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

Reviewed by: Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk Kathleen Scollins Yuliya Ilchuk, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. xvi + 268 pp. ISBN 978-1487508258. The question of Nikolai Gogol's national identity is a stubborn one, arising with his first appearance in print and persisting to the current day. The question had gained urgency following the demise of the Soviet Union, prompting reconsideration from what seemed like every scholarly direction: neo-, anti-, and postcolonial. Yuliya Ilchuk's Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity builds upon the important work of recent scholars such as Edyta Bojanowska, further interrogating the apparent contradictions between the two "sides" of Gogol's colonial identity to arrive at a more radically decolonial understanding of the writer's complex and ambivalent subjectivity. Ilchuk's essential argument moves beyond a rejection of the reductive "either/or" thinking that dominates traditional Russian and Ukrainian studies, while contending that he is not exactly "both," either: rather, Gogol's personal and narrative hybridity erodes the binary altogether. Although this is Ilchuk's debut monograph, hers is already an established voice in the study of the cultures of Russia, Ukraine, and especially the embattled spaces in between, whether physical, textual, or conceptual: post-Soviet identity, post-Maidan protest art, contested memory, translation studies. Her far-flung projects span multiple centuries, cultures, and discursive traditions, demanding a broad range of theoretical and analytical tools, and she brings the full arsenal to bear on this study, employing a multipronged methodology that combines postcolonial theory with computer-assisted textual analysis. The result is impressive: multidisciplinary and illuminating, expanding on recent scholarly trends and opening new avenues of investigation, all while modeling how tools of the Digital Humanities can contribute to Slavic studies by reconsidering even the most "canonical" literary texts and lives from new perspectives. Ilchuk opens her study with Gogol's well-known warning not to rely upon his works, the verbal fabric of which is riddled with gaps and ambiguities, the result of frequent revision. Thankfully, she does not so much heed his warning as take it as an invitation to dive more deeply into the lacunae, employing an assortment of contemporary theoretical and digital tools to disclose new aspects of both narrative and authorial identity. Her framework draws in particular upon Homi Bhabha's elaboration of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, which reevaluates the dynamic between colonizer and colonized, emphasizing their interdependent development of subjectivity, postulating an ambivalent "in-between" discursive space, and restoring to the colonial subject the agency to resist or subvert dominant structures. While the bilingual Gogol's earliest works demonstrate what Ilchuk considers a deliberate and playful engagement with "hybrid [End Page 97] discourse," his rewrites of the later 1830s scrubbed away many regionalisms for the Russian reading audience, though the editing process was inconsistent, sometimes preserving or even restoring these Ukrainian elements. She characterizes the revised versions as "a multilayered palimpsest," whose "previous hybridized elements" are still discernible beneath the neutered surface, revealing not only a heterogeneous discourse, but the constant construction, revision, and performance of a hybrid national identity (4). Nearly two centuries of scholars have parsed Gogol's unique literary voice to assign him a "place," their various approaches shaped by their understanding of the colonial dynamic between Russia and Ukraine. While the dominant line of scholarship has accepted Belinskii's definition of Gogol as a "Russian national poet," thereby eliding any regional roots, proponents of Ukrainian studies have aimed to reclaim him as an essentially national writer making his way in a "foreign" empire, compelled to use Russian in order to participate fully in imperial literary life (12). Some recent scholars divide his output chronologically, resulting in separate literary personae—"Mykola Hohol" until 1836, succeeded by "Nikolai Gogol" until his death in 1852; while this approach avoids the suppression of either "side" of his identity, it nonetheless fixes the Russian/Ukrainian binary at the heart of this "dual" identity. While the concept of hybridity has been critiqued as potentially ignoring—or, conversely, further entrenching—hierarchical colonial dynamics, Ilchuk uses the concept productively to distinguish between recent "both/and" approaches that designate a dual national identity vs. the more...

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