Valerian Polishchukʼs poem “The Adyghe Singer”: specificities of a colonized space (wars, forced migrations, ecocide)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2026.1.6Keywords:
poem, anti-colonialism, ethnocide, emigrations, national identityAbstract
This article, for the first time in Ukrainian literary scholarship, analyzes Valerian Polishchukʼs poem The Adyghe Singer (1923) and the circumstances of its emergence in the context of anti- and neocolonialism. The article aims to determine how Polishchukʼs artistic narrative conceptualizes national space as colonized. The theoretical and methodological basis is the application of historical-genetic and historical- functional methods. The study draws on historical and literary research and uses material (autobiographies, correspondence, and reports from the secret department of the SPD of the Ukrainian SSR) connected to the writer’s life and milieu.
The results of the study argue for an anti-colonial orientation of the poem The Adyghe Singer, which is grounded in the events of the national liberation movements of the peoples of the Caucasus in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular the Caucasian War. A number of analyzed fragments of Polishchukʼs poem confirm that the writer relied on historical evidence. Rejecting the Russian imperial interpretation, he depicts the irreconcilability of two entities — the colonizer and the colonized. The author addresses a range of issues tied to the national question, including policies of colonizing “small” peoples, such as the question of national language, preservation of historical memory, ecocide, forced internal displacement and emigration, the conflict between the national and the social, the fate of a peopleʼs leader, etc.
The proposed reconstruction of the political and cultural background of the period in which the poem was written and published demonstrates that its plot is connected to Ukrainian realities of the pre-Soviet and Soviet eras. Although in its rejection of the Russian Empire and its conquest-oriented ideology, the poem did not contradict the then-dominant proletarian worldview, the glorification of national liberation struggle was an important and bold statement by the writer against the backdrop of emerging Soviet imperialism and its various strategies of denationalization. Polishchukʼs creativity, like the activities of many other Ukrainian figures, showed a readiness to develop Ukrainian culture within the Soviet system while refusing to reconcile with Russian chauvinism.
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