Postcolonial Europe

In Dracula, Bram Stoker's famous Victorian horror novel, the young British lawyer Jonathan Harker sets out on a journey eastward. When the hero crosses the Danube andenters Transylvania in order to finalize a contract with a local count on the purchase of a piece of real estate in London, he notes a number of disquieting details. He finds himself in a strange, ambiguous region "just on the border of three states", inhabited by "four different nationalities" where five different languages are spoken (Stoker 1979: 9-10). Young Mr Harker has actually entered on two parallel journeys, the goals of which he is not aware of.

The two main topics proposed by this volume-colonialism and postcolonialism on the one hand and Sovietology (which I understand here primarily as the study of the Soviet legacy) on the other-involve broad and important areas which have a special relevance for contemporary Ukraine in general and for Ukrainian studies in particular. This is all the more true in that Ukrainian studies is a relatively young discipline and one that has suffered inordinately from distortions of the Soviet period-which themselves clearly imply

Interview with Janusz Bugajski, Director of the New European Democracies Project and senior fellow in the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC

The term "postcolonialism" is used today as a collective term for various kinds of theoretical approach that take a critical attitude towards the problems of knowledge, politics and cultural collision. Postcolonial studies, which have become popular as a consequence of literary research, are not confined today merely to literary studies.

The metaphor used in the title of this paper was coined by the former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau who, in his 1969 speech at the Washington Press Club, said that sharing a land mass with a neighbor richer and more powerful than oneself was like sleeping with an elephant. "No matter how even-tempered and friendly the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt" [Kennedy 1996, viii].