Ukrainian Futurism: Re-Appropriating the Imperial Legacy

Abstract

This article surveys the research on Ukrainian Futurism that appeared just before and after Ukrainian independence (1991), and offers critical annotations of these publications. It deals with the literary as well as the visual arts, with works that appeared in Ukraine and in the West. The literature review is preceded by a short outline of Ukrainian Futurism and its fate in scholarship from the 1930s. Much of what has been written on Ukrainian Futurism has appeared in the context of more general ‘avant-garde’ and even ‘modernist’ debates. This paper respects these perspectives but foregrounds Futurism. The author shows that one of the central issues of the new research has been the delineation of a ‘Ukrainian’ movement on the basis of cultural capital that is generally still called ‘Russian’. The research discussed here highlights the multi-national character of avant-garde practices in the Russian and Soviet Empires, offers a suggestion on how imperial cultural processes should be conceptualized and questions the appropriateness of current ‘Russian’ terminology.