Romulus's nations: Myths of brotherhood and fratricide in Russian and south Slavic national narratives

This dissertation contributes to recent examinations of the psychological power of national identity. It investigates the ways in which literary texts imagine ideal national communities, as well as the narrative strategies through which they integrate the emotional charge of these sacred communities with the readers' own experience of self. I claim that the texts under consideration effect emotional identification through a narrative dynamic in which the eruption of the demonic within the most sacrosanct familial space is paradoxically transformed into the source of the nation's sublimity. This traumatic core of intense emotional charge---of negative pleasure (Kant), or perverse enjoyment (Zizek)---rivets the identification of national subjects to the image of the nation. I take as my case studies several Slavic works that represent this simultaneously sublime and demonic core through the trope of fratricide---Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and Dead Souls, from Russia and the Ukraine; Petar Njegos's The Mountain Wreath from Serbia and Montenegro; Anton Donchev's Time of Parting from Bulgaria; and Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain from Macedonia. In all these narratives, brotherhood emerges as the image of the ideal national community, whereas the necessity to cleanse the national self from the invasion of a demonic other takes the form of a fraternal sacrifice. The trauma of this sacrifice integrates demonic violence into the very foundation of national identity. Through this transformation of pure horror into sacred trauma, the nation is experienced as a sublime entity, and is defined as the singular expression of non-discursive mystic truth. Terrifying yet fascinating, both Gogol's Cossack brotherhood and Gogol's Russia owe their transcendent status to a mystic dread of this kind, and the collective Russian soul is defined as the soul privy to traumatic, fearsome love. My last chapter addresses the ways in which Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain effectively implodes this mechanism of national sublimation by draining the national fraternal myth of this emotional charge and provokes the re-evaluation of national identity according to different paradigms.