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Lecture by Yuliya Ilchuk, Stanford University, "Making Sense of Hybrid Cultural Production in the Russian Empire: The Case of Nikolai Gogol"

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Ukrainian Studies Program, University of Illinois
Location
101 ISB
Date
Oct 30, 2019   5:00 pm  
Speaker
Yulia Ilchuk
Contact
Valeria Sobol
E-Mail
vsobol@illinois.edu
Phone
217-244-1063
Views
68
Originating Calendar
Slavic Events

Abstract:

Making Sense of Hybrid Cultural Production in the Russian Empire: The Case of Nikolai Gogol

During the post-Soviet transition, both Russia and Ukraine have been preoccupied with defining their national codes, while showing little interest in regional identification and hybrid cultures and languages. I hope that my research on hybrid cultural production in the empire during the time of Nikolai Gogol will rectify the situation and further the postcolonial and decolonial studies within the Slavic literary field. In my talk, I will demonstrate how Nikolai Gogol and the Ukrainian intellectuals of his time (Orest Somov, Vasyl Narizhnyi, Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykola Kostomarov) contributed to the creation of a heterogeneous imperial culture in their efforts to translate Ukrainian “otherness” for the metropolitan audience, in their hybrid language practices, and in various strategies of ethnic disguise and camouflage. The broader theoretical questions are considered as well: whether hybridity, considered in the Russian-Ukrainian context, can provide an alternative to the essentialist categories of “pure” and “authentic” national identities, and how writing simultaneously to the imperial and national audiences can help us rethink the ethnic communitarian and civil liberal traditions not as opposed but as inseparable phenomena in nation-building.

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