Mykola Markevych, and Mykhail Drahomanov, existed as “all-Russian”; and others, like Taras Shevchenko, Panteleimon Kulish, Marko Vovchok and Mykola Kostomarov, enjoyed a more or less separate Ukrainian identity. (Ilchuk 2009: 21)
This artistic phenomenon arose from the contact between the different cultural and identity affiliations held by Ukrainian in-between literary actors. As George G. Grabowicz (1992: 232) observed, this literary production “should indeed be considered part of Ukrainian literature,” even if “there was an inescapable sense for virtually all these writers that Ukrainian literature was a subset of Imperial, All Russian literature.” Nonetheless, the Ukrainian writers who gained success at the “centre” of the empire played the important role of cultural mediators between the Russian and Ukrainian societies. In their literary depictions, the Ukrainian “periphery” was transformed and adapted to make it accessible to Russian readership: “Implicitly if not explicitly, their work tended to minimize or aestheticize the differences between Russia and Ukraine, thus discounting the inherent autonomy or ‘otherness’ of the Ukrainian historical and cultural experience” (Andriewsky 2003: 184).
The case of Nikolai Gogol’/Mykola Hohol’ (1809–1852) definitely embodies the fluid cultural dynamics of his epoch. The definition of his national identity has been at the core of intellectual and political debates in Russia and Ukraine, where his literary experience has been included in both the Russian canon (as Nikolai Gogol’) and in the Ukrainian one (as Mykola Hohol’). Reading his works, critics have mainly categorized it according to two different periods: the Ukrainian period (1829–1836), including the works devoted to “national” themes, and the Imperial period (1836–1852). Nevertheless, throughout the last decades a huge body of literature on Gogol’ has appeared, focusing especially on the hybrid aspects of this literary figure (e.g. see Grabowicz 1994; Luckyj 1998; Ilnytzkyj 2002; Bojanowska 2007). Edyta M. Bojanowska (2007: 6), in her study entitled Nikolai Gogol. Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism, stresses how the author’s national identity “cannot be framed as an either/or question […] Whether Gogol was a Russian or a Ukrainian is thus the wrong question to ask.” The periodization of Gogol’’s literary production into two distinct artistic phases seems to address the complex duality of the author’s experience by means of abstract ideological terms, ignoring the extraordinary ←51 | 52→patchwork of language, cultural and political elements involved in the formation of his identity. Gogol’’s in-between positioning underlies the ambivalence of the literary space imagined by the author. As Myroslav Shkandrij (2001: 115) stressed, “Gogol brought a Ukrainian consciousness to St. Petersburg, that is, structures of thought and feeling that were deeply critical of Russian society, which he drew upon throughout his creative life.” Ilnytzkyj (2002), moreover, has tried to define the artistic experience of Gogol’/Hohol’ as the outcome of the intersection between three cultural paradigms: the Ukrainian tradition, the Russian model and the Imperial paradigm. This entails a positioning “between cultures” that, as observed by Yuliya Ilchuk (2009), implies an artistic experience moving in an intermediate space “between languages.” It is the presence of Ukrainian and hybrid Russo–Ukrainian forms that confers a “defamiliarizing effect” onto Gogol’’s literary language: “Positioned on the ‘interstices’ of two cultures, Gogol existed in the in-between space of cultural ambivalence that diluted the imaginary essence of the Russian nation through a ‘distorted’ Russian language” (Ilchuk 2009: 19). Thus, Gogol’ gives birth to a transcultural identity model, which lies outside the rigid parameters of national canonization:
[…] I only know that I would grant primacy neither to a Little Russian over a Russian nor to a Russian over a Little Russian. Both natures are generously endowed by god, and as if on purpose, each of them in its own way includes in itself that which the other lacks—a clear sign that they are meant to complement each other.46 (Gogol’ 1952: 418)
Gogol’’s/Hohol’’s “two-souledness” (dvoedushie) reflects the duality of the Ukrainian cultural experience: in the author’s epoch, as stated by Grabowicz (1992: 224), “the very idea of what is to be a Ukrainian writer (and indeed a ‘Ukrainian’) was in a state of becoming.” Nonetheless, in those same years the publication of Taras Shevchenko’s The Bard (Kobzar, 1940) would offer to Ukrainian intelligentsia “the articulation of an entire cultural language—a language grounded in the Cossack past, its heroic ←52 | 53→epics (dumy) and folklore, as well as a profound sense of loss and victimization” (Andriewsky 2003: 192). The new discourse was then capable of deconstructing and demystifying the entire theoretical framework elaborated by the centre of the Empire. Following these lines, it was the ideologization of literary frontiers between the All-Russian and Ukrainian cultural systems that gradually led to the harsh contestation of dual and hybrid cultural experiences:
By the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, however, those who still tried to maintain a dual Ukrainian-Russian identity were, increasingly, struggling with the issue of a divided loyalty. George Luckyj has described the choice for Ukrainians as the thorns of a dilemma: Gogol or Shevchenko? Empire or Ukraine? (Shkandrij 2001: 31)
The categorization of Nikolai Gogol’’s and Taras Shevchenko’s artistic experiences in alternative “literary spaces” makes clear their respective roles in the Ukrainian cultural paradigm through the lens of ideology.47 As Shkandrij (2001: 108–109) emphasized: “[a];t the same time as Shevchenko was indicating the irreconcilability of Ukrainian and Russian interests, Gogol was attempting to resolve the conflict between his ‘two souls’.”
Following these lines of thought, it is no surprise “that during the Soviet period practically no efforts were made by Soviet scholars to look at Russian-language literary texts written in Ukraine as a distinct coherent corpus” (Chernetsky 2019: 57). Actually, even in post-Soviet times, the ideological legacy of the Imperial and Soviet experience has led to a failure to assimilate the notable duality of the national culture. This has happened precisely because the prehistory of “hybrid subjectivities” still “underwrites the complex processes of transformation currently underway”:
[…] precisely because Russian political and cultural imperialism has for centuries compelled Ukrainian authors to write in Russian, contemporary Ukrainian society possesses a well-developed capacity to accept Russophone linguistic and literary realities as parts of a larger Ukrainian continuum. If Nikolai Gogol’s writings are claimed as Ukrainian even if composed in Russian, it follows that ←53 | 54→exclusionary attitudes toward linguistic practices in contemporary Ukrainian literature are illogical. (Chernetsky 2019: 51)
Paradoxically, in the contemporary context, “[e];ven though it is clear to all that there is a vast difference between a forced or imposed hybridity and a freely-assumed one, the imperial-Soviet experience has made this issue a painful one for Ukrainian intellectuals” (Shkandrij 2009). Nonetheless, today it is just this kind of duality that could open the way to a new epistemological and cultural understanding of the inherent hybridity of post-Soviet realities.
Shifting Social Dynamics in Post-Soviet Ukraine
As the British historian Andrew Wilson (2000) retraces in his analysis of contemporary Ukrainian politics, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse the ground was finally ready for the emergence of a full-fledged independent state and “unexpected nation.”48 While adopting this definition, Wilson, in the preface to his work The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (2000), symbolically addressed the surprise of the international community at witnessing the rise of a “new nation” in Europe with such “pronounced patterns of ethnic, linguistic, religious and regional diversity” (Wilson 2000: xi). Still, in 2016 Volodymyr Kulyk’s reflections seemed to confirm the peculiar persistence of this complex background, by which the Ukrainian scholar could ascertain how throughout the history of independent Ukraine “profound disagreements on the content of national identity stemmed from dissimilar ethnolinguistic profiles and historical trajectories of different regions” (2016: 593). Nevertheless,