List of (Un) Recommended Reading: Ukrainians in the works of Russian writers of the 20th century

Abstract

The article aims to study the portrayal of Ukrainians in the literature from the Soviet period. It focuses on how Ukrainian identity is represented based on ethno-clichés rooted in the Russian imperial tradition, which persisted across different periods of the twentieth century. The works analyzed include “The Silent Don” by Sholokhov, “The White Guard” by Bulgakov, and “To the Independence of Ukraine” by Brodsky. These works share a deliberate and systematic construction of Ukrainians as “Other” and “Alien”.
The study uses a diachronic approach and comparative historical, descriptive-analytical, imagological, and contextual analysis principles. These methods are employed to examine the selected works and determine how the images of Ukrainians are constructed in the texts of writers within the Russian imperial discourse.
The study discovered that the portrayal of Ukrainians, and Ukraine in general, in the analyzed literature was based on ethno-clichés rooted in the tradition of Russian imperial thinking. As a result, these portrayals reflect the authors’ subjectivity and imperial worldview, and political engagement, regardless of the variations in their personal backgrounds. The depictions of Ukrainians in the works of Sholokhov, Bulgakov, and Brodsky are influenced by Russians’ “cultural” codes, where the determining factor in their creation was not empirical reality but a discursive tradition based on stereotypes and prejudices.
It’s concluded that contrary to the slogans of friendship and equality of all peoples declared in Soviet ideology, Sholokhov’s “The Silent Don” depicts the image of Ukrainians as the Other (khokhly). In contrast, Bulgakov’s “The White Guard” is dominated by the image of the Alien/Enemy, represented by the petliurivets (a historical counterpart of the mazepynets). Whereas ‘dissident’ Brodsky presents in his pasquil To the Independence of Ukraine a combination of various ethno-clichés related to Ukrainians and Ukraine, encompassing everyday (khokhol), cultural (maloros) and political (mazepynets) contexts.
The inclusion of the analyzed works in the literary canon of modern Russia and, most importantly, their reception by foreign readers as part of the myth of ‘great Russian literature’ and components of the propaganda text determines if they are mandatory positions in the list of recommended texts for decoding and debunking as examples of imperial literary discourse.