{"title":"Self-Translation ‒ The Looming End of Russophone Literature in the CIS? Boris Khersonskii’s Anti-Hegemonic Code-Switching","authors":"Dirk Uffelmann","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2021.10.006","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Having become famous thanks to publications in Russian publishing houses in the 1990s and 2000s, after 2014 the Russophone Odessite poet Boris Grigor’evich Khersonskii faced allegations of Russophobia for his pro-Ukrainian position and criticism of Russian interference in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Over the post-Euromaidan years, the poet increasingly added Ukrainian-language translations of his Russian poems and texts originally written in Ukrainian to his portfolio. This paper<sup>1</sup> investigates Khersonskii’s forced choice of poetic language, zooming in on the post-2014 timeline of his increasingly Ukrainophone oeuvre and distinguishing between various digital and print genres, comprising both his Facebook blog and book publications such as <em>Stalina ne bulo</em> (<em>There Was no Stalin</em>) and <em>Odesskaia intelligentsiia</em> (<em>Odessite Intelligentsia</em>, both 2018). The paper analyzes the poet’s linguistic performance with a special focus on his self-translations, which can be found online in Khersonskii’s Facebook blog dating from October 30, 2013 to February 19, 2019, and proposes a postcolonial framing of self-translation and code-switching: in so doing, it defends the thesis that Khersonskii’s anti-hegemonic code-switching is counterweighed by his subsequent self-translations and bilingual blogging, serving the goal of mitigating the bipolar language conflict in post-Maidan Ukraine.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347921000661","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Having become famous thanks to publications in Russian publishing houses in the 1990s and 2000s, after 2014 the Russophone Odessite poet Boris Grigor’evich Khersonskii faced allegations of Russophobia for his pro-Ukrainian position and criticism of Russian interference in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Over the post-Euromaidan years, the poet increasingly added Ukrainian-language translations of his Russian poems and texts originally written in Ukrainian to his portfolio. This paper1 investigates Khersonskii’s forced choice of poetic language, zooming in on the post-2014 timeline of his increasingly Ukrainophone oeuvre and distinguishing between various digital and print genres, comprising both his Facebook blog and book publications such as Stalina ne bulo (There Was no Stalin) and Odesskaia intelligentsiia (Odessite Intelligentsia, both 2018). The paper analyzes the poet’s linguistic performance with a special focus on his self-translations, which can be found online in Khersonskii’s Facebook blog dating from October 30, 2013 to February 19, 2019, and proposes a postcolonial framing of self-translation and code-switching: in so doing, it defends the thesis that Khersonskii’s anti-hegemonic code-switching is counterweighed by his subsequent self-translations and bilingual blogging, serving the goal of mitigating the bipolar language conflict in post-Maidan Ukraine.
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.