as Russian because they have published their works in Russian publishing houses, received Russian literary awards, and distributed their works in Russia. Now that they choose not to engage with these markets, the author speculates, Ukrainian readers' perspectives on them might change and so might their perspectives on what can be counted as Ukrainian literature.

In chapter 3, Puleri offers a new perspective on Russophone Ukrainian works by analyzing them through the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of minor literature. This allows him to view the Russophone literature of writers working in...