This presentation will examine how the prominent nineteenth-century Ukrainian writer, ethnographer, translator, historian, and national revival activist Panteleimon Kulish grappled with the thorny question of the fate of Ukraine in the Russian empire in his first novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). Nicknamed “the Ukrainian Walter Scott,” Kulish attempts, in this work, to fuse the Gothic literary mode with the conventions of Walter Scottian historical fiction in order to produce a nostalgic picture of Ukrainian heroic and authentic culture on the brink of its succumbing to the homogenizing force of the Russian empire. Ultimately what Kulish creates is a highly ambivalent vision of Ukraine’s subdued imperial present haunted by the ghosts of its autonomous, if chaotic, past. Dr. Sobol will also discuss the ways in which the Russian literary critics’ reception of this novel epitomizes Russian imperial discourse on Ukraine, which has proven remarkably persistent to the present day. This presentation is based on a chapter from her latest book, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (2020).
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
Valeria Sobol is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her primary research interests include Russian literature and science, the Gothic literary tradition, history of emotions, empire and race studies. She is the author of Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (2009); Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (2020), and a co-editor (with Mark Steinberg) of the volume Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (2011). She has also published numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as on Ukrainian literature. She is the recipient of the Prize for the Best Article in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture (2018-19) from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies.