Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk (review)

Reviewed by: Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk Daniel Green Ilchuk, Yuliya. Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2021. xvi + 268 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $74.00. Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity is an important scholarly contribution to Gogol´ studies and the examination of identity performance. It came out between Russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, and it speaks to two issues of urgent importance: Ukrainian identities and Russian imperial mindsets. Gogol´ has been at the nexus of debates over identity since he emerged on the literary scene in the late 1820s and he continues to be treated as a political football between Ukrainian and Russian nationalists today. Yet it is his significance for both national literary traditions that makes his life, works and legacy an excellent lens through which to study how Ukrainians and Russians have navigated their national and imperial identities from the nineteenth century onwards. In her book, Ilchuk sidesteps the never-ending debate about whether Gogol´ is a Ukrainian or a Russian writer, instead arguing for a hybrid identity, one which spanned both his self-fashioning in society and his literary works. Over six distinct yet complementary chapters her book covers: 1) the formation of Russian and Ukrainian national identities; 2) Gogol´'s self-fashioning in the imperial capital of St Petersburg; 3) his use of a hybridized, Ukrainian-influenced Russian language; 4) his theories of language and identity; 5) the development of different drafts and versions of his writing; and 6) the posthumous treatment of his stories and their translation into Ukrainian. Ilchuk deftly moves between examinations of broad socio-historical contexts to close readings of portraits, letters and literary works. Woven through the book are examples of Gogol´'s idiosyncratic use of language. In chapter three the reader is presented with lexical and morphological calques from Ukrainian into Russian from Gogol´'s Ukrainian tales (pp. 74–76), while a table in chapter four shows how Gogol´ continued this linguistic inventiveness when playing with Russian idioms in his later writing in Dead Souls and The Inspector General (p. 112). Digital tools also provide the means for performing comparisons: Ilchuk contrasts drafts of the same stories, showing how the changing socio-linguistic contexts of his lifetime prompted Gogol´ to revise or have others rework earlier stories (chapter 5). In the afterword she compares Gogol´'s lexical choices in his published works with those of other writers of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ethnic origin, showing that Gogol´ falls between writers of Russian and Ukrainian origin in his word choices (p. 169). It is as a contribution to postcolonial studies that Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity really makes its mark. Postcolonial approaches came late [End Page 784] to Slavonic Studies, with the Russian imperial situation falling outside traditional Western European models of understanding empire. Though there has been interest in recent decades in examining the particularities of the Russian imperial example, such as Alexander Etkind's influential Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Cambridge and Malden, MA, 2011), this remains an understudied area to which Ilchuk's book adds another dimension. The strength of this work lies in its extensive engagement with theory and scholarship from Ukrainian and Russian studies and beyond. The main theoretical strands include performance and speech-act theories, as well as postcolonial ideas of mimicry and hybridity. In the introduction, Ilchuk traces the evolution of theories of hybridity, from Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhabha to more recent scholarship critical of the notion (pp. 4–6). In Ilchuk's conceptualization of hybridity, she avoids the idea prevalent in other studies 'that Gogol had internalized a colonial mode of behavior' (p. 7), instead arguing that his hybridity created ambivalent 'in-between' spaces in which he could perform creative and subversive identities. In doing so, she builds on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the 'in-betweenness of languages', which, she asserts, lays important groundwork for understanding 'Gogol's crossing the border of Russian and Ukrainian, which led to […] semantic shifts, unusual collocations, neologisms, and new compounds — all of which deterritorialize and reterritorialize discursive and social...

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