Alien—Different—One’s Own. North-east ethnic and lingual cultural frontier of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Donbas)

Abstract

In the article, which continues the discourse of ethnocultural frontier, the attention is focused on the facts and problems referring to the Ukrainian-Russian cultural frontier of Eastern Ukraine. Polyethnic character of the society initially, since the mid 17th century, determined the presence of two culture-forming components in the region, namely Ukrainian and Russian ones, the dynamics of their correlation in various historical periods, the motion of transitive forms and ambivalent conditions. (The Jewish element acquired the essential function in the ethnocultural system of the region later, mainly in the 20th century.) In the frames of the so-called Kharkiv school of romantics a unique linguocultural situation, not deprived of paradoxicality, was formed, in which Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism objectively performed as one of the factors shaping the development of the Ukrainian literature. From this perspective, the article conducts the diachronic analysis of the main stages of the literary process in Ukrainian Slobozhanshchyna, mainly in its center, Kharkiv. The researcher focuses on such issues and phenomena as the role and signiƗ cance of Kharkiv University founded in 1805; Kharkiv periodicals and collections in the Russian and Ukrainian languages; the activity of such influential figures as H. Skovoroda, H. Kvitka-Osnovianenko, P.Hulak-Artemovskyi, I. Sreznevskyi, M. Kostomarov, O. Potebnia, etc.; contradictory and dramatic literary life in Kharkiv of the national cultural Renaissance epoch in the 1920s and early 1930s (‘Executed Renaissance’) and during the subsequent periods. The ‘Donbas segment’ of the eastern ethnocultural frontier, with its history being much shorter than the Kharkiv one though also abundant with contradictions, is considered in the synchronic aspect, in comparative contrast of the diferent writers’ fates and creative phenomena, including the background of the modern dramatic situation in the region.