Ukraine as the Hub of Postimperial Formalism

Ukrainness, Revolutionary Populism, and the Theory of Poetical Language ‘in’ Russia and ‘in’ Poland

Abstract

The notion of ‘postimperial formalism’ accounts of the interconnectedness of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish variants of formalism, whose distinctive character is contingent on the dialectics of liberation and subjugation (or autonomy and heteronomy) operating in the multinational entity of the Russian empire. Specifically, the theory of poetic language – the pars pro toto of early literary theory – carries with itself the survivals of the conditions of the multinational empire. This is most eloquently expressed in the writings of Polish and Jewish-Ukrainian populist activists turned ethnographic researchers, who prepared a theory of poetic language to which the formalists could have recourse. I first map the dimensions of the Ukrainian investment into the formulation of the theory of poetic language. Secondly, I describe the role of the constructed Ukrainness – under the guise of the so-called Ukrainian school of Polish romanticism – in the emergence of Polish formalism.