Between the Self and the Other: Little Russia in the Works of Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol (1809~1852), a celebrated Russian writer born in the Ukraine, chartered a path fascinating for recent scholarship of alterity. His life, marked with his journey from his homeland to the heart of Russia, and then to Western Europe, inevitably left an indelible impact on his work. This paper investigates the dynamic interconnection of the center and periphery, and ultimately the relationship of the self and the other in Gogol`s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikan`ka (1831-32) and the redaction of Taras Bul`ba (1842). Gogol`s attitude to Little Russia is ambivalent in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikan`ka. On the one hand, Little Russia is presented as a prosperous place with hospitality and merrymaking, a stark contrast to the dry, cold, fragmented society in Russia. On the other hand, a rather ominous streak is palpable. Dikan`ka is torn between reality and fantasy, allowing the "unclean power" to sneak in. The revised version of Taras Bul`ba approaches to the issue in a different manner. Compared to the earlier version included in Mirgorod, the Cossacks of the redaction undergo the process of Russification. They are no more Ukrainian Cossacks, but baptized by the Russian national ideology and consequently, reborn to be Russian warriors. In this process, Gogol superimposes the virtues associated with Ukrainian Cossacks onto the Russian national identity, as if he wishes to provide a model for his contemporaneous Russians who are contaminated by the Western values such as materialism. As a result, the Little Russian virtues (valor, spirituality, religiosity, honor, loyalty,etc.) contribute to establishing the ideal Russian identity. In conclusion, Little Russia remains as the symbol of "the other" vis-a-vis Russia in Gogol`s early work, while the later work demonstrates the writer`s serious attempt to insert the positive values represented by the Cossacks into the culture of the center and therefore, the latter is to be empowered to confront the West, "the other" for Russia.clos