Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we witnessed the textualization of new speech acts that contributed to developing “new ways of translating the world” (Rubins 2019: 46)—that is, new tools and symbols able to reflect the reshaping of the cultural frontiers of modernity. As highlighted by Maria Rubins (2019: 21), “Russia has been no stranger” to the “global trends that informed much of the world’s cultural production in the last hundred years”: among these trends, we can mention the fall of multiethnic empires (i.e. the Tsarist empire in 1917) and totalitarian regimes (i.e. the Soviet Union in 1991), revolutionary cycles (i.e. the October Revolution in 1917, perestroika and the fall of the communist rule in 1985–1991), wars (i.e. the two World Wars in the first half of the century, and the Afghan war in late Soviet era, above all), massive migrations and displacement. These events created the ground for the “proliferation of hyphenated, hybrid, translocal and transnational identities” that make up today the so-called “archipelago of Russian culture,” borrowing Rubins’ definition (2019: 24).13
Whereas, following a geocritical approach, Rubins observed how globally “the interdisciplinary study of the archipelago has challenged the binary conception of mainland versus islands, recasting the entire cultural space as an archipelago” (2019: 25), in the 2000s the peculiar “glocalization” (Kukulin 2019: 171) of Russian language and culture in post-Soviet times has been the focus of studies adopting the postcolonial methodology for research on the post-communist region. It is also as a result of this emerging approach that in his review of the latest English editions of Aleksievich’s novels Second Hand Time (Vremia sekond-khend, 2013) and ←22 | 23→Chernobyl Prayer (Chernobyl’skaia molitva, 1993), emblematically entitled Neighbours in Memory, Serguei Oushakine (2016: 12) significantly came to describe Sviatlana Aleksievich as “the first major postcolonial author of postcommunism.”14
Notwithstanding the historians’ enduring reluctance to endorse the methodological hybridization between postcolonialism and post-communism, Aleksievich’s experience reveals once again the presence of multiple points of intersection between the two “post-”: postcolonial linguistic and cultural hybrids, textual and identity deterritorialization, conflictual binary discourses re-emerge in a different form—but, at the same time, akin to classical colonialism—in the cultural contexts of the new countries that have arisen from the ashes of Communism. It was significantly “[t];he opening up of Second world cultures to increased global contacts as a result of the policies of perestroika and glasnost and, even more so, the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the suddenly former USSR” that “highlighted this jarring omission” (Chernetsky 2007: 7) in postcolonial research.
Among the most productive points of contact between the two “post-,” we witness the revision of the so-called “East–West” divide in the heart of Europe, which opened the ground to global contacts and interdisciplinary research perspectives. The studies undertaken by the post-communist scholars who contributed to the volume Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures (2015), edited by Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik, reflect the original perspectives offered by this methodological orientation. As highlighted by the editors in the introduction to the book, the unifying idea behind all the contributions is to give voice to new actors in the contemporary debate on European identity.15 ←23 | 24→As argued still in 2012 by Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Şandru, the editors of a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, here we deal with “an inquiry that does not so much seek some postcolonial status for East-central Europe as it strives to find, theorize, and make productive spaces of difference within similar paradigms of subjection, subalternity and peripheralization” (Kołodziejczyk, Şandru 2012: 116).
Generally, drawing upon the path undertaken by the editors of the volume included in this book series, Postcolonial Slavic Literatures After Communism (2016), the proposed framework answers the need for exploring “not only the heuristic potential of postcolonial approaches to postcommunist cultures on the meta-theoretical level,” but also “literature’s specific contribution” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 14) to a broader understanding of post-communist societies. On the one hand, as emphasized by Klavdia Smola and Dirk Uffelmann (2016: 17), “for East and East-Central Europe, it might be useful to stress selected concepts of postcolonial studies such as hybridity or inbetweenness that are compatible with interpretative routines such as deconstruction […] or global paradigms such as transnationality or world literature.” On the other, whereas together with the editors of the volume we argue that “Slavic literatures after communism are postcolonial […] in a no more metaphorical way than the allegedly ‘classic’ cases of postcolonial literatures,” we can still maintain that they “need not, however, necessarily be postcolonial in the same respect” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 15). It is exactly following this path that we can go beyond the question posed by David Chioni Moore still at the dawn of the new millennium in his seminal essay “Is the ‘Post-’ in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” (2001), and eventually create the ground for a new epistemological approach to the post-communist—and, namely, post-Soviet—culture and society. As suggested by Smola and Uffelmann (2016: 14), we should reframe the main research question as follows: “on what levels are the literatures of postcommunist countries postcolonial?”16 The complexity ←24 | 25→and heterogeneity of a space where “neighboring cultures with mutual linguistic intercomprehension and cultural and religious similarities” (Smola, Uffelmann 2016: 15) were in a state of constant interaction and exchange prevents us from giving a univocal answer to this question.17 Nonetheless, the peculiar in-between position which emerges from the diverse historical experiences of Slavic cultures still represents one of the main characterizing traits of the postcolonial setting in Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, shared historical dynamics make the definition of new post-Soviet ethnic and national identities in Eastern Europe—together with the demarcation of the respective fields of national cultures—even more complex and contested than in overseas colonialism.18
Most fundamentally, regarding my research focus, the “trans-nationalization” of Russian culture also seems to regard a broader process taking place in the post-Soviet region as a result of a peculiar (post-)colonial experience in (post-)Soviet times. As emphasized by Susanne Frank, ←25 | 26→the ambivalent multinational Soviet literature “that emerged as a project of cultural and literary policy in the mid-1930s can be seen as not the least important part of political enterprise of nationalities policy in the Soviet Union” (Frank 2016: 193). This project, proclaimed as anti-imperial, still had some characteristics that allow identifying it as imperial: “the dominance of Russian as lingua franca and the language into which all (relevant) literary texts had to be translated was only one feature, others being dogmatism of one aesthetic doctrine—Socialist Realism—and universalism” (Frank 2016: 193). According to Frank, the heritage of this transnational project—that forged “a literary reality of dense intercultural entanglement” (2016: 201)—comes to still influence the “post-imperial” developments of post-Soviet literatures. Especially, when identifying its “unintended result” for “the space of Russian-language literature,” Frank recognizes that “nearly everywhere […] there are authors today who use Russian as their writing language” (2016: 213). This is “a group and a tendency in-between” (Frank 2016: 213), living at the crossroads between the processes of “nationalization and/as de-Sovietization” in former Soviet republics and “nationalization in Russia itself” (Frank 2016: 212). Recent literary developments in post-Soviet cultures could be thus included “on the one hand in the context of current global tendencies of literary transnationalization, and on the other in a historical perspective as effects and consequences of the project of Soviet multinational literature” (Frank 2016: 214).
Interestingly, it is also through the lens of the global decentralizing process
