The Missing Hybridity: ‘Envisioning’ Ukrainian Literary Space

Abstract

In this paper, the author focuses on the question concerning the complex positioning of the Russophone literary phenomenon in the Ukrainian post-Soviet literary canon. Analysing the conceptualization of the hybrid cultural elements in the post-Soviet cultural area, it is possible to observe the rise of a contrast between the cultural ‘exclusivist’ and ‘inclusivist’ attitudes in the Ukrainian literary debate. It is the product of the renewed social and political clash between the Ukrainian and Russian ‘national systems’. The ideologization of the ethnolinguistic factor in the Post-Soviet area gives birth to competing ideologies, which draw new ‘imagined borders’ in the Ukrainian literary space. It is the result of the polarization of the respective national historical narratives, misused by the current political discourses, to paralyse the dialogical perspectives in the process of cultural confrontation. Listening to the ‘voices’ of contemporary cultural actors, it will be possible to draw different images in order to envision the Ukrainian literary space.