SUMMARY:

The article critiques recent scholarly efforts to decenter Russian Formalism, arguing that they often reinforce imperial hierarchies by treating “non-Russian” or “peripheral” – for example Ukrainian – contributions not included in the mainstream canon as mere “commentaries.” Dubbing them “Russophone” conveys this hierarchy while overlooking the bilingual complexity and agency of 1920s Ukrainian intellectual currents. The author contends that the Ukrainian intellectual movement was not a peripheral and derivative commentary but a theoretically original site of production that addressed substantial methodological gaps within the Russian “center.” This thesis is backed by the case of Aleksandr Beletsky (Oleksandr Biletskyi), who anticipated modern reception theory by shifting the analytical focus from the text’s formal properties to the active role of the reader as an autonomous, historically situated cocreator of meaning. The article calls for a “defamiliarized” history of literary theory that recognizes the agency of non-Russian intellectual traditions as constitutive elements of a common transnational intellectual field rather than mere appendixes to a Moscow-centered narrative.