SUMMARY:

A contribution to the forum “Russia’s War on Ukraine and Nineteenth-Century ‘Russian Studies,’” this essay tackles the problem of recovering Ukrainian literature in the Russian classical literary canon of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the academic work of deconstructing imperial attitudes and reframing the literary canon can excavate those aspects of Russian culture that might lay the ground for a new, post-Putin Russia and for postcolonial understandings of its culture.