Humanities & Social Sciences
2021
Behind the Scenes of the Empire: Essays on Cultural Relationships between Ukraine and Russia
by Vira Ageyeva
Much has already been written about Ukrainian-Russian relations in the context of Russian interests and priorities. Russia unceremoniously ennobled its history with other people's achievements while depriving Ukrainians of their past. From the Ukrainian's perspective, the story is completely different. For centuries Ukrainian literature has been involved in the anti-colonial discourse. From Kotlyarevsky, Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Kharkiv romantics to the era of modernism and eventually the emergence of contemporary Ukraine, it offered various models of identity, denying imperial claims and asserting its own cultural sufficiency. In this book, the authoritative literary critic Vira Ageyeva analyses the Ukrainian resistance to imperialism and the struggle of Ukraine for the preservation of it's collective memory through the prism of the cultural process.
