РОСІЙСЬКА МАТРИЦЯ Й АЛГОРИТМИ ДЕКОЛОНІЗАЦІЇ (Рецензія на книгу: Агеєва Віра. За лаштунками імперії. Есеї про українсько-російські культурні відносини: 2-е видання, випр. Київ: Віхола, 2023. 360 с.)

Abstract

The review is dedicated to the new book of Professor Vira Ageyeva, in which she examines Ukrainian-Russian relations mainly of the past two centuries under an anti-colonial perspective. The fact is that in world Slavic studies a lot has been written about these relations in the context of overtly or covertly articulated Russian interests and priorities. The Russian Empire, as this state was called from birth, constantly ennobled its history with other people's achievements and gains, in return depriving Ukrainians of what they had achieved. Through the prism of the cultural process, Vira Ageyeva describes and examines the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian Empire and the struggle for the preservation of collective memory. In these centuries, Ukrainian literature was the main spokesperson of the anti-colonial discourse. The author of the book traces the dynamics of this discourse, which she keeps track of from Kotlyarevsky, Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Kharkiv romantics to the era of modernism, and then to several attempts to establish a state. Ukrainian culture and literature in particular during these periods offered different models of identity, one way or another, more or less successfully undermining the Russian imperial matrix and asserting its own cultural self-sufficiency. At the same time, as Vira Ageyeva convincingly proved, the humanism of Russian literature, which is talked about so much in the departments of Slavic studies of Western universities, with rare exceptions was exhausted (and is exhausted now) on the Ukrainian question.