the last decades there has not been a real and static dividing line, based on the ethnolinguistic traits of the population, between the generally assumed social collectivities of “Ukrainians” and “Russians,” and “Russian speakers” and “Ukrainian speakers” in Ukraine. Indeed, this dividing line was fluid and subject to hybridizing trajectories and intersections with other identity markers. In an attempt to grasp the fluid character of post-Soviet identity affiliations, Peter W. Rodgers in 2008 recognized the regional category, rather than the ethnolinguistic one, as a suitable parameter for describing contemporary Ukraine. In his study Nation, Region and History in Post-Communist Transitions: Identity Politics in Ukraine, 1991–2006, Rodgers provided a tentative model for describing the regional composition of contemporary Ukraine: it was conventionally articulated in ten regions, according to the combination of linguistic, cultural and historical affiliations. He distinguished the Crimean Peninsula from other regions, as being “the only area of Ukraine, with an ethnic Russian majority”—according to the 2001 national census (58.5 per cent)—and the “least supportive of Ukraine’s state independence” (Rodgers 2008: 56), possessing a unique degree of political autonomy in the country until the contested annexation to the Russian Federation in March 2014. Then, he identified a southern region, including the areas of Kherson, Odesa and Mykolaïv. These territories, which were absorbed as new industrial centres into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century with the status of the province of “New Russia” ←58 | 59→(Novorossiiskaia guberniia), are characterized by a greater diffusion of the Russian language and culture, but “the region today is less urban, and ethnically Russian than other parts of Ukraine to the east” (Rodgers 2008: 57).55 Rodgers further identifies the north-central region (Poltava, Kirovohrad, Cherkasy, Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy), acknowledging its historical specificity: this was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until the mid-seventeenth century, and includes the historical lands that were inhabited by Cossacks. It passed then under Russian control with the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), which ended the Russian–Polish war. As Rodgers (2008: 57) notes in his classification: “Although these areas were under Moscow’s control for a similar period of time as lands to the east and in the south, they have always retained a more ‘Ukrainian’ political outlook.” Significantly, even if in the late Imperial and Soviet eras the main urban centres were predominantly Russified, nowadays the population is mostly made up of Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians. Rodgers distinguishes then the western region (L’viv, Ternopil’ and Ivano-Frankivs’k) from the west-central one (Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Khmel’nyts’kyi, Rivne and Volyn’): while both are inhabited mostly by Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, the first is usually described as the historical region of Galicia (Halychyna), where under Habsburg rule the national movement emerged.56 In the south-west region (Chernivtsi, Zakarpat’ska oblast’), Rodgers further identifies two distinct regions, Bukovyna and Zakarpattia: both were under Habsburg rule up to 1918 and have a large number of national minorities in their territories, but developed divergent historical experiences, bordering respectively modern Romania and Hungary. Finally, according to Rodger’s scheme, we have the east-central region (Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovs’k, Kharkiv) and the eastern one (Donets’k, Luhans’k). Historically, both are industrialized and ←59 | 60→Russified areas, but while the first one shows a distinct attitude towards the convergence of Ukrainian and Russian cultural legacies, the second was instead a true “showcase of socialism” (Rodgers 2008: 63), and today has turned out to be tied to a Soviet regional identity, with a predominantly Russian-speaking population.57
Indeed, in his study, Rodgers (2008: 55) significantly identifies the potential flaws in his classification and admits that “drawing regional boundaries in Ukraine is fraught with difficulties,” especially because “such boundaries are often more fluid than rigid.” Together with Lowell W. Barrington and Erik S. Herron (2004), who previously presented a framework made up of eight distinct regions, Rodgers states that the urgency behind a more nuanced regional classification of Ukraine lies in the need to overcome the essentialization of the “divisions of Ukraine into macroregions such as ‘Eastern Ukraine’ and ‘Western Ukraine’,” which “fail to illuminate inherent differentiation among areas with contrasting historical, economic and demographic profiles” (2008: 55).58 This kind of essentializing approach emerged consistently after the 1994 presidential elections in Ukraine, which saw the victory of Leonid Kuchma, who supported the “upgrade” of the status of the Russian language in the country and a ←60 | 61→political rapprochement with Russia, over the incumbent Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of Ukraine (1991–1994), who promoted Ukrainian as the sole state language and the country’s distancing from Russia. In public debates the voting patterns were first explained by “a neat dividing line between Ukrainian speakers to the West and Russian speakers to the East” (Rodgers 2008: 50). The essentialization of internal divisions into a binary scheme expanded then its scope from political to polemical debates in the mainstream media: the so-called two Ukraines discourse portrayed a nation split into a European-oriented, nationalist and Ukrainian-speaking West and a Russian-oriented, Soviet nostalgic and Russian-speaking East.59 In her commentary entitled The Myth of Two Ukraines, Tatiana Zhurzhenko (2002a), at the dawn of the 2000s, observed how this controversial debate was sharpened by the so-called “ ‘Huntingtonization’ of the Ukrainian political discourse,” that is, the projection of regional differences into a clash between “two civilizations.” Paradoxically, “the most important factor of this ‘Hungtingtonization’ ” of internal divisions was an “external one”:
After the end of the Cold War and the initial euphoria caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall Ukraine found itself “in between” the new emerging geopolitical realities: between an enlarging EU and NATO on the one side, and a rather shaky re-integration of the former Soviet republics, dominated by Russia, on the other […] This uncertainty has been interpreted ideologically as a conflict of two cultural orientations and two mutually exclusive identities: European culture embodied by Western Ukraine and pan-Slavic or Eurasian culture embodied by Eastern Ukraine. (Zhurzhenko 2002a)
Whereas in the course of Ukrainian history the essentialization of the exclusive character of the national narrative took shape along an oppositional relation to external imperial hegemonic discourses, today the internal regional divisions—be they language, ethnic or historically based—re-actualize when the borders imagined by competing binary discourses ←61 | 62→harden.60 Apparently, it is especially in the field of “literary politics” (Rewakowicz 2018: 2) where the room for “rethinking” the Ukrainian literary canon in light of contemporary sociocultural dynamics has been also hindered by such an epistemological approach.
New (Old?) Cultural Standards in the Post-Soviet Era
In the history of Ukraine, as emphasized by Marko Pavlyshyn (2016a: 78), it is especially literature that has played an important role “vis-à-vis the Ukrainian nation,” and even today “the participation of a national literature in nation-building” is taken “as axiomatic” (2016: 79). In the aftermath of the post-Soviet historical rift, the debate was not around “the possibility of a national literature,” but on “the shape that it, and its history, should take” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 79–80). While reframing the new national literary canon, it is no surprise that the question of literary bilingualism was emblematically ignored. This approach follows the dynamics of Ukrainian history, in which “[i];n the absence of a Ukrainian state, and with Ukrainian literary activity taking place in a geographical space shared by representatives of other cultures […] Ukrainian literary history writing from its inception had little cause or opportunity to do otherwise than focus on phenomena marked by their language as Ukrainian” (Pavlyshyn 2016a: 81). As highlighted by George G. Grabowicz (1992: 221), at the dawn of Ukrainian independence:
[…] the Russian-language writings of Ukrainian writers are most often treated as something of an embarrassment, like a skeleton in the closet; for some they are a hedging on the writer’s national commitment. For many others, including most Western critics, this is largely a terra incognita. For virtually all, however, language is seen
