Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk

Reviewed by: Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk Timothy Langen Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity. By Yuliya Ilchuk. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. 2021. xvi+ 267 pp. $52.50. ISBN 978-1-4875-0825-8. From the beginning of his career to our day, Gogolʹ's works have generated highly charged interpretative fields, and in recent years, 'Russian' and 'Ukrainian' have [End Page 148] been two of the most powerful hermeneutic magnets. With this monograph, Yuliya Ilchuk subjects both terms to dynamic, historicizing analysis. By her reading, Gogolʹ's national identity is not fixed but rather constituted (at least partially) in performance, before heterogeneous audiences, with multiple cultural and linguistic codes, giving rise to gestures and texts capable of generating divergent interpretation. Her focus is not on classifying Gogolʹ as essentially 'Russian' or 'Ukrainian', or as first one and then the other, but rather on the constant (and constantly shifting) interpenetration of these categories in the contexts in which Gogolʹ enacted his own literary and personal identity. This book is methodologically and theoretically ambitious. The chapters treat, in order, the history of Ukrainian elites in the Russian empire; Gogolʹ's varying self-presentation in the 1830s; the distribution of Ukrainian and Russian (and hybridized) lexical, syntactic, and idiomatic elements among the narrators of his Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831); the interaction of various languages and linguistic markers (especially Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Yiddish) in Gogolʹ's writing and in Russian cultural and political debates during his career; the changes he made to Taras Bulba and Dead Souls (both 1842); and the posthumous treatment of his texts in Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian contexts. Ilchuk brings considerable theoretical sophistication to bear on these topics; she is as ready to see in Gogolʹ's self-conscious linguistic hybridity a challenge to Bourdieu (p. 71) as she is to find in Greenblatt's and Bhabha's paradigms a useful framework for reading Gogolʹ. Equally well managed is her use of large data sets for stylistic analysis, with technical appendices giving extra information about her methodology. The results support her overall argument that Ukrainian and Russian elements do not simply coexist in Gogolʹ's texts, but rather operate in varying manners and proportions according to audience and occasion. In addition to this lexical corpus analysis, Ilchuk draws attention to a kind of dual coding whereby (typically) a Russian reader will receive one sort of message from Gogolʹ and/or his narrator(s), while a Ukrainian reader or listener will hear something different. Both the early Dikanka tales and the later revisions of Taras Bulba and Dead Souls have this property, as she argues. One sign of the value of a book like this is the way it can reframe arguments which its subject does not address directly. Ilchuk repeatedly emphasizes performativity—Gogolʹ's social manners, his sartorial and coiffuristic gestures, and his deviations from literary Russian grammar and usage. Readers of Boris Eikhenbaum's 1919 article 'How Gogolʹs Overcoat Is Made' (repr. in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. by Robert A. Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 267-91) will recognize a similar claim here but with new light cast on it. Eikhenbaum's Gogolʹ is irrepressibly performative and creative, rather than concerning himself with what one might call 'content'. For Ilchuk, performance is how Gogolʹ engages content. It is hard to think what more this book could do. Devoted to the topic of identity in its dizzying complexity, it is theoretically sophisticated, clearly and engagingly written, methodologically bold, and rich in detail. Ultimately Ilchuk's aim, in the best spirit of the theorists whose ideas she mobilizes, is not only to provide an objective [End Page 149] analysis of an acuvre, idiom, and life, but also to show its positive generative potential. She succeeds. Timothy Langen University of Missouri Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

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