Drawing on colonial discourse and postcolonial theory to reinterpret key writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Myroslav Shkandrij discusses how the need to legitimize expansion gave rise to ideas of Russian political and cultural hegemony and influenced Russian attitudes towards Ukraine. These notions were then challenged and subverted in a counter-discourse that shaped Ukrainian literature.
Both Russian and Ukrainian writers have explored the politics of identity in the post-Soviet period, but while the canon of Russian imperial thought is well known, the tradition of resistance – which in the Ukrainian case can be traced as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures in the 17th century – is less familiar. Myroslav Shkandrij, a professor in the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba, is the author of Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times. Olena Haleta is a professor at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Lviv.
