Puleri, Marco Narrazioni ibride post-sovietiche: Per una letteratura ucraina di lingua russa (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 3, 2018 Reviews Puleri, Marco. Narrazioni ibride post-sovietiche: Per una letteratura ucraina di lingua russa. Premio ricerca ‘Città di Firenze’, 53. Firenze University Press, Firenze, 2016. 257 pp. Bibliography. Index. €12.90 (paperback). The language question has been central to Ukrainian politics and their perception abroad for several years, at least from the 2012 highly contested ‘On the Principles of the State Language Policy’ law, which aimed at granting Russian and other minority languages the official status of ‘regional languages’. Discussions on the place of Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian and other languages spoken in Ukraine in the context of the strengthening and normalization of Ukrainian after centuries of limitations and several waves of Russification are a constant in the political landscape of contemporary Ukraine, including the debate around the latest education reform, harshly criticized by Ukraine’s neighbours in both the east and west of the country. Marco Puleri’s Italian-language monograph represents an important reminder of how clashes on issues of language policy may tend to obliterate intricate and fascinating multi-language configurations at the level of cultural production and reception. Puleri’s book can be seen as both an important contribution towards a flexible re-evaluation of the cultural sphere of the postSovietspace ,onethatdoesnotfallintothetrapofapplyingrigidbinaryschemes to complex situations, and a compelling study of present-day Ukrainian literature and culture. The object of Puleri’s work is contemporary Russianlanguage Ukrainian literature, including both prose and poetry, although with a clear focus on the former. The author does not intend to provide his readers with a systematic inventory of the several Ukrainian authors who use or have used the Russian language as a medium for artistic expression in today’s Ukraine or of their works, but to present a set of methodological tools to analyse and understand the nature and functioning of a ‘minor literature’ in a hybrid cultural context. Puleri openly recognizes his embracing of Deleuze and Guattari’s paradigm, which he successfully applies to contemporary Ukraine. His book is thus to be seen as both a crucial instrument for a more thorough understanding of contemporary Ukrainian literature and as a model for the study of multilingual literary environments. The first chapter of Puleri’s volume, titled ‘Shifting Identities: Identity Dynamics in the Post-Soviet Context’, is dedicated to a discussion and reevaluation of such widespread yet ambivalent and controversial concepts as ‘post-colonial’ and ‘post-Communist’ in the Ukrainian context. The author, drawing on the work of several scholars from both the anglophone and the post-Soviet world, analyses the Ukrainian tendency to give a binary reading of its much more variegated cultural landscape as a consequence of the historical SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 542 traumas of Ukraine, pleading for the acceptance of fluid frontiers over rigid borders (see A. J. Rieber, ‘Changing Concepts and Constructions of Frontiers: A Comparative Historical Approach’, Ab Imperio, 1, 2003, pp. 23–46) in the characterization of cultural negotiations in contemporary Ukraine. The second chapter, ‘Literature, Language and Identity: Moving Frontiers’, pursues the author’s reflection on the applicability of mobile frontiers to the nexus of literature, language and identity in post-Soviet Ukraine through a historical excursus from imperial times to the present day. Puleri analyses Gogol´’s reception in the context of the epistemological choice between exclusive and inclusiveculturalidentitiesandmakeshiswaytothecontemporaryagethrough theexperienceoftheSovietperiodfromthepointofviewofUkrainiancomplex linguistic and political landscape. The third chapter, titled ‘Textual Mappings: Heterogeneity and Polyphony in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature’, offers a comprehensive survey of contemporary Ukrainian literature, with special attention to Yuri Andrukhovych and Serhii Zhadan, probably the two most influential authors of post-Soviet (Ukrainian-language) Ukrainian literature. The fourth chapter, ‘Ukraiins’kyi/Rosiis’komovnyi/Rosiis’kyi. Defining New Interpretational Windows’, provides the reader with various insights on the complexity of cultural positioning in contemporary Ukrainian culture that are meant to help them understand the relationship between language, tradition and cultural belonging. This is obtained through a challenging reconstruction of the most widespread attitudes concerning the role of language for the definition of the boundaries of national culture among foremost writers and critics in contemporary Ukraine. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to a fascinating discussion of the role of...