A Gothic Prelude

This chapter examines the earliest and the most “classical” Gothic tale in Russian literature — Nikolai Karamzin's The Island of Bornholm (1793) where the Russian traveler, stranded on a mysterious Danish island, is surprised to learn that the island used to be populated by Slavs. The fictional traveler's investigation of the mysteries of the island (deriving from possible incest and the resulting punishment) becomes a journey back to the dark pagan origins of Russian history and a Gothic prelude to Karamzin's later historical project. The Island of Bornholm remains an isolated phenomenon in late-eighteenth-century Russian literature, unique for its complex fusing of Gothic tropes and historical concerns.

Introduction

This chapter talks about the Gothic tradition, the Russian Empire, and the geography of the Russian Gothic. It begins by talking about Mikhail Lermontov's novel A Hero of our Time to set an example to show the recognizable tropes of Gothic literature. It defines “the imperial uncanny” as the instability in the categories of one's own and the foreign, the familiar and the strange, self and other, a confusion resulting from the threatening ambiguity of the Russian imperial space. The chapter gives a history of the Gothic tradition, how it manifested in the literature of the Russian Empire, and its reception.

In Search of the Russian Middle Ages

This chapter analyzes the Livonian tales of the 1820s penned by future Decembrists and set in medieval times in what would later become the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. This setting provided the Russian Romantics of a liberal political leaning with “access” to the European Middle Ages. It also allowed them to explore the bloody legacy of feudalism, which they were intent on fighting at home. Despite their subtle critique of contemporary Russia in these tales, the Decembrists' imperial imagination fully justifies the Russian expansion in the region by contrasting the Baltics' “dark” and “savage” medieval past to their benign present in the Russian Empire, by emphasizing historical ties between the then German-dominated Livonia and its East Slavic neighbors, and, in some cases, by reclaiming the Baltics as an originally “Russian” domain.

’Tis Eighty Years Since

This chapter gives voice to Ukraine by focusing on the Ukrainian writer and scholar Panteleimon Kulish's historical novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago published in Russian in 1843. The chapter shows that multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel — from “medieval” ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains and supernatural phantoms — produce an intricate play of temporalities. Moreover, they create an ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past, as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dangerous period of chaos overcome by the country's incorporation into the Russian Empire. Kulish's extensive use of the Gothic mode, when analyzed closely, reveals his profound ambiguity about Ukraine's imperial present haunted by the ghosts of its autonomous heroic past.

Afterword

This chapter reflects on the contemporary moment, which has witnessed a revival of Russia's expansionist and imperial discourse. It discusses “physiognomy” — a concern that pervaded Russian literary criticism of the time and found its manifestation in such uncanny fictional characters as the characters of the stories discussed in this book. The book discussed the anxieties that underlay several literary works of the time that deployed, seriously or subversively (and often both), popular Gothic tropes. The Gothic conventions served not exclusively as purely literary techniques intended to create a mysterious and suspenseful atmosphere in the work, to provoke certain emotions in the reader, or, in some cases, to mock a fashionable literary form. The chapter concludes that the book reconstructs a coherent tradition of the Russian imperial uncanny — a fictional space into which the Russian Empire projected its colonial fantasies and anxieties, and where it created its monsters and doubles that continue to haunt the Russian historical imagination.

“Gloomy Finland” and Russian Gothic Tales of Assimilation

This chapter draws on a variety of sources, from ethnographic publications in contemporary journals to Romantic novellas and historical novels that construct the image of the “wild” but docile Gothic Finland that is finally included in history and civilization through its incorporation into the Russian Empire. Both ethnographic and literary texts depict the Finns as a magic-prone, semi-mythological people destined by both history and geography to be ruled by others and enthusiastically embracing the Russian civilizational mission. Odoevsky's Gothic novella The Salamander stands in stark contrast to these optimistic interpretations of the annexation of Finland. It offers a dark story of a failed conversion where “natural,” intuitive and irrational Finland (embodied by the heroine Elsa) resists the mechanistic spirit of Petrine Russia and ultimately wreaks vengeance on the Russified Finnish hero.

On Mimicry and Ukrainians

This chapter examines Antonii Pogorel'sky's novel The Convent Graduate (1830–33), set in Ukraine. The novel mockingly plays with the clichés of the Gothic tradition to subtly point to the true threat — the “menace of mimicry,” to use Bhabha's terminology. It discusses Ukraine as the “other” as it introduces to the reader the exotic low classes of Ukraine, not fully assimilated into the Russian imperial identity. It discusses how The Convent Graduate offers several competing models of education and the resulting cultural identification. Ukrainian mimicry, ruthlessly satirized in the novel, exposes its very object, the Russian imperial self, as a simulacrum, and thus calls into question the Russian colonial strategy of assimilation.

Ukraine

This chapter introduces Ukraine as the quintessential locale of the Russian imperial uncanny. It discusses Ukraine's complicated history of its integration into the Russian Empire. Unlike Finland, Ukraine was perceived as a repository of specifically Slavic authenticity and national culture. The topic of Ukraine in the Russian imperialist discourse and Gogol's complicated relationship to his Ukrainian and Russian “selves” have been sufficiently addressed in scholarship. Thus the chapter only outlines the major factors that contributed to the image of Gothic Ukraine in the Russian literary imagination as its uncanny double and briefly discusses Gogol's stories The Night before Christmas and A Terrible Vengeance (1832) as case studies.