"You laugh, but I cry:" Nikolai Gogol and Taras Shevchenko's Poetics of Transition

Abstract

“You laugh, but I cry:” Nikolai Gogol and Taras Shevchenko’s Poetics of Transition Abstract

Nikolai Gogol and Taras Shevchenko have both been named as fathers of Russian and Ukrainian literature. Yet in their supposed roles as founding fathers, they have been seen in very different lights. Gogol is perceived as the quintessential trickster, Shevchenko the national poet par excellence. Moreover, Gogol has been characterized as believing that Ukraine, or “Little Russia,” should serve as a companion to Great Russia, and Shevchenko as a Ukrainian nationalist. Despite these different portrayals, both authors were contemporaries who shared their national origin, spending their childhoods in Ukraine, and adulthoods principally in Russia. In my dissertation, I argue that a close comparison of Gogol’s and Shevchenko’s works reveals aspects of their poetics otherwise unnoticeable, particularly a common interest in the liminal, and highlights important similarities in the two authors.

In Chapter I, I survey existing literature comparing both writers, as well as establish a definition of the liminal that I use through the subsequent dissertation. In the second chapter, I compare two works from Gogol’s and Shevchenko’s first periods, Taras Bulba and Haidamaky, and find that they share a poetics of destabilizing trauma. In Chapter III, I compare Dead Souls, “Dream,” and “Cold Ravine,” all the authors’ second periods. They reveal a shared focus on flux, temporal, structural, and otherwise. Chapter IV focuses on Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends and “The Artist.” Comparing the two reveals Gogol’s and Shevchenko’s poetics of disenchantment.

Finally, I read Dead Souls, Part Two and “Should we not then cease, my friend,” and discuss the last period of Gogol’s and Shevchenko’s writings. I argue that throughout their lives, both authors thematize the liminal, and in this final period, they focus on psychological liminality. Comparing their works allows this theme to become apparent and show how it takes different forms throughout both authors’ lives.