Russia has been unscrupulously adorning its own history with other nations’ victories and achievements, robbing Ukrainians of their past. This stance was always supported by Ukrainian men and women of letters who undermined imperial pretenses and affirmed their own cultural identity.

Vira Ageyeva analyses the Ukrainian resistance and struggle for preservation of their collective memory through the prism of cultural process. The book reveals betrayals and collaborations, peculiarities of the development of colonized peoples under the pressure of empires, the tragedy of authors who must either renounce their talent, or keep creating in the lack of freedom. Ageyeva covers the period from the 19th century up to now (Mykola Gogol, Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Lesya Ukrainka, Viktor Domontovych, Yuri and Sophia Andrukhovych, and others) and traces how authors either resisted the suppression of Ukrainian history, or why they took a different position, why they chose the empire, and what price they had to pay for that.