The Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the "Imperial Uncanny," 1793-1844

FAIN: FT-61594-14

Valeria Sobol
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)

The Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny asks why Russian Romantic literature consistently portrays the empires peripheries as haunted spaces and the locus of Gothic encounters. I argue that the Gothic mode served as a particularly apt form for "the imperial uncanny" -- the experience of danger and uncertainty in the ambiguous colonial space within Russias borders. Diverging from the prevailing view of the Russian Gothic as an imitation of the Western literary trend, my project reconceptualizes this body of literature as a key genre that dramatizes uniquely Russian imperial anxieties and concerns (e.g., Russias fluid boundaries, cultural dependence on the West, and the clash between imperial and national identities) and offers a powerful critique of empire. The book will be of interest to Russian historians and literary scholars, as well as to a broader audience of scholars of the Western Gothic and those interested in new approaches to empire.

Media Coverage

Gothic Ruins: The Ghost of the Ukrainian Past in Panteleimon Kulish’s Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Irina Avkhimovich
Publication: Center E-news for everything Russian, East European, and Eurasian at Illinois
Date: 10/14/2014
Abstract: On September 30, 2014, Dr. Valeria Sobol, Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, gave a talk on Gothic tropes in nineteenth-century Russian and Ukrainian literature, and discussed their significance in a novel by Panteleimon Kulish entitled Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). Kulish’s recognizably Gothic plot turns and characters reflect the writer’s complex attitude to the Ukrainian past and identity in their relation to the Russian imperial presence. This presentation is based on a chapter from Prof. Sobol’s current book project on the imperial Gothic in Russian literature.
URL: https://reeecillinois.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/gothic-ruins-the-ghost-of-the-ukrainian-past-in-panteleimon-kulishs-mykhailo-charnyshenko-or-little-russia-eighty-years-ago/

“‘Gloomy Finland’ and the Russian Imperial Gothic”: Valeria Sobol at the Noontime Scholars Lecture (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Olga Makarova
Publication: Center E-news for everything Russian, East European, and Eurasian at Illinois
Date: 10/20/2017
Abstract: On Tuesday, September 26, the current head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Professor Valeria Sobol gave a lecture entitled “‘Gloomy Finland’ and the Russian Imperial Gothic.” The talk was a part of REEEC Fall 2017 Noontime Lecture Series, but as Professor Sobol pointed out in her opening remarks, the talk could also fit into the “1917: Ten Days that Shook the World / 2017: Ten Days that Shake the Campus” initiative since it was 1917 when Finland finally gained its independence. However, the lecture took us back to the time when Finland became a part of Russia – the timeframe that is of particular interest to Sobol as she is working on her new project, Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850.
URL: https://reeecillinois.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/gloomy-finland-and-the-russian-imperial-gothic-valeria-sobol-at-the-noontime-scholars-lecture/

Associated Products

‘A Melancholy Stepson of Nature’: Finns and Finland in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Ethnography (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: ‘A Melancholy Stepson of Nature’: Finns and Finland in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Ethnography
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: This paper explored the constructions of Finland and its inhabitants in the Russian press and ethnographic publications of the 1840s. Romantic works about Finland, physiological sketches and supposedly “objective” ethnographic descriptions reveal a persistent pattern of portraying the Finnish national character and history as directly determined by Finland’s gloomy and sublime landscape and the strong pagan element of Finnish culture, which also shape its destiny as a docile object of the Russian empire’s “enlightening” colonial mission.
Date: 11-21-2015
Primary URL: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/aseees/aseees15/index.php?cmd=Online+Program+View+Event&selected_box_id=193781&PHPSESSID=i2v3ef5puolp3qus0osd630gl3
Primary URL Description: Convention program
Conference Name: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) annual convention.

“‘Gloomy Finland’ and the Russian Imperial Gothic” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “‘Gloomy Finland’ and the Russian Imperial Gothic”
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: This talk is based on one of the chapters from Professor Valeria Sobol’s book in progress, Haunted Empire: The Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850. The book explores the connection between the Gothic and empire in Russian literature, focusing on the portrayal of Northern and Southern imperial borderlands as uncanny spaces. In this lecture, Professor Sobol will discuss the image of “gloomy” and Gothic Finland constructed in Russian literary and ethnographic publications of the 1840s. While being intimately linked to Russian foundational narratives, such the “invitation of the Varangians” and the construction of St. Petersburg, Finland emerged as an exotic and mysterious land after its incorporation into the Russian empire in the early nineteenth century. Finland’s ambivalent status in the Russian cultural imagination, along with the Gothic connotations of its majestic sublime landscape and its reputation as a “land of wizards,” made it a particularly apt setting for the Russian imperial uncanny. The lecture will offer a brief analysis of Vladimir Odoevsky’s novella “The Salamander” (1844) meant to demonstrate this function of Finland in Russian Gothic literature. While most 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 offers a far more complex and darker picture, using the narrative of the conquest of Finland to critique both Russia’s historical path and Western modernity more generally.
Date Range: 09/26/2017
Location: Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, University of Illinois
Primary URL: https://calendars.illinois.edu/detail/7?eventId=33283765

“Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850.” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850.”
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: This talk will introduce my new book project, Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850, in which I investigate the connection between the Gothic elements found in numerous Russian literary works of the period and their imperial context. I argue that the persistent presence of Gothic tropes in Russian literature is not a just a tribute to a fashionable Western literary trend, as it is often interpreted; rather, I read it as a key literary form that dramatizes deep historical and cultural tensions, unique to the Russian imperial situation. Focusing on two spaces of internal otherness that figure prominently in the Russian Gothic—the Baltic/Scandinavian “North” and the Ukrainian “South,”—I attempt to reconstruct the specifically Russian tradition of the “imperial uncanny,” a fictional space into which the Russian empire projected its colonial fantasies and anxieties and where it produced the doubles and monsters that continue to haunt Russia’s historical imagination.
Date Range: April 2016
Location: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University

“Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850.” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850.”
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: In this talk I introduced my new book project, Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850, in which I investigate the connection between the Gothic elements found in numerous Russian literary works of the period and their imperial context. I argue that the persistent presence of Gothic tropes in Russian literature is not a just a tribute to a fashionable Western literary trend, as it is often interpreted; rather, I read it as a key literary form that dramatizes deep historical and cultural tensions, unique to the Russian imperial situation. Focusing on two spaces of internal otherness that figure prominently in the Russian Gothic—the Baltic/Scandinavian “North” and the Ukrainian “South,”—I attempt to reconstruct the specifically Russian tradition of the “imperial uncanny,” a fictional space into which the Russian empire projected its colonial fantasies and anxieties and where it produced the doubles and monsters that continue to haunt Russia’s historical imagination. In this talk, I focused on the "Ukrainian" part of my book and especially the last chapter that examines Panteleimon Kulish's first historical novel _Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago._
Date Range: May 2015
Location: Chair of Slavic Literatures and Cultures, University of Passau, Germany
Primary URL: https://www.phil.uni-passau.de/aktuelles/meldung/detail/haunted-empire-the-russian-literary-gothic-and-the-imperial-ucanny-1750-1850/

“Gothic Ruins: The Ghost of the Ukrainian Past in Panteleimon Kulish’s Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago.” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Gothic Ruins: The Ghost of the Ukrainian Past in Panteleimon Kulish’s Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago.”
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: This presentation is part of my book project, Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the Imperial Uncanny, 1790-1850. The book argues that in Russian literature the empire’s peripheries are consistently depicted as dangerous, ambiguous places that destabilize the characters’ imperial identities. They become sites of the imperial uncanny, a fictional space into which the empire projected its colonial fantasies and anxieties and where, through Gothic tropes, it produced the doubles and monsters that continue to haunt Russia’s historical imagination. Haunted Empire focuses on two spaces of internal otherness that figure prominently in the Russian Gothic: the Baltic/Scandinavian “North” and the Ukrainian “South.” In this presentation I will discuss the historical novel Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago written by prominent Ukrainian writer Panteleimon Kulish in 1843. The novel attempts to conjure the ghost of the Ukrainian “authentic” and heroic past, before the Russian empire fully incorporated this region in the late eighteenth century, and produces a vision of its relative cultural independence and chivalric tradition in Gothic-fantastic imagery. The mixed reception of the novel in the Russian press, ranging from admiration for its heroic and folkloric motifs to denying Ukraine any historical past whatsoever, encapsulates the imperial fantasies and fears provoked by the literature of the imperial uncanny.
Date Range: 09/30/2014
Primary URL: http://calendars.illinois.edu/detail/2750/32002891

Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Book)
Title: Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: Haunted Empire shows that Gothic elements in Russian literature frequently expressed deep-set anxieties about the Russian imperial and national identity. Valeria Sobol argues that the persistent Gothic tropes in the literature of the Russian empire enact deep historical and cultural tensions arising from Russia's idiosyncratic imperial experience. Her book brings together theories of empire and colonialism with close readings of canonical and less-studied literary texts as she explores how Gothic horror arises from the threatening ambiguity of Russia's own past and present, producing the effect Sobol terms "the imperial uncanny." Focusing on two spaces of "the imperial uncanny"—the Baltic "North"/Finland and the Ukrainian "South"—Haunted Empire reconstructs a powerful discursive tradition that reveals the mechanisms of the Russian imperial imagination that are still at work today.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781501750571
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

“’Tis Eighty Years Since: Panteleimon Kulish’s Gothic Ukraine.” (Article)
Title: “’Tis Eighty Years Since: Panteleimon Kulish’s Gothic Ukraine.”
Author: Valeria Sobol
Abstract: This article explores the ideological implications of the Gothic mode employed in Panteleimon Kulish’s first novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). I show that the multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel —from Walter Scottian ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains, uncanny ethnic Others, and supernatural phantoms—produce an intricate play of temporalities, identities, and allegiances and ultimately create a highly ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dark period of chaos overcome by the country’s incorporation into the Russian empire. Rather than dismissing Kulish’s engagement with the Gothic as a tribute to the fashionable Western trend, I argue that this mode serves as a conduit to some of the work’s most pressing ideological and historical concerns and ultimately yields a more nuanced insight into the author’s complex position as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire.
Year: 2019
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Slavic Review

Prizes

Best Article in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture (2018-19)
Date: 5/20/2020
Organization: American Association for Ukrainian Studies

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