” Mykola Hohol and the Battleground of Ukrainian Culture”
by Stephen Komarnyckyj
Paper Presented at the International conference on Hohol in Kyiv from the 23rd to the 28th September
In the 1841 portrait by F Muller Hohol looks at us with a gaze that is both contemplative and amused against a sky where the last sunlight is fading into a leaden dusk. The portrait captures an ambivalence in the man who lived, it seems, in an amorphous twilight where outlines blur and where his work drifts over the borders between Russia and Ukraine. He even has a Russian name, Nikolai Gogol, and a Ukrainian name, Mykola Hohol, but both these identities shared the same aquiline nose and soft sensuous mouth. Mykola Hohol, the author of Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka, which reeks of the fecund soil of Ukraine is the same man as Gogol, the chronicler of provincial Russian towns the grotesque revelation of a nose concealed in a piece of bread. Read the rest of this entry »
