One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his national identity. This book presents a completely new assessment of the problem: rather than adopting the predominant "either/or" perspective – wherein Gogol is seen as either Ukrainian or Russian – it shows how his cultural identity was a product of negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values. By examining Gogol’s ambivalent self-fashioning, language performance, and textual practices, this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance.
Ilchuk provides a comprehensive account of assimilation and hybridization of Ukrainians in the Russian empire, arguing that Russia’s imperial culture has depended on Ukraine and the participation of Ukrainian intellectuals in its development. Ilchuk also introduces innovative computer-assisted methods of textual analysis to demonstrate the palimpsest-like quality of Gogol’s texts and national identity.
Yuliya Ilchuk is an assistant professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. The Negotiation of Ukrainian Identities in the Russian Empire 2. Gogol’s Self-Fashioning and Performance of Identity in the 1830s 3. Hybrid Language and Narrative Performance in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikan′ka 4. Heteroglossia, Speech Masks, and the Synthesis of Languages 5. Gogol’s Texts as Palimpsest: Taras Bulba and Dead Souls 6. The Posthumous Publications and Translations of Gogol’s Texts
Afterword Notes Appendix Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Robert Romanchuk
"Yuliya Ilchuk's knowledge of the history of Gogol's texts and their editing, their language(s), and their reception(s) is truly impressive — she is one of very few specialists in these important and under-researched areas. Her book is a major contribution to our understanding of the colonial subject Gogol. It stands out from all the recent scholarly writing on Gogol, by Westerners and Slavs alike."
Taras Koznarsky
"This monograph is a timely contribution to the field of Gogol studies, and more generally, to scholarship on the so-called golden age of Russian literature as well as on colonial cultural and social conditions that shaped the development of modern Ukrainian literature. Yuliya Ilchuk provides a new approach to Gogol's peculiar place in Russian literature — both central and marginalized, instrumental and subversive — that of cultural and linguistic hybridity."
Susanne Fusso
"Yuliya Ilchuk takes Gogol seriously as an astute and autonomous agent. This book is fresh and original and will open up new horizons in Gogol studies."
