In the musical culture and classical repertory of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, we encounter a widespread fascination with Ukraine, expressed in compositions ranging from piano works employing folk melodies to operas based on Gogol’s Ukrainian stories. This involved artists mining the same or similar material from different perspectives and with different agendas: from works like those of Mykola Lysenko, produced for Ukrainian audiences and intended as expressions of a specifically Ukrainian musical culture, to those produced in the imperial capitals—most prominently operas such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night and Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa—commonly understood as contributions to the Russian national tradition.

The period in which Ukrainian topics became a common feature in opera and concert music coincides with the state’s repressive measures meant to curb Ukrainophile activity. Consequently, the cultivation of Ukrainian topics and styles was inevitably politicized, not only for those who did so for the development of Ukrainian national culture, though they would have been most acutely aware of it.

Drawing on recent scholarship of nineteenth-century Ukrainian and imperial cultural politics, this project these repertories and their reception, as a means to gain a better understanding of how the notion of national culture and the relations between Russia, Ukraine and the Empire were understood and negotiated in the musical life of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My conviction is that our understanding of both Russian and Ukrainian musical life would benefit greatly from studying these entangled histories in their mutual interaction and within the broader socio-political context of the empire rather than in isolation as distinct national schools.