There could hardly have been a more striking contrast between countries and academic cultures than the one between Ukraine and Australia in 1993. Having left behind the impoverishment, hyperinflation, and political turmoil of early post-Soviet Ukraine, I landed some thirty hours later in what then seemed to be the land of prosperity and stability. From early spring in Eastern Europe, I moved into late summer in the Southern hemisphere, and was transplanted from the familiar environment of my research institute at Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences to the hectic and somewhat baffling world of a Western university. But it was a peculiar Australian version of “Westernness” – in a country located geographically in the South Pacific – that greatly influenced my thinking about Ukraine’s past by introducing me to post-colonial theory.
I came to Monash University in Melbourne at the invitation of Dr. Marko Pavlyshyn, who was then the head of the Slavic section at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies (as of this writing, he heads the School of Modern Languages and Literatures at Monash). With funding from the Foundation of Ukrainian Studies in Australia, Marko has been bringing younger scholars from Ukraine to Monash with the aim of introducing them to contemporary Western theory and methodology. I had applied for this fellowship, hoping to further my research on the construction of a new high culture by Ukrainian patriots in the Russian Empire. My proposal had some interesting ideas and referred to Roland Barthes (whose works I had read in Russian in the 1989 Moscow edition) and Michel Foucault (whom I had not read at the time, but suspected that the very mention of his name might improve my chances of going to Australia). Marko saw in my proposal the promise that I myself did not see. As an Australian literary scholar, he has long been exposed to post-colonial theory and pioneered its application in his own field of Ukrainian Studies.
One of the first texts I read in Australia was Marko’s 1992 article, “Post-Colonial Features in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture.” He then guided me through a bibliography of post-colonial “classics,” including the often-incomprehensible Homi K. Bhabha. The excellent and sensitive teacher that he is, Marko also suggested that I start with an analysis of material about national clothing and body image – as opposed to other projected chapters (of which only a few were subsequently completed). This was the origin of “The Body and National Myth,” which appeared in the Australian Slavonic and East European Studies in early 1994, just before I left Australia for Ukraine, and my eventual doctoral program in Canada.
“The Body” or Tilo (as Marko and I came to refer jokingly in Ukrainian to this paper’s title) thus became the product of my transcontinental journey at the dawn of the post-communist era, when scholarly tradition and paradigms were in a state of flux. In Ukraine before 1993 there were some solid works about the Ukrainophile generation of Ukrainian patriots (approximately 1850-1890) – books published both during the Soviet period (R. P. Ivanova, A. K. Voloshchenko) and after ideological control disintegrated under perestroika (V. G. Sarbei). But the tendency emerging after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 was to rewrite Ukraine’s modern history as the heroic story of the “Ukrainian national movement” aimed at securing an independent state. The approach I was taught as a young graduate student in 1989-1992 was therefore largely teleological and sociological. Although my advisor, Professor Sarbei was often ironic about the revision of history, he himself actively participated in it. In this sense, the year in Australia proved liberating because it helped me to establish a critical attitude to the nationalistic temptations of a young Ukrainian historiography. The cultural construction of modern Ukraine that the Ukrainophiles were so obviously engaged in did not allow for a nationalistic vision of a “national awakening.” Cultural history undermined the certainty of the Hrochian scheme of the national movement’s progression from an academic interest to a political movement. Finally, far from solidifying the notions of a “colonizer” and “colonized” (so dear to the hearts of Ukrainian nationalists), modern post-colonial theory problematized this dichotomy by showing how the two could not exist without each other and how resistance to colonialism borrowed cultural forms from the metropole.
“The Body,” thus, was a neophite’s attempt to apply to his field a newly discovered tool for the study of imperial cultural space. I stand by this paper’s main conclusions and interpretations, although today I would rewrite much of the semiotic jargon and further stress the permeable line between what was considered acceptable and seditious among the Ukrainophiles’ cultural pursuits. I would emphasize the ambivalent and situational solidarity they were building – in order to undermine once more the language of modern nationalism, which removes the gray shades typical of the nineteenth century in favor of the twentieth century’s black-and-white nationalistic vision of national distinctiveness.
In the years since the publication of “The Body,” I have moved away from nineteenth-century topics, while preserving my interest in cultural history and identity construction. There are echoes of post-colonial theory in my 2004 book on the Ukrainian historical imagination under Stalin, although I find in Stalinist Ukrainian culture only certain tropes and strategies familiar from colonial cultures, and only models of interaction stressing ethnic difference – without claiming that a clear-cut opposition existed between Moscow as the imperial center and Ukraine as colonial periphery. Post-colonial theory has also been used critically in Ukraine by the journalist Mykola Riabchuk, and among Western specialists on Ukraine, by Stephen Velychenko.
If I have moved away from the cultural history of pre-revolutionary Ukraine, I am happy to observe excellent work being done there. Innovative Ukrainian historians, such as Natalia Yakovenko and Yaroslav Hrytsak, continue undermining the traditional nationalist schemes with their cutting-edge cultural history approach. Their students and younger scholars affiliated with the magazine Krytyka and the journal Ukrainskyi humanitarnyi ohliad produce top-notch work that equals and exceeds in sophistication anything published elsewhere. Some younger Ukrainian cultural historians, such as Andrij Zaiarniuk, have received their education abroad (Zaiarniuk studied in Canada under John-Paul Himka), but their academic and intellectual home is Ukraine. Much of the recent work on Ukrainian history critically engages Western models, rather than merely trying to “apply” them to the Ukrainian case.

October 18, 2006