Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

14 Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Monument to Nikolai Gogol, Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy. Photo by Emilia Orlandi (February 2005). Wikimedia Commons. •• • 14 Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) EDYTA BOJANOWSKA On the face of it, the biography of Nikolai Gogol seems an Imperial Russian success story: a model of metropolitan openness to peripheral diversity. A twenty-year-old Ukrainian youth of humble means moves to St. Petersburg and launches his career as a writer in Russian, soon to earn recognition as a founding father of Russian prose and as the author of a beloved national icon: the image of Russia as a rushing carriage, about to overtake all nations. The Ukrainian subject matter of Gogol’s first volumes of stories—Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32) and Mirgorod (1835)—in no way diminishes the warm welcome with which the Russian audience greets the new talent from Ukraine. Gogol soon befriends key figures in the cultural life of the capital, among them the Russian poets Zhukovskii and Pushkin, who encourage and support his work. Sumptuous grants from the empress and the tsar follow. The period ’s most important arbiter of literary value, Vissarion Belinskii, lavishes accolades on the young Ukrainian, pronouncing him the head of the new nationally conscious realist movement in Russian literature. Gogol moves to Russian themes, and after his masterful comedy The Government Inspector (1836), he writes what will become a foundational text in the history of the Russian novel, Dead Souls (1842). Gogol’s ascendancy in Russian culture would seem to offer proof of the powerful appeal that the imperial, metropolitan culture held to provincials and of this culture’s receptivity to an art of non-Russian ethnic provenance. While the large brushstrokes of this picture are basically correct, the story of Gogol in its detail offers a less happy image of cultural diversity and openness in the Russia of Nicholas I. The complicating factor proved to be the rise of ethnic and linguistic Russian nationalism, which displaced the earlier, more inclusive celebration of Russian uniqueness as rooted in the culturally and ethnically heterogeneous empire . This new, russocentric nationalism set the criteria and the price for admission into the theater of imperial culture. Gogol’s ascendancy to Russian cultural icon was therefore far from painless and easy. Tensions and problems accompanied both the Russian reading public’s reconciliation with Gogol’s Ukrainian identity and Gogol’s 160 Edyta Bojanowska own efforts to cater to his readers’ vociferous demand for an uplifting national image of Russia. To the extent that Gogol is an imperial success story, he became one against considerable odds. What were the adjustments that Gogol felt he had to make in order to be accepted as a Russian writer? From the start, these involved his ethnic and cultural background, which was quite typical of early nineteenth-century Ukrainian gentry. Gogol’s mother came from Polish-Ukrainian nobility and his parents used the Polish “Ianovskii” (Polish transcription: Janowski) as part of the family name. The family estate in Vasilevka, in the Poltava region, was known among locals by the ancestral name Ianovshchyna. Gogol’s mother called him Nikola, which is a mixture of the Russian Nikolai and the Ukrainian Mykola. The family was trilingual, although they used Polish mostly for reading. Gogol’s father subscribed both to The Ukrainian Herald and the Polish Monitor, wrote letters to his wife in Ukrainianized Russian, and penned comedies in folksy, idiomatic Ukrainian. Research has cast doubt on this fact, but as far as Gogol knew, his paternal ancestor Ostap Hohol received nobility from the Polish king for his services in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s war against Muscovy. The future Russian bard grew up hearing his family refer to the Russians as moskali, an ethnonym with a derogatory connotation similar to the colonial name for the English—the redcoats. Upon moving to St. Petersburg, Gogol’s Ukrainianness and its Polish admixtures became an aspect of his identity that he felt compelled to manage very carefully. His experiments with his family name exemplify this well. Up to his early months in St. Petersburg, Gogol typically signed his letters Gogol-Ianovskii; in a few childhood letters he even skipped the Ukrainian “Gogol” in favor of the Polish “Ianovskii.” After the Polish November Uprising against Russia (1830–31), however, he dropped completely “Ianovskii” and settled on “Gogol” (the last letter signed “Gogol-Ianovskii” comes from September 29, 1830). He admonished his mother to address...