In 1839, roughly a year after he was freed from serfdom, Taras Shevchenko wrote from St. Petersburg to his enslaved brother Mykyta in central Ukraine. “It is a great joy to be a free man,” he wrote, “you do what you want, no one will stop you.” Toward the end of his letter, Shevchenko made an emphatic request of his brother: “Write back to me like I’m writing to you, not in the Muscovite language, but in our own … ‘Muscovites, see, are alien folk/ Life’s a trial with them.’” The quoted couplet is a variant from Shevchenko’s poem “Kateryna,” which would be published in his seminal Kobzar collection only months later in 1840.
Such letters, as Natalia Shpylova-Saeed explains in her urgent and thoughtful new book, constitute “a fertile liminal space where narratives of various natures clash: metropolitan and peripheral, imperialist and decolonizing, dominant and subaltern, oppressive and subversive” (12). They also stand as a diverse corpus of intimate reflections on Ukraine’s cultural and social difference from Russia (as Shevchenko notes, “Muscovites are alien folk”) and on Russia’s longstanding agenda to deny that difference (“Life’s a trial with them”). The agenda has been deliberate and comprehensive. In 1764, for instance, Catherine II in her own correspondence (inaccurately attributed in the book to her addressee, Aleksandr Viazemskii, 50) calls not only for Ukraine (“Little Russia”) to be “Russified,” but for its distinct sociopolitical history to be subjected to a program of epistemic erasure: “When the [Ukrainian Cossack] hetman is gone, we must try to ensure that the era and the very names of the hetmans disappear (emphasis mine)” (See Sbornik Russkogo Istoricheskogo obshchestva. Tom sedʹmoi: [Bumagi imperatritsy Ekateriny II, khranyashchiesia v Gosudarstvennom arkhive Ministerstva inostrannykh del. T. 1], St. Petersburg, 1871, 348). Such texts make clear, convincingly and tragically, that the jumbled Russian imperialist rhetoric of assimilation/non-recognition/effacement of Ukrainians, which was evident in Putin’s infamous pseudohistorical 2021 screed “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” has been less an exception than the rule for centuries.
Shpylova-Saeed focuses on the itineraries of these letters in the realm of memory, but her remit is much wider, touching upon profound questions of identity, cognitive colonization, and an ethics of recognition. With sensitivity and comparative insight, she unpacks and contextualizes correspondence (and diary entries) by such key Ukrainian cultural and historical figures as Shevchenko, Mykola Hoholʹ (Nikolai Gogolʹ), Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, revealing the different ways in which they asserted and steadied themselves as Ukrainians amid shifting currents of state oppression and collective self-doubt that threatened to consume them.
She organises her discussion both geopolitically (with two chapters on “Ukraine and the Russian Empire” and “Ukraine and Austria-Hungary”) and temporally (with a chapter on “Ukraine’s 1918 Independence and the Formation of the USSR”). This structure results in what first appears to be an unusual positioning of Lesia Ukrainka in the chapter “Ukraine and Austria-Hungary,” even though Ukrainka was born and raised in the Russian empire. But as Shpylova-Saeed explains, Ukrainka was a force of nature whom no border could contain. Her frequent exchanges with counterparts in Vienna and across Europe cultivated a westward orientation and endowed her with a keen confidence in a national sense of self marked by, as Ukrainka put it in 1903, “a truly free, neither chauvinistic nor ‘slave’ national psychology” (145).
Shpylova-Saeed’s refreshing focus on letters—which should be taken further to encompass other, more subaltern Ukrainian voices through the centuries—allows her to highlight often overlooked figures who were correspondents and interlocutors of the book’s dramatis personae. One of them is Rosalia Lifshyts, the spouse of bestselling Ukrainian writer and revolutionary politician Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Born in Orel to prosperous Jewish parents in 1886, Lifshyts made a linguistic conversion to the Ukrainian language sometime in the 1910s. Her commitment to Ukrainian extended well beyond the privacy of the home, even among Russian-speaking friends: as she wrote to Vynnychenko, “I warned them that I would not speak with anyone in Russian” (221).
Vynnychenko’s case reminds us that the denial of Ukraine and of Ukrainians has sadly been a western pastime too. Shpylova-Saeed highlights a telling moment from one of Vynnychenko’s 1925 diary entries, which chronicled his visit to claim residency in France at a Paris police station. “A young lady at the police office, issuing me the piece of paper for the right of residence, said to me categorically and unequivocally that Ukraine ‘n’existe pas.’ The end,” he wrote. “So she registered me as russe” (208). He quipped with characteristic sarcasm: “The French government and its police have solved the national problem in the east of Europe.”
Through fraught and often raw epistolary correspondence, Russia’s Denial of Ukraine exposes an entrenched cycle of alienation and denigration of Ukrainian identity that reads as a searing indictment today, four years into Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine. The urgent need for its publication and circulation calls into question our own role in this cycle as scholars and educators.
