In academic work, personal meetings and conversations sometimes play a decisive role. For the author of these lines, meeting Ulrich Schmid was one of the first discoveries of the German-speaking academic world. Talking to Ulrich, reading his texts was also a lesson in analytical synthesis, authentic inter-disciplinarity, and the ability to comprehensively consider, but also to resist the methodological fashion of the moment, if necessary. An example of the latter is Ulrich’s 2020 article “Contact Zone vs. Postcolonial Condition” with its tactful suggestion to explore the heuristic potential of the concept from Latin American studies for the research of Ukrainian culture.1 Ulrich Schmid, following Mary Louise Pratt, suggests that “contact zones” should be understood “as social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in the context of highly asymmetrical power relations”, and suggests to think critically about the analytical possibilities “to avoid the trap of perceiving Ukrainian culture only through victimization” and to give its due to transculturation, bilingualism, mediation, hybridity, and imaginary dialogue.2 Similar approaches — or at least attempts to think in this direction — can be found in the history of Ukrainian historiography and literary studies in the first decades of the twentieth century.