Self-Translation ‒ The Looming End of Russophone Literature in the CIS? Boris Khersonskii’s Anti-Hegemonic Code-Switching

Abstract

Having become famous thanks to publications in Russian publishing houses in the 1990s and 2000s, after 2014 the Russophone Odessite poet Boris Grigor’evich Khersonskii faced allegations of Russophobia for his pro-Ukrainian position and criticism of Russian interference in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Over the post-Euromaidan years, the poet increasingly added Ukrainian-language translations of his Russian poems and texts originally written in Ukrainian to his portfolio. This paper¹ investigates Khersonskii’s forced choice of poetic language, zooming in on the post-2014 timeline of his increasingly Ukrainophone oeuvre and distinguishing between various digital and print genres, comprising both his Facebook blog and book publications such as Stalina ne bulo (There Was no Stalin) and Odesskaia intelligentsiia (Odessite Intelligentsia, both 2018). The paper analyzes the poet’s linguistic performance with a special focus on his self-translations, which can be found online in Khersonskii’s Facebook blog dating from October 30, 2013 to February 19, 2019, and proposes a postcolonial framing of self-translation and code-switching: in so doing, it defends the thesis that Khersonskii’s anti-hegemonic code-switching is counterweighed by his subsequent self-translations and bilingual blogging, serving the goal of mitigating the bipolar language conflict in post-Maidan Ukraine.