The Moscow-Maidan Train: Routes of the Postcolonial Collective Unconscious in Anna Jabłońska's "Dialogues about the Homeland"

Abstract

The article analyzes the dramatic cycle Dialogues about the Homeland by Anna
Jabłońska, which illustrates how Russian-speaking Ukrainian playwrights of the 2000s understood the identity transformation that began in Ukrainian society after the Orange Revolution of 2004. The collected and interpreted factual material allows for the conclusion that after Ukraine declared independence, Russia made significant efforts to keep contemporary Ukrainian drama within its orbit. There was an attempt to bring this drama under the „umbrella” of the Russian „new drama” and, in doing so, impose the idea of a shared cultural space in Ukrainian society.
The cycle Dialogues about the Homeland serves as evidence of the subjection of some young Ukrainian playwrights, including Anna Jabłońska, to such indoctrination. However, under the influence of the Orange Revolution and the processes it initiated, they began to reconsider their civic identity. As a result, they saw themselves not as a „unified people” of the post-Soviet formation, but as Ukrainians of the first generation, who did not want to be detached from the social desire for decolonization.
At the same time, the analysis demonstrates how Russians, by appropriating the brilliant work of playwrights from the post-Soviet space, both ignored their decolonial manifestations of self-identification and participation in the fates of their independent countries and, simultaneously, displayed an imperial superiority over them as deeply provincial. The article emphasizes the need for former post-Soviet countries to create their own objective, decolonial histories of national literatures in the early 21st century.