Letters from Vienna #67
Was Gogol Russian or Ukrainian?
“Russia and Ukraine renew rivalry over Nikolai Gogol” The Guardian declared in 2009. “On 200th anniversary of literary giant Nikolai Gogol’s birth, both countries lay claim to writer”.
“The writer was born and spent his youth in rural Ukraine” The Guardian reported “–
then part of the tsarist Russian empire – in the early 19th century, but wrote in Russian, lived some of his life in St Petersburg and was buried in Moscow. His nationality is the subject of intense public debate as the bicentenary approaches, with both states funding events to mark the occasion.”
“Aleksey Vertinsky, an actor at Kiev’s academic youth theatre, told the Ukrainian press he was disgusted at Russian attempts to “adopt” Gogol. “They can get lost,” he said. “If I announce this morning that I’m a blue trolleybus, does it mean I should drive off to the depot?” he added, in an absurdist afterthought that might have appealed to the writer himself.
But many experts in Moscow argue Gogol is “100% Russian”. “A part of the political elite in Kiev wants to claim Gogol as their own so they can enter civilized Europe with at least one great Ukrainian writer,” said Igor Zolotussky, a Russian authority on Gogol.”
“But there can be no such discussion because there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian national identity. Gogol wrote and thought in Russian. He was a great Russian writer, full stop.”[1]
1667
According to Rolf-Dietrich Keil the part of Ukraine Gogol hailed from (between Kiev and Charkov) had only belonged to Poland for a short while. “Already in the 17th century people felt as if they belonged to the Russian Empire whereas the territory west of the Dnieper only fell into Russian hands in 1793, once Poland had been divided for a second time. For an orthodox Ukrainian the annexation of the territories between the Dnieper, Dniester, Western Bug and Pripyat by orthodox Russia must have seemed like a liberation from the dominant Catholic Polish aristocracy.”[2]
In 1667, Timothy Snyder tells us: “Ukraine was split along the Dnieper River between the Commonwealth and Muscovy by the Treaty of Andrusovo. Today, the years between 1664 and 1667 are seen from a Ukrainian point of view as the time of a great Ukrainian rebellion against Polish oppressors; or from a Russian point of view as the moment when the stray Ukrainian stream found its way into the great Russian river.”[3]
It’s not without significance that Gogol abandoned the Polish part of his name: Janovsky in the wake of the Polish rebellion of 1830[4] or that his father wrote comedies in “Little Russian” (aka Ukrainian) while he himself didn’t or for that matter that he spent much of his adult life (between 1836 & 1848 (he was only 42 when he died in 1852)) in Italy. That he was attacked by the pro-Western critic V.G. Belinsky (who to the best of my knowledge never actually left the borders of the Russian Empire) as being anti-Western is one of the many ironies of history. Writers, if they are worth their salt, can never be pinned down to a simple national, cultural, ideological or philosophical position while a work of art itself is, by definition, subject to multiple interpretations; if it isn’t, it isn’t art.
Gogol wasn’t what one might term a nationalist but he did eschew western habits of luxury in favour of simplicity and emphasized the need for self-sufficiency. Perhaps the most important figures in “Dead Souls” are the ones of Constantine Theodorovitch Kostanzhoglo and his negative counterpart: Khlobuev. The former eschews western luxury and lauds plain living (as well as hard work) while the latter can’t bring himself to sacrifice the slightest symbol of “western civilization” even if it spells his own financial ruin.
Ukraine’s Black Soil
Gogol’s description of Ukraine’s landscape is lyrical: “Not a cloud in the sky,” he wrote in “The Sorotchintsy Fair”. “Not a sound in the fields. Everything seems dead. Alone, up there, in the celestial abyss, a lark quivers, and its silvery song descends along the aerial steps towards the enamored earth... A thousand insects, like emeralds, topazes, rubies, rain down on the colorful vegetable gardens shaded by tall sunflowers.”
“Haystacks with gray reflections and sheaves of golden wheat are arranged like a camp in the endless plain. The fruits bend the branches of cherry trees, plum trees, apple trees, pear trees... What voluptuousness and what indolence in these summers of Little Russia!”[5]
Indeed, he idealized life in the provinces: „There,” wrote Nicolas Gogol in a “Ménage d’autrefois”, “no desire exceeds the palisade of the courtyard, the hedge of the apple orchard, the isbas (wooden houses) of the village, planted askew and lost among the willows, the elderberries, the pear trees. The life of this modest proprietor passes by so quietly, so peacefully, that, in a moment of oblivion, one finds oneself doubting the existence of the passions, the desires, the vain agitations engendered by the spirit of the evil to disturb the world: all this, it is believed, is only the product of a dream, a sparkling phantasmagoria.“[6]
Yet at the same time his attitude toward the provincial gentry (with whom he happened to identify) is hardly a flattering one. In fact: it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Ukrainians were as offended as the Irish were by Synge. Perhaps it would be wiser for them to deny any knowledge of him rather than to claim him as their own!
Sadly, Ukraine’s rich soil has been as much of a curse (in much the same way that oil is the curse of many a nation) as a blessing.
Between 1909 and 1913, the Germans calculated, Ukraine produced a surplus of c.5.5 million tons of cereals, 80% of which were exported to other parts of the Russian Empire or abroad.[7] This was why the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which suffered from starvation in the course of the First World War, was so interested in the Ukraine. Indeed, there were even plans to incorporate it into the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy[8] while a “Ukrainian Legion” was formed, loyal to the Habsburg Empire.[9] That the “Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Nationalistiv, OUN) was founded by Galician Ukrainian veterans of the West-Ukrainian-Polish war in Vienna in 1929” is not without interest.[10]
The Germans were equally interested in the Ukraine, for much the same reason. The efforts of the Germans to create an independent Ukraine (see letter #32) must be seen against this economic background (Germans were also starving in 1918) as well as the obvious geo-political one. What made the Germans more significant players was not merely their military superiority to their Austro-Hungarian counterparts but also due to the fact that they didn’t have to take into consideration minorities such as the Poles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Yet, when both the Germans and Austrians finally took hold of the Ukraine they found to their horror that they were unable to exploit its rich resources. The situation was simply too chaotic and their own plundering too inept.
At that point in time the Ukraine found itself in a state of civil war, which was a class conflict as much as anything. Nearly all questions revolved around the redistribution of land, much of which was chaotic, murderous and involuntary; many an heir of the characters in “Dead Souls” was murdered in his bed.
Neither the Germans nor the Austrians proved able to create a stable state and when both were forced to retreat by the terms of the treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye & Trianon, the Soviets were able to conquer the Ukraine, which they did with the utmost brutality. The fact that they weren’t able to pacify the Ukraine completely undoubtedly played a role in Stalin’s cruel policies of the 1930s, which murdered millions[11].
International interest in Ukraine’s agricultural sector remains intense[12] and might well be regarded as one of the prime causes for the Western-backed putsch in 2013-14 as well as the current war there.
Yet I digress. To return to the original question: it must be said that Gogol was both Russian and Ukrainian (aka Little Russian). To complicate matters further: one must also mention the fact that he had Cossack and Polish ancestry too. He was, in short, something of a mutt, as all humans are. The idea of “racial purity” is an illusion, one which has always bordered on madness.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/31/nikolai-gogol-russia-ukraine
[2] p.14 Nikolai W. Gogol, Rolf-Dietrich Keil
[3] p. 117 The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, Timothy Snyder
[4] p.8 Nikolai W. Gogol, Rolf-Dietrich Keil
[5] p.14 Gogol, Henri Troyat
[6] p.17 Ibid
[7] p.284 Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft 1917-1922
[8] p.104-105 Ibid
[9] p.101 Ibid
[10] p.143 The Reconstruction of Nations, Timothy Snyder
[11] pp. 21-58 Bloodlands Timothy Snyder
[12] THE CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF UKRAINIAN AGRICULTURE
COUNTRY FACT SHEET | DECEMBER 2014