Edyta Bojanowska
Equivocal Praise and National-Imperial Conundrums: Gogol'’s “A Few Words About Pushkin”
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.

Yuliya Ilchuk
Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.

Maksym Klymentiev
The Dark Side of “The Nose”: The Paradigms of Olfactory Perception in Gogol'’s “The Nose”
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: The article focuses on the ways in which Nikolai Gogol'’s famous story “The Nose” can be viewed meaningfully after being designated as the token of nonsense and illogicality by representatives of structuralism and hermeneutics in Slavic studies. Instead of interpreting the story’s symbolic significance or establishing its connections to other texts, the present article examines the story literally and asks what it means to lose one’s olfactory capacity in the Russian capital in the first third of the nineteenth century. The article’s answer is that Gogol'’s story can be seen as marking the moment during which the traditional olfactory-rich values of Russian culture gave way to a more vision-oriented Western sensory paradigm that tended to denigrate the sense of smell and its cognitive potential.

Svitlana Krys
Allusions to Hoffmann in Gogol'’s Early Ukrainian Horror Stories
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: Critics have noted similarities between Nikolai Gogol'’s three early horror stories (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala [St. John’s Eve], Strashnaia mest' [A Terrible Vengeance] Vii) and the worksof his famous German predecessor Ludwig Tieck. There also exists some speculation concerning the relationship between his Ukrainian tales and the worksof E.T.A. Hoffmann. However, a detailed comparison between the two authors focused only on Gogol'’s “St. Petersburg” stories.His early tales have been ignored because they were presumed to depend mostly on folklore. This article argues that there are intertextual connections between Gogol'’s St. John’s Eve and A Terrible Vengeance, and Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann [The Sandman] and Ignaz Denner. The paper contends that Gogol' was recapitulating, consciously or unconsciously, Hoffmann’s oeuvre in his works both in terms of plot detail and on a deeper psychological level.

Kathleen Manukyan
From Maidens to Mugs: The Motif of the Mirror in the Works of Nikolai Gogol'
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: From Plato’s times to our contemporary age, theorists have spoken of art as being a mirror of life and sometimes argued against the notion. In his nonfiction essays on art and literature, Gogol' was also fond of the metaphor. Due to the frequency with which mirrors appear in his work, Gogol'’s oeuvre offers a unique opportunity for study of how the idiom of art-as-mirror transforms in the move from theoretical reflections to his fictional stories. Appealing to Meyer Abrams’s claim that the mirror has become a “constitutive” metaphor, this article assumes that: a) the potential problems the metaphor introduces are fair game in general theorizing, and b) the questions introduced into the texts by Gogol'’s fictional mirrors may also point toward problematic issues in his thought on art and development as an artist. The article surveys Gogol'’s use of mirrors in his fiction and relates them to their theoretical counterparts. Clear patterns emerge that parallel the geographical and meta-literary subject matter of his work. Ultimately, the article reveals how Gogol'’s evolving treatment of the mirror metaphor may offer insight into the sources of the author’s “creative decline.”

Cassio de Oliveira
Skuka and the Absurd in Gogol'’s Tale of the ‘Two Ivans’
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: The present article is devoted to an analysis of Gogol'’s last story from his Ukrainian cycle, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”; it makes use of canonical as well as innovative approaches to Gogol'’s tale in order to explore the significance of the epilogue to an interpretation of the story as a whole. The examination will encompass ideas on the temporal aspects of the narration, the philosophical concept of ennui/skuka, and the possible significance of the camera obscura as the setting for one of the key moments in the story. Whereas the camera obscura is the setting of the quarrel between the two main characters, the story ends with a manifestation of skuka from the narrator: how do these two elements relate to each other, and what do they suggest in terms of the possibility of reaching an all-encompassing interpretation of the ‘Two Ivans’?

Robert Romanchuk
Back to “Gogol'’s Retreat from Love”: Mirgorod as a Locus of Gogolian Perversion (Part II: “Viĭ”)
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: Gogol'’s “Viĭ” offers readers a “clinic” on Lacanian perversion, taking them through key psychoanalytic agencies—letter, mother, father, phallus, voice, and gaze—in their perverse modalities. Rather than seeking a definitive “identity” for “Viĭ” (as have earlier analyses), this study proposes that “Viĭ” is a condensed bundle of manifest and latent signifiers—that is, what psychoanalysis calls the symptom. Indeed, the best “etymology” of “Viĭ,” far more transparent than those offered before (vyty, viia, Vasiliĭ, vuĭ, viiaty, viko), is simply viĭ: Ukr. “bundle (of brush).” “Viĭ” is literally the symptom of the tale, the missing signifier which, rather than objectively signifying the tale’s content, makes a cut into the text itself—figured in its paratextual inscription at the opening footnote—and structures it from within. “Viĭ,” precisely as symptom, condenses all of the “etymologies” proposed to date by scholars, and makes multiple, bilingual (Ukrainian-Russian) “returns” of the repressed in the text.

Adrian Wanner
Gogol'’s “Portrait” Repainted: On Gary Shteyngart’s “Shylock on the Neva”
Volume 51 • Numbers 2–3 • June-September 2009

Abstract: The Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart has frequently been called a “Gogolian” writer, usually in an attempt to explain the pedigree of his grotesque humour. This article focuses on Shteyngart’s story “Shylock on the Neva” (2002), which is a modern-day rewriting of Gogol'’s tale “Portret” [“The Portrait”]. A close analysis of Shteyngart’s text and comparison to its Gogolian model reveals a complex relation that is not necessarily centered on Gogol'’s humour. In his rewriting of “The Portrait,” Shteyngart emphasizes the inherent venality and vulgarity of Gogol'’s characters, who turn into grotesque caricatures of their prototypes. In doing so, he seems to “Gogolize” Gogol'’s tale by adding some of the absurd humour that critics have found to be lacking in “The Portrait.” By making a painting the focus of their stories, both Gogol' and Shteyngart engage in a self-reflective comment about art and the role of the creative artist. Similar to the clichéd hack-paintings of Gogol'’s painter Chartkov, artistic creation has been reduced in “Shylock on the Neva” to the production of postmodern simulacra based on stereotypes and cultural myths.