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George Luckyj. The Anguish of Mykola Hohol, a.ka. Nikolai Gogol. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1998. x, 117 pp. $18.95 paper.
The question of Gogol's Ukrainianness has enjoyed a certain vogue in Ukrainian cultural and intellectual circles since the demise of the Soviet Union and of its official myths about Russian-Ukrainian fraternity. Happily this vogue has coincided with increased interest in marginal and postcolonial literatures on the part of cultural theorists. To date, neither scholars in Ukraine nor their Western counterparts have provided a sufficiently comprehensive account of how Gogol's writing might be shaped by the author's ethnicity, cultural background, and attitude towards Imperial Russia. George Luckyj's Anguish of Mykola Hohol comes, therefore, as a welcome introduction to the Ukrainian Gogol. Updating and, in part, building on his earlier monograph Between Gogol' and Sevcenko: Polarity in the Literary Ukraine, 1798-1847 (1971), Luckyj provides much useful background material in this new biography for an English-speaking audience long accustomed to regarding Gogol as (in Belinsky's famous formulation) a "Russian national poet."
Luckyj's focus on Ukrainian elements in Gogol's life is avowedly revisionist: its stated aim is to "redress an obvious imbalance in the past" (p. 25). In attempting to do so, the author provides an extensive survey of post-Soviet Ukrainian scholarly and popular literature on Gogol's place in a Ukrainian cultural context, as well as a selection of revealing comments by earlier observers and Gogol's contemporaries. Recasting the traditional two-Gogols approach of previous biographies (comic writer versus Christian homilist), Luckyj considers the writer's self-confessed state of ethnic dvoedushie as a major source of inner conflict. Early on in the book he advances the provocative thesis that Gogol's inability to reconcile his twin Ukrainian and Russian...