On decolonial shelters, or What to do with problematic scholarly inheritances?

SHORTLY AFTER I TOOK UP my current post at the University of St Andrews, I inherited a Soviet-era library.The former inhabitant of my office, a scholar of Russian literature, had gifted it to me on his retirement.I'd never owned 'a library' before.Growing up, we'd always got our books from 'the library'.This library, my library, was thus a source of professional pride.The complete works of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky that adorned its shelves seemed also to adorn me.The musty smell that greeted me when I opened the office door seemed to tell me that I had arrived at a much sought-after status.A lectureship.A library.A destination.The feeling didn't last long, however.Even before I'd given the question of colonial epistemic violence much thought, I'd begun to feel oppressed by the dusty tomes.The fact that the books were almost all written by men, for a start, and that they gave off a distinct whiff of Soviet intelligentsia snobbism, made me feel increasingly alienated by them.After I started working on the Ukrainian East, also known as 'Donbas' -a heavily industrialized region of Ukraine whose mineral resources were depleted by colonial extractivism and which, since 2014, has been devastated by a Russian war waged in the name of the 'Russkii mir' -my library took on a more morbid quality.Several collections by Ukrainophobe poets, imperial blockbusters exploring the mysterious depths of the Russian soul and canonical Soviet works celebrating ideologies of limitless industrial growth revealed themselves as weapons in a cultural arsenal.I began to wonder if this really was my library after all.Or if, more worryingly, this library was beginning to own me.Why was I guarding these books so carefully?Why was I affirming their status as a hallowed literary canon?I am not the only one to have fallen out with my Soviet library.Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian critics have been writing about what Sasha Dovzhyk calls the condition of 'ingrained colonial inferiority' brought about in part by the Russocentric literary canons that they were forced to assimilate. 1 Describing the dusty Soviet tomes that fill her country house near Kharkiv, the researcher and writer Viktoriia Grivina thus explains how, growing up, she always felt excluded from the pages of these books.By contrast with the 'majestic' Petersburgs and Moscows where many of these stories were set, these works subtly conveyed to Grivina her homeland's lack of worth, that Kharkiv was