From Russian Literature to Russian-Language Literature of the Empire

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 argues for the need to divest the notion of Russian culture of its ethnolinguistic connotation and study it as a transnational phenomenon, similar to the literatures known today as "Francophone," "Anglophone," or "Hispanic.”