Vasily Grossman is one of the most prominent and interesting writers of Soviet era. His journalist papers on II war period, and later on his major literary work, novel Life and Fate made his name famous among the best writers of Russian culture. When his famous Life and Fate novel was seized in 1960 by KGB (Grossman himself was never arrested by the Soviet authorities) his literary career broke for that moment. As a moral compensation Grossman got a special translation work in Armenia, which he managed to put into a special prose called An Armenian Sketchbook. Grossman writes up soviet Armenia with poetical instruments that we are able to analyze through geopoetics and socrealism. Some parts of Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook, though, could also be understood by postcolonial interpretation.

Prosaic notes by Mandelstam and Kаrabtchiyevski selected for critical reading contribute to the Armenian text in the Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin, Valery Bryusov, Sergey Gorodetsky, Andrei Bely, Anna Akhmatova, Vasily Grossman, Andrei Bitov). A methodology adopted in the article enables analyzing the postcolonial awareness of travelling authors expressed in the two works, and its origin one should look for in the position of an outsiders in the Soviet culture. The autobiographic narrators — Mandelstam and Karabtchiyevsky — seem to be fully associated with a frequently tragic experience of a centuries long colonial domination suffered by Armenians. While the attitude of the author of the Journey to Armenia is supported by exceptionally broad knowledge about history and culture of the country, the main role in Longing for Armenia is played by well-motivated ethical emotions of the traveler.

The article is devoted to political, cultural and mental diversity of Donbass from the rest of Ukraine. The author shows the uniqueness of this region as a result of a complex and contradictory history, as well as the effect of permanent social, economic and ethnocultural processes of a colonial and totalitarian character. This is the reason for the hybrid identity of local residents. Later on, more space is devoted to the work of two writers — Ukrainian-speaking Serhiy Zhadan and Ukrainian-Russian-speaking Vladimir Rafeenko.

The author of the article treats the novel of contemporary Russian prose writer Vladimir Makanin as an example of anti-colonial creativity, which deconstructs the imperial way of thinking and contesting colonial domination. Asan is a text devoid of imperial textuality, criticizing the prevailing political system and showing the complex Caucasian reality. The place of the described events (Chechnya) was recognized as an area where the life of the inhabitants is still shaped by colonial experience. The inevitable effect of this kind of works is the deconstruction of the world’s imaginations made from the imperial point of view. It is accompanied by deconstructing one’s own language and recognizing the structures of violence in it.

The aim of this article is to analyze of Zachar Prilepin’s political beliefs from postcolonial theory point of view. Author of this paper concentrated on Prilepin’s press articles, his notes on the blog and essays and tried reconstruct Prilepin’s attitude to modern Russian political and economy situation. Russian writer has very often criticized Russian liberal and democratic community for their narration about “western way” as the best for Russian state and nation. Prilepin thinks that the “Western World” try to transform Russia to their subaltern and Russian democratic-liberal part of society are played main role in this process.

Politically involved works of Victor Pelevin describe and deconstruct phenomena characteristic for the social life of the postmodern period. The new neoimperial paradigm is different from the previous one. Thanks to the development of new means of communication, countries use unconventional weapons in their struggle for influence, and certain elements of postmodern wars become simulacric phenomena of postmodern culture. The grotesque stories and novels of Pelevin, included in the collection Pineapple Water for the Fair Lady, are connected with poststructural philosophy and deconstruct the traditional perception of history and politics.

The essay aims at showing which ways an interpretation of literature can turn towards. A proposed way is based on how to functionalise post-colonial criticism tools for the purpose of today’s polish literary studies. The author discusses concept of post-colonial researches connected with polish literature about Russia and Russians. The article presents ways of an interpretation of Russia in polish travel literature after 1989. The author writes about three books, witch are a representation of different perspectives of thinking and writing about Russia. The first way is concerned with polish recolonization of the former USSR. Second is connected with a position of a wanderer, who travel from place to place with no permanent home in Russia. The last way shows thinking about Russian Federation in very innovative way, it is perspective of a settler. All those concepts of seeing and describing Russia is infected by an interpretation “revenge”.

The article is the review of a book Russia’s Postcolonial Identity. A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. Its main aim is to present the new perspective of researching postcolonial situation in Russia, presented by Viatscheslav Morozov in which Russia is seen as a subaltern.