Roman Dubasevych, assistant professor for Ukrainian cultural studies at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Greifswald, has written a very broad and profound overview of representations of the Habsburg Empire in post-Soviet Ukraine. His attempt is to offer a cross-media and interdisciplinary analysis of these representations based on approaches from cultural studies, literature, art history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

The book has been written initially as PhD thesis for the first doctoral program devoted to “Austrian Galicia and Its Multicultural Heritage” at the University of Vienna. The book appears at an apposite time given the heated intellectual and political debates about the extent to which the Ukraine belongs to “Europe” and why or if the West of Ukraine is more European than the rest of the country due to its Habsburg past.

Dubasevych wants to provide a broader context, grounded in cultural science, especially for German-speaking audience to better understand the political and historical debates of this topic. His work is not the first of its kind as Tatjana Hofmann has already provided an excellent and perceptive analysis of the literary and intellectual discourses in Ukrainian literature after 1991 (Literarische Ethnografien der Ukraine. Prosa nach 1991 [Basel, 2014]). In her work she unmasks distinctive cultural nationalistic writings of acknowledged Ukrainian authors as Mykola Rjabčuk or Jurij Andruchovyč. Dubasevych adds a broad survey of the Ukrainian literature and arts especially dealing with the Habsburg image to this German-speaking discussion, based on selected authors and artists dealing in one or the other way with the Habsburg past.

The book starts with Dubasevych's theoretical framing. He applies and quotes the basic and relevant findings of Jurj Lotman, Jan Assmann, and Michail Bachtin. He also refers to other studies of the memory construction of the Habsburg Empire in Polish or Hungarian literature. In this first chapter, the different roles of the Habsburg myth are introduced, and these further guide his analysis: the memory of the Habsburg Empire functions as myth of a glorious past, a future concept, a cultural and communicative memory, but also as a critique of present-day Ukraine.

Following this introduction are two main chapters: “Fallanalyse” (case analysis) and “Habsburg postcolonial.” “Fallanalyse” deals with texts by Andruchovyč, namely Erc-Herc-Perc, and other texts together with an analysis of visual representations of the Ukraine by artists like Volodymyr Kostyrko or Jurij Koch. He shows how these authors wish to construct a quasi-postcolonial and enlightened vision of the presence of the Habsburg Empire in Ukraine that, at the same time, gets very close to constructing superiority. In the end, the Habsburg Empire is positively represented, despite other linguistic or artistic forms that seem to disqualify problematic and critical aspects of the Habsburg past. While there are other motifs and symbols that one could hold on to in the past and in the present, “Habsburg” remains a positive paradigm in this specific intellectual discourse. Dubasevych shows this convincingly in a very thoughtful and detailed analysis of the chosen texts and art works.

The second major chapter, “Habsburg postcolonial,” is a central and important part of the book because it examines the construction of the Habsburg image in Ukraine through a postcolonial lens. Rarely done in such a profound way, this endeavor is the main contribution of Dubasevych's work to contemporary scholarly and public discourses. Usually intellectual discourse in Ukraine and about Ukraine focuses on the Russian-Ukrainian relations in the past and present, but this is not the case of the topics related to the Habsburg Empire. Dubasevych builds on earlier studies that attempted to decolonize Galicia and the Habsburg Empire in Ukraine's history. He applies an intertextual and intertemporal approach, drawing on a number of narratives, images, and also postcolonial works to make visible the Eurocentrism of the Ukrainian Habsburg discourse and the inherent European Orientalism toward other regional and national representations within Ukraine. He also renders its development comprehensible. While his psychoanalytical observations are interesting, they do not add anything new to the discussion of Orientalism in the works of Jurij Andruchovyč, which has already been studied comprehensively by the author.

The book is worth reading as it offers an extensive analysis of Ukrainian literature and art projects around the memory and construction of memory of the Habsburg Empire in post-Soviet Ukraine. It, moreover, effectively relates to the current production of authors and artists concerning past discourses (even though not art projects), for instance, to the Ukrainian national communism of Chvyl'ovyj. However, the author's evaluation of the writings of Andruchovyč or the artworks of Volodymyr Kostyrko as “innocent Eurocentrism” remains debatable: The works discussed by Dubasevych are obviously very well structured and executed. The interest in and adherence to European culture and ideas through the Habsburg Empire is not the problem and even understandable. It is the uncritical evaluation and usage of it to devaluate and degrade other cultural memories and projects to impose a cultural divide not only in the world but also between the populations in present-day Ukraine, which do or do not live on former Habsburg territory. In a way this “innocent” discourse has been one reason for the alienation and political segmentation of the Ukrainian population that makes bridging the gap nowadays all the more difficult as it is historically essentialized—not in the least by the authors mentioned by Dubasevych. Furthermore, conclusions regarding the daily practices, which in a way reflect the cultural memory of a Habsburg past, should be made carefully, especially when they are based solely on published narratives and representations that are the main focus of the study, which also relies exclusively on observations of Dubasevych in the urban centers in Western Ukraine, such as L'viv or Ivano Frankivs'k, while completely leaving out the rural areas where the supposed borderlines are located.