Gogol's hybrid performance: The creation, reception and editing of 'Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki' (Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka) (1831-1832)

This dissertation examines Nikolai Gogol's fashioning of a hybrid national identity during the creation, reception, and editing of his Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki during the 1830s-1840s. It challenges existing views of Gogol's national identity in terms of ethnic oppositions, emphasizing the importance of the mixture of linguistic, cultural, political and class beliefs in his identity formation. Chapter One introduces the concept hybridity to the study of the cultural and linguistic practices of Russian writers of Ukrainian origin (such as Vasilii Narezhnyi, Orest Somov and Gogol) in the context of Russian imperial culture. Chapter Two analyzes Gogol's negotiation of his cultural and ethnic alterity during the creation and after the publication of his tales. This chapter focuses on Gogol's use of mimicry and cross-cultural disguise for self-affirmation in the dichotomous culture of Russian literary aristocrats. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the changing reception of Gogol by Russian society in the 1830s-1840s, when growing Russian nationalism threatened to brand Gogol as a potentially disloyal other. Chapter Three examines Gogol's self-fashioning via his hybridized Russian language in the first edition of the tales (1831-1832) and its purification in subsequent editions (1836, 1842, and 1855). The changes in language and style that Gogol and his editors made in these editions indicate how imperial ideology subjected Gogol's works to monolingual standardization. Chapter Four establishes a link between the narrative performance in Vechera and hybrid national identity. Traditionally, the masquerade of narrative voices presented in the tales has been reduced to an opposition between its two main narrators, a Russified one and a local Ukrainian, thereby ignoring other narrators. This chapter instead studies the performative function of storytelling in Vechera and demonstrates that the tales' multi-narrative structure produces a different dynamic among the narrators; it both narrates and reveals varying messages for two different audiences - imperial Russian and colonial Ukrainian.