Empire as discourse In Krytyka, No. 9 (59), 2002, pp. 2-6.

The article is a review of Myroslav Shkandrii's book “Russia and Ukraine. Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times”. The material consists of an introduction and four parts.

In the introduction, the author criticizes attempts to apply a postcolonial perspective to the Ukrainian context for focusing excessively on the topic of Ukrainian nationalism.

The first part argues that Shkandrii neither addresses the issue of the appropriateness of using the term “colony” in relation to Ukraine nor provides a complete definition of the term “discourse.” The author reflects on Ukrainians viewing their own culture as weak and inferior as a result of cultural imperialism.

The second part focuses on the mythologems that Russian literature used to reinforce Ukraine's ambivalent status between exoticization and cultural and political assimilation.

The third part examines the problem of Ukrainian writers' duality between imperial and regional identities. Much attention is paid to Ukrainophobia in the literary works of Mikhail Bulgakov. The author points to the hastiness of Shkandrii's attempts to view contemporary Ukrainian literature as postcolonial, emphasizing that the processes of decolonization in Ukraine are far from complete.

In the fourth part, the author criticizes Shkandrii for his fragmentary selection of personalities and works to represent anti-colonial Ukrainian literature. He emphasizes the importance of studying the mechanisms of colonial oppression instead of focusing on the antagonism between colonial and anti-colonial narratives.