This chapter outlines the role of empire in shaping Russian literature from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It traces the persistent literary impact of empire using the concept of imperiality, developed by analogy with coloniality, which decolonial theory describes as a sociopolitical and cognitive framework that endures beyond the times of colonialism. The chapter highlights the impact of empire on eighteenth-century Neoclassical poetry and on literature of the Romantic era. It then explores the enduring presence of empire in later periods, including Realist and early Modernist writing, as Russia’s colonial practices combined with a self-image as a magnificent and much-put-upon nation state. Finally, it presents the Soviet-era cultural system of the ‘friendship of the peoples’ as a reimagined imperiality and concludes with an in-depth discussion of critical reflections on imperial legacies by post-Soviet authors such as Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia.

This chapter is a response to the volume’s arguments. It explores the book’s two central claims – that literary works must be seen as products of their time, and are best understood as being in dialogue with one another. It argues that ‘being of one’s time’ is a complex idea that requires a sophisticated sense of ‘situatedness’. Specifically, it first explores how the imperial and colonial conditions of Hellenistic culture produce contested performances of belonging that change over time as the imaginary of empire is constructed. Second, it looks at how ‘dialogues’ between texts are gestures of self-authorisation for ancient writers and for modern historians. Third, it draws attention to the physical affordances of the construction of belonging – from how a person speaks and walks to the material culture of empire. Finally, it suggests that the book’s unwillingness to discuss the full range of, say, Jewish Greek writing from the period restricts how we can understand cultural translation and cultural belonging in the Hellenistic age, and produces a potentially misleading literary history of the era.