the multiplicity of labels and categories based on strictly exclusive territorial, linguistic and ethnic terms, especially whereas we understand that paradoxically, as in the case of Central Asia, the “Russophone cultural-linguistic space might continue to function here even without a larger presence of ‘Russians’ ” (Kosmarskaya, Kosmarski 2019: 90). Moving further to an understanding of the complexity of the “Russian-speaking” world, new insights emerge from the analysis undertaken by the Kazakhstani scholars who contributed to the thematic issue emblematically entitled When Global Becomes Local: Modern Mobilities and the Reinvention of Locality (2017) in the scholarly journal Ab Imperio. At the core of Akbota Alisharieva, Zhanar Ibrayeva and Ekaterina Protassova’s research proposal lies the opportunity to study Russian as a polycentric language, following the analogous case of the field of the so-called “World-Englishes,” which was first developed ←17 | 18→in the 1970s in the aftermath of the decolonization process (Kachru 1992; Bolton, Kachru 2006). Here again, “[i];n theoretical and pragmatical terms […] the use of the term ‘Englishes’ emphasizes the autonomy and plurality of the world varieties of the English language” (Kachru et al. 2006: 4). Similarly, nowadays the “Russian-speaking space” is influenced by the new demographic processes, national cultural standards and language practices which have followed the Soviet collapse since 1991:
As a result of the collapse of the USSR, the Russian-speaking area has reduced and changed its configuration. Russian speakers live in almost all countries of the world. Diaspora is growing, but it is not subordinate to a single center as before […] Russian philologists working outside the Russian Federation are faced with the question of how to describe new phenomena in Russian language, when this deviates from the previous standard and the interaction with local languages affects its vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation—even among those for whom it was the native language.4 (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 232)
Research provides preliminary evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Russian language in Kazakhstan, or “Kazakhstani Russian,” has acquired autonomy from the “global” Russian language.5 Such dynamics have been ←18 | 19→recognized even in other post-Soviet contexts where the cultural proximity of Russian with the state language, in spite of a “downgraded” official status, is more pronounced (see the Ukrainian case: e.g. Del Gaudio 2011). Yet these reassessments have implications well beyond the sphere of linguistics, as they redefine the terms in which social scientists—and even politicians—contemplate the issue of the “Russian speaking communities” in post-Soviet countries.6
The above-mentioned authors of the article “The Kazakhstani Russian: An Outsider’s Perspective” (“Kazakhstanskii Russkii: Vzgliad so storony”) further emphasize that whereby, on the one hand, “in Russian studies such analyses have just started,” today “the study of the variability of the Russian language is still tied to observe the exclusive normative model of Russian supported by the scientific and political resources of the Russian Federation” (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 234).7 Interestingly enough, on the other hand, here again the main factor affecting the actual and habitual use of the local varieties of Russian language “from below” is “the subjectivity of the speakers: how do people answer the question of who, strictly speaking, owns the language and who has the right to speak it?” (Alisharieva et al. 2017: 235).8
←19 | 20→
An answer to this question—and to the proliferation of cultural constructs that still tie categories such as “Russian” and “Russian-speaking” to territorially, ethnically or ideologically bounded labels—can be identified in the emerging field of “Russophonia.” Yet, as mentioned by Robert A. Saunders, still in 2014 a Google search for Russophonia only produced “a list of pages dedicated to ‘Russophobia’ or the ‘fear of Russians’ ” (2014: 1). While addressing a necessary practice of reflection on terminology, Dirk Uffelmann (2019: 208) used the term to describe “the global community of Russian language and culture,” significantly—and provocatively—switching the focus from the speakers to the set of speech acts. Disembodying language from its carriers, we can consider even the room for “Russophone Russophobia,” highlighting how nowadays a “critique of all that is constructed as Russia(n)—namely, Russian politics, mentality, culture, and above all language—if expressed in Russian, can collide with the performance of using the Russian language” (Uffelmann 2019: 214).
Eventually, the term “Russophonia” brings the attention to the performative acts of speaking Russian (and even speaking back to Russia), thus laying the ground for a new potential methodological orientation, with the aim to overcome contradictory ideological constructs based on ethnicity, nationality and territory.9 Most fundamentally, Russophonia highlights the self-conscious and autonomous nature of the performance that carriers of the Russian language are enabled to produce with their individual speech acts, finally switching the focus to the agency of these new cultural actors—thus creating the ground for an extremely interesting field of study aimed at an understanding of the multiplicity of Russian political and linguistic cultures and identities.
In-between (Literary) Russophonia
In the closing lines of the lecture given at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the occasion of the awarding ceremony, Sviatlana Aleksievich (b. 1948, ←20 | 21→Stanislav—today Ivano-Frankivs’k), the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015, reflected upon one of the most controversial issues mirrored by the kaleidoscope of post-Soviet identity:
I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. All are very dear to me. But in this day and age it is difficult to talk about love.10 (Alexievich 2015)
In an attempt to define the different cultural, historical and political affiliations of the writer Sviatlana Aliaksandrauna (in Belarusian)/Svetlana Aleksandrovna (in Russian) Aleksievich, a number of different labels have been adopted: (post-)Soviet, for her historical-cultural background; Belarusian, for her citizenship; Ukrainian, for being born in the Soviet Stanislav, today’s Ivano-Frankivs’k; and, finally, Russian, for her native language and artistic-literary instrument. Eventually, this created the ground for the rise of a contested reception of Aleksievich’s success in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, where she was at times appropriated or rejected along the “own/other” divide (Charnysh 2015).
In an article published the day after the awarding of the prize to Aleksievich, the Ukrainian journalist Vitalii Portnikov (2015) offered an interesting key to an understanding of this controversial issue. Reflecting upon the observers’ attempts to position the writer’s experience within the borders of a single national literary canon, the Ukrainian journalist highlighted how today at the core of the dispute lies “our inability to shift cultural frontiers” (nashe neumenie razdvigat’ kul’turnye granitsy; Portnikov 2015). For Portnikov, Sviatlana Aleksievich is a Belarusian writer “to the same extent that Joyce and Yates are Irish writers, Mark Twain and Hemingway are Americans, García Márquez is Colombian, and Vargas Llosa is Peruvian”11 (Portnikov 2015). According to Portnikov, “[i];n the ←21 | 22→contemporary world the national belonging of a writer is not determined by language, but by a choice of civilization”12 (Portnikov 2015).
Following Portnikov’s
