Authors

Discussion

The paper interrogates the ‘Kyiv text’ of the early 20th century and considers the cultural struggle between metropole and periphery as reflected in literary images of a borderland city. Focusing mainly on novels of the 1920s, the paper will trace anxieties among Russian authors over the loosening Russian imperial grip on Kyiv in the context of the war for Ukrainian statehood and the Ukrainization policies of the early Soviet state; this will be compared to the ways in which Ukrainian authors reimagine a new urban Ukrainian literature through a certain ‘reclaiming’ of the space of Kyiv. At the same time, the paper will consider whether understanding Kyiv, a key city on the imperial periphery, purely as a site of cultural struggle elides certain key aspects of the urban discourse, particularly among the wave of young Ukrainian authors writing about Kyiv at the time.