Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. English Dept.

Advisor(s)

Melissa Miller

Second Advisor

Megan Cook

Third Advisor

Zach Rewinski

Abstract

Nikolai Gogol's extant works depict a man torn between his birthplace of Ukraine and the nineteenth-century milieu of Imperial Russia. Notably, he did not reveal his name for some time after publishing his first story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka; as a result, readers attributed the tales of Ukrainian life within not to Gogol, but to the charming "Ukrainian jester" persona of Rudy Panko. Even after revealing his identity and garnering respect in the St. Petersburg literary scene, his contemporaries often viewed him as sly and suspicious because of his ancestry. Perhaps due to external doubts regarding his loyalty to Russia, Gogol's later works tend to prioritize describing Russian life. 

This literary trajectory raises a question: where did Gogol feel most at home? In this thesis, I focus primarily on the shift in Gogol's national representation throughout his literary career: while Gogol's early stories featured in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Mirgorod paint a vibrant picture of Ukrainian life, his later works, such as Dead Souls, show Russia in the midst of a cultural conflict with the West. Attention is also given to Gogol's use of asides and satire to at once glorify and critique Russia. Furthermore, I draw from Gogol's correspondence to identify whether this representational shift reflects any personal fondness for Russia.

Keywords

Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol, native force, internationalizing force, linguistics, nationalism

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