“Little Russia (Malorossia) for Russia, in a literary sense, is the same as Scotland is for England; it is awaiting its Walter Scott, awaiting him with love and will be able to give him his due appreciation.”Footnote 1 This hope, expressed in the St. Petersburg journal The Finnish Herald in 1846, was somewhat misplaced, as the “Ukrainian Walter Scott” had already entered the literary scene: three years earlier, Panteleimon Kulish (1819–97), perceived by contemporaries as the Ukrainian incarnation of the Scottish novelist, published his first historical novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (Mikhailo Charnyshenko Ili Malorossiia vosem΄desiat let nazad). While little known nowadays, this work, written in Russian (with considerable Ukrainian and Serbian linguistic components) and reviewed in most major Russian “thick” journals in the course of the year, was clearly a cultural event of some importance.Footnote 2 Overshadowed by Kulish's later and more mature The Black Council (Chorna Rada, 1845–57), Mikhailo Charnyshenko typically receives only a passing mention in Kulish scholarship.Footnote 3 As I will demonstrate in this article, however, Mikhailo Charnyshenko offers rich material for exploring the author's attempts to negotiate between national mythology and modernity and to come to terms with Ukraine's loss of its political and cultural autonomy in the Russian empire. My analysis will focus specifically on the Gothic mode that pervades the novel. Rather than dismissing this aspect of the work as a tribute to the fashionable western trend, I argue that the Gothic mode serves as a conduit to some of the work's most pressing ideological and historical concerns and dramatizes the split between nation and empire, past and present that haunted Kulish throughout most of his life.
Kulish was not only the author of the first Ukrainian historical novels, but also a prominent folklorist, ethnographer, historian, translator, the first biographer of Nikolai Gogol΄, and a leading if controversial figure in the Ukrainian national revival. He idealized the Ukrainian Cossack past at the early stage of his career but denounced Cossackdom as a brutal and destructive force in his later historical studies (albeit not consistently). While promoting vigorously a distinct Ukrainian language and culture, he reconciled himself with the Russian imperial project, whose victim he himself would become. Like his contemporary Taras Shevchenko, Kulish was arrested and exiled for his ties to the Brotherhood of St. Cyril and Methodius (1845–47)—a Kyiv-based secret society that sought political reforms based on Christian moral principles, as well as a Ukrainian cultural revival and national autonomy within a Pan-Slavic framework.Footnote 4 Specifically accused at the Brotherhood trial of promoting an “opinion about [the Little Russians'] right to a separate existence from the Empire,” Kulish would later advocate the idea of the joining of “Northern Rus΄” with “Southern” Rus΄.Footnote 5 In spite of the Russian government's persecutions, he remained loyal to the regime and even accepted a high government position in conquered Poland after the 1863 uprising, expressing little sympathy for the Polish nationalist movement while continuing to admire Polish culture. A firm believer in the benefits of cultural enlightenment, he also espoused the ideology of “khutorianstvo,” a Rousseauian idealization of the Ukrainian khutir, or homestead, as a spiritual and moral center—and it is on his khutir Motronivka where he spent the last years of his life and died. After decades of neglect during the Soviet period on the basis of his “bourgeois nationalist” views, the “Ukrainian maverick” Kulish, to use Andrii Danylenko's apt formulation, now occupies a firm place in the Ukrainian literary canon.Footnote 6
The same year the call for a Ukrainian Walter Scott appeared on the pages of The Finnish Herald, Kulish, who at the time lived and worked in St. Petersburg, wrote in a letter to Moscow-based historian, journalist, and novelist Mikhail Pogodin: “My life is not too bad. However, I do miss Little Russia. I want to go there in the summer but everybody finds it extremely silly. I agree, but what, in this intelligent city, will replace for me my native language and the views of my home country? Walter Scott was not insincere (ne mutil) when he told Washington Irving, ‘I'd die if I couldn't see Scotland for a long time.’”Footnote 7
Kulish's self-fashioning as a Ukrainian Walter Scott writing nostalgically about his homeland from the imperial capital is clearly more than a literary gesture; likewise the parallel between Ukraine and Scotland drawn in The Finnish Herald is not limited to the literary sphere, in spite of the critic's qualification (“in a literary sense”). The grounds for this comparison (apparently widespread at the time) derive from Ukraine's and Scotland's political situations: in both cases, we have a region absorbed by the neighboring state into a larger entity, ultimately an empire, and yet preserving its distinct national culture.Footnote 8 In the age of an intense preoccupation with national uniqueness, moreover, both Scotland and “Little Russia” highlighted the fact that the dominant imperial powers lacked a well-defined national character (narodnost΄), although they avidly sought it.Footnote 9
The complex question of whether Ukraine could be considered a colony of the Russian empire has been debated by many historians and literary scholars in recent decades.Footnote 10 I am siding here with the view articulated by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: while not a “classical” colony (distant, racially different, and militarily subjugated) and despite the involvement of the Ukrainian elites in the Russian and Soviet imperial projects, Ukraine, at least in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was a colony (of both Poland and Russia)—a territory whose “resources … were exploited, people economically subjugated and socially oppressed, the elites successfully assimilated, the national-minded discourse shuffled or neutralized, and the culture and language considered uncivilized and scornful.”Footnote 11
The status of Ukraine as both a colony and a province of the nineteenth-century Russian empire is the critical context in which I examine Kulish's first historical novel. Throughout his tumultuous life and career, Kulish tried to negotiate a place for Ukrainian culture and national identity in relation to its various political, spiritual and cultural models and influences, focusing on Russia and Poland but also turning to Islam. Yet his position as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire was of primary importance. In his biography of Kulish, Luckyj states: “It is this Russian-Ukrainian coexistence which proved to be the central dilemma of his life.”Footnote 12 An important aspect of this dilemma was the conflict between Kulish's Romantic fascination with the Ukrainian heroic past and its rich folk tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, his deeply-held Enlightenment values and belief in high culture, which he associated with Russian (and at times Polish) influences.Footnote 13 At the level of ideology, this conundrum translated into a split between his ideals of Romantic nationalism and his alignment with the dominant imperial culture. While Kulish's disavowal of his Romantic nationalist views is typically associated with the later period in his career, I will argue that his ambivalence about Ukraine's heroic past and its current status in the Russian empire can already be observed in his first novel. As I will show below, moreover, it is particularly the Gothic stratum of the work that yields a more nuanced insight into the author's complex position.
While the heyday of the “classical” Gothic novel—as exemplified by works of Horace Warpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Maturin, and many others—is usually dated between the 1760s and the 1820s, the Gothic tradition, with its emphasis on the irrational, demonic, mysterious, and fantastic and its privileging of medieval castles, exotic locales, and haunted landscapes continued to exercise its influence throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 14 Recent scholarship on the Gothic in both western Europe and the Russian empire (including Ukraine) have traced the remarkable persistence of the Gothic mode—a deployment of recognizably Gothic tropes and narrative techniques in connection to the dominant Gothic themes of irrationality, transgression, and past history haunting the present—even in the genres, which, like the historical novel, are typically viewed as alien to the Gothic.Footnote 15 These studies, more importantly, have demonstrated a continuing relevance of the Gothic mode in its ability to address some deep cultural anxieties and historical traumas, from the crisis of the Enlightenment and the disintegration of post-reform Russian society to the violence of Ukrainian uprisings and the threat to the Ukrainian language posed by Russian imperial policies.Footnote 16 While Ukrainian and Russian writers' engagement with the Gothic legacy has manifold implications, I am particularly interested in the imperial context of such an engagement. In the analysis that follows, I hope to demonstrate that the interaction of various Gothic registers in Mikhailo Charnyshenko—the fantastic, the Walter-Scottian “historical” Gothic, and the Gothicized ethnic Others—create a complex and highly ambivalent picture of the Ukrainian subdued colonial present haunted by the ghosts of its glorious autonomous past.
’Tis Eighty Years Since
Kulish's familiarity with and admiration for Scott is well documented, and the Scottish writer's noticeable influence on Kulish's historical novels has been a subject of several studies.Footnote 17 While scholars diverge on the question to what extent Mikhailo Charnyshenko follows the Walter Scottian model of the historical novel, Kulish's engagement with Scott in this work is rather explicit, for its very title, Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago, invokes Scott's Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since—with its emphasis on the change between “then” and “now.” More specifically, the title of Kulish's novel takes us back to 1762, the short reign of Russia's ill-fated emperor Peter III and his aborted campaign against Denmark, whose goal was to restore the Schleswig region to his German Holstein-Gottorp Duchy. The war plan never materialized because of the coup that ended Peter's reign and life and brought Catherine II to the throne. As described in Kulish's primary source for the novel, Istoriia Rusov ili Maloi Rossii (The History of the Rus΄ or Little Russia), Peter formed a Ukrainian Cossack regiment for his army where young people were lured by the recently-converted calculating Jew, colonel Kryzhanovskii.Footnote 18 The novel's title protagonist, Mikhailo Charnyshenko, joins the Cossack recruits, in spite of the objections of his father. The hero's disobedience of his father's ban on serving in the Russian army causes the latter's wrath, and eventually, when Mikhailo unintentionally burns down most of his father's house, the old Charnysh publicly denounces and curses his son. It is the father's curse that is responsible for the subsequent series of misfortunes occurring to the protagonist—his capture by blood-thirsty exotic Serbs, the tragic death of his beloved Katerina killed by Mikhailo's passionate new Serbian lover, and his own death, followed by his father's demise ten years later.
What exactly is at stake for Kulish in adopting the Walter Scottian temporality, the “eighty years ago”? Bahrij, who emphasizes the Gothic aspect of Mikhailo Charnyshenko over its Walter-Scottian elements, claims that the historical setting in Kulish's novel is not significant per se—rather, the military campaign serves here as essentially a pretext for the hero's leaving the parental home and embarking on his adventures. I would argue, however, that the historical context of the novel is far from being a purely formal device unrelated to the novel's problematics. In fact, the choice of this rather obscure historical episode is strategic on Kulish's part for at least two reasons. First of all, the very irrelevance of this military campaign to the Ukrainian subjects of the empire enables Kulish to question his young protagonist's uncritical and ahistorical acceptance of the heroic ethos of the past. Secondly, it allows the writer to set his novel just on the eve of the beginning of Catherine II's rule, during which any remnants of Ukraine's autonomy within the Russian empire would come to an end with the abolition of the Hetmanate in 1764 and the razing of the Zaporizhzhian Sich in 1775.
In the concluding chapter of Waverley, Scott explains that it is Scotland's loss of its unique culture and autonomy in the aftermath of the suppression of the Jacobite uprising described in Waverley that set him to “the task of tracing the evanescent manners of his own country.”Footnote 19 As made clear in the opening of Mikhailo Charnyshenko, Kulish pursues a very similar goal of reconstructing a national life that has vanished, if not without a trace. It is above all the ideological subtext of Waverley and its relevance to the Ukrainian situation—the historical-political parallel between Scotland's absorption by England and Ukraine's dissolution in the Russian empire—that attracts Kulish to the Scottian model, in addition to its Romantic and ethnographic appeal.
What is Kulish's “Little Russia of eighty years ago” like? The novel's opening nostalgically evokes this relatively recent past when Ukraine still lived “its own distinct life” and when “its memories, interests, customs, dress, way of life and poetry were purely national (narodnye).”Footnote 20 It is presented as “an entirely different world,” with its authentic clothing, contrasted with the contemporary westernized dress, the pure Ukrainian language (as opposed to the current “barbarian” mixture of Russian and Ukrainian), poetic folk songs, and its “magic” (divnaia) heroic history. This world, however, is irrevocably lost:
You cannot help but ponder over the destiny of this extraordinary people (narod), which has appeared in a miraculous way like a lush flower among hostile elements, flashed with a remarkable blaze of glory, announced itself to the entire world; but it did not have enough energy for simmering life, and it bowed its head prematurely; it disappeared like a supernatural apparition, almost before our very eyes.Footnote 21
In other words, the “eighty years ago” refers to the last period of Ukraine's relative political autonomy and, most importantly, its cultural and national specificity before its (often fraught) assimilation of Russian imperial culture. Essentially it is the moment before the death—or, as Kulish puts it in more Gothic terms, the ghostly disappearance—of the nation. However, as the quote above suggests, this ghost-like disappearance is closely linked to the no less elusive and phantasmagorical appearance of the narod. The nation's very existence is thus so brief and fleeting that it acquires a quasi-supernatural quality. Kulish, however, attempts to capture this ghost, to reconstruct this forever lost world through studying its folklore and ethnographic evidence. His novel is thus presented as “the last page from the history of such a magic (divnyi) phenomenon,” as he invites his readers to “hear the echo of its ancient, mighty, and miraculous life … in these, already poor, remnants of its magnificent past.”Footnote 22
Kulish's antiquarian project of restoring the historical past is a recognizable anti-imperial nationalist strategy identified by scholars of the British Empire.Footnote 23 The fictional storyline of Mikhailo Charnyshenko is accompanied by an impressive scholarly apparatus, with extensive ethnographic and historical notes and citations of documentary sources. At the same time, as we have seen, Kulish persistently refers to the Ukrainian autonomous past as a ghostly, phantasmagorical bygone era—a feature not found in Waverley, where ghosts are restricted to the Highlanders' superstitious imagination.
These two seemingly conflicting temporalities, “antiquarian/historic” and “fantastic,” are expressed in the novel by two Gothic modes—what I term “the Walter-Scottian Gothic” and the “supernatural Gothic.”Footnote 24 While the former finds its expression in Kulish's fascination with ruins, towers, Gothic architecture, medieval allusions, and his propensity to draw parallels between the Ukrainian Cossacks and west European knights, the latter is associated in the novel with the imagery of ghosts and apparitions, folkloric motifs, and infernal forces.Footnote 25 The interplay of various Gothic traditions in the novel contributes to Kulish's complex portrayal of Ukraine, which seems gone but not quite. Rather, like a ghost, it is at the same time alive and dead, present and absent, historically specific and a-temporally symbolic, belonging to the past and yet haunting the present.
Fathers, Sons, and Gothic Ruins
Differing attitudes to the past are, in fact, at the heart of the principal conflict of the novel between Mikhailo and his antiquarian father, the Cossack lieutenant (sotnik) Charnysh. Their past, of course, is even more removed from Kulish's time—it is the era of Ukrainian Cossack uprisings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the tension between the “antiquarian” and the “fantastic” perception of the past, which marks the narrator's temporality, is observed at the characters' level as well. The elder Charnysh, retired from service after a series of injustices committed by the “Russian courtiers who were ruling Little Russia,” dedicates himself to collecting Ukrainian songs, legends, chronicles, and other “remnants of antiquity.” This semi-scientific project nonetheless bears a stamp of the supernatural:
Lieutenant Charnysh dedicated himself to his study with some kind of a warm faith. The more he penetrated into the spirit of the traditions, songs, chronicles, and other various remnants of the old times, the greater the charm with which past ages and events appeared to him. Having focused all his talents on one point, he created for himself a separate fantastic world, in which his soul found light and in which he found a substitute for the society he had forsaken forever. The brave knights of Ukraine … were alive in his imagination.Footnote 26
For all his fascination with Ukraine's glorious past, old Charnysh is aware that “Little Russia has already lived its term” (otzhila uzhe svoi vek), and he is skeptical about transferring this heroic ethos into the contemporary historical setting.Footnote 27 This is why he disapproves of military service in the corrupt imperial army and strongly supports his son's civil career at the Little Russian Collegium. Old Charnysh thus acknowledges the irreversibility of time and “the otherness of his object of nostalgia from present life and [keeps] it at a safe distance”—a pre-condition for Romantic nostalgia, according to Svetlana Boym.Footnote 28 Mikhailo, by contrast, fails to acknowledge the otherness of the past, violates this distance, and attempts to reenact the heroic past of Ukraine in its imperial present.
The novel is often read as a religious-moral tale with a Gothic twist—a disobedient son castigated by his father's curse; yet the punishment the hero receives for his career choice seems rather severe, even by the standards of the Gothic genre. Critics have interpreted Mikhailo's “guilt” precisely in terms of a conflict of temporalities. Petrov points out that Kulish deliberately sets his novel after the era of heroic military battles in order to portray Mikhailo's romanticization of war and Cossacks as already outdated and even harmful. The critic justly sees here the kernel of Kulish's future disillusionment with kozachchyna.Footnote 29 Nakhlik suggests that “from the point of view of Kulish the kul΄turnyk (enlightened populist), Mikhailo's guilt and misfortune come from the fact that he did not understand the difference between the epochs: instead of the activity appropriate for modernity (governmental or “antiquarian”), he became fascinated by the old, military type of behavior.”Footnote 30
Moreover, as Petrov reminds us, the didactic folkloric theme of disobedience to one's parents and abandonment of the parental home had particular relevance in Kulish's time: the rise of the Ukrainian national (narodnyts΄kyi) rebirth movement in the 1840s was accompanied by the rhetoric of going back “home,” to the ancestors' culture, to one's fathers and roots. Petrov offers a rather extreme reading of this theme in the novel, interpreting Mikhailo's disobedience of his father as a manifestation of his rootlessness, a vain pursuit of glory and rank, or even as a betrayal of Ukraine's national interests characteristic of the Ukrainian nobility of the late eighteenth century.Footnote 31
What we should remember, however, is that it is not Mikhailo's disobedience alone but his (albeit unintentional) burning of his father's house that causes the fateful curse. The house, where Mikhailo arrives in order to inform his father of his decision to enlist in the army and to collect his armor, becomes a locus of the novel's conflicting temporalities and nostalgic impulses. As we learn from a long narrative digression, this house was intended by Mikhailo's ancestors to be an exact replica of the house of Bohdan Khmel΄nyts΄kyi in Subotov, the hetman's residence and hypothetical birth place.Footnote 32 The project was successfully accomplished by Mikhailo's father, who happened to come across the draft of Khmel΄nyts΄kyi's house. This more direct relation to history and origins is contrasted to the narrator's temporality, that of the Ukraine “eighty years since.” Characteristically, while contemplating the house, the narrator separates his perspective from that of the protagonist, noting that this building, full of historical meaning for him (a Ukrainian intellectual of the 1840s), does not hold nearly the same significance for the young hero from the 1760s who lacks the distance from and the reverence for this “antiquity” (starina). Moreover, he also detaches the temporal plane of his narrative from Mikhailo's: while the narrator apologetically keeps his readers waiting by the gate, the hero, we learn, has already made his way through the house. “But,” the narrator says, indulging in what Boym terms “reflective nostalgia,” “we can't follow him so quickly: everything stops us in this house, a sample of the taste and a monument of the daily life (byt) of our ancestors. We want to prolong the sweet feeling aroused in us by these antiquities: more than history, more than chronicles and songs, they tell us about those miraculous ages which once were and can never be again.”Footnote 33
The gate, leading to the house, is described through abundant Gothic references, invoking a (supposed) medieval past of knightly battles. Even more importantly, the gate is presented as a remnant of a ruin, even before the house is destroyed by fire: “It seemed to be a fragment (oblomok) of a Gothic tower that had remained from some Gothic castle; the moss and wild grass covering it completed the resemblance.”Footnote 34
While critics have interpreted Kulish's recurrent allusions to Gothic architecture as an influence of translated western novels, I contend that this description points to the symbolic function of the house as a ruin in its nineteenth-century sense, as discussed by Peter Fritzsche. Fritzsche observes a critical shift in the function of the ruins in the early nineteenth century, compared to the eighteenth century when the ruins invoked the generic European cultural legacy, a universal set of meanings, and continuity between the past and the present. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, they began to signal a temporal rupture between the imperial present and a unique but never-fully-accessible national past.Footnote 35 While Fritzsche derives these conclusions from the case of Germany in the wake of the French revolution and during the Napoleonic wars, the situation seems to be very similar and even more extreme in Kulish's Ukraine under Russian dominance. The rift between the past and present is particularly dramatic here, for Ukraine is portrayed in the novel, as we saw earlier, essentially as a ghost, a nation with a rich if fleeting past but no present. The burning of the house thus symbolically dramatizes the coming rupture and turns the building literally into a modern ruin, or even “the ruin of a ruin,” “the hallmark of modernity,” to use Fritzsche's formulation.Footnote 36
The notion of the ruin, I would argue, connects the two ostensibly separate temporalities and Gothic modes in the work. An antiquarian fragment of the historical past, a piece of material evidence about a bygone time, the Gothic ruin acquires ghostly, fantastic connotations because of the seemingly insurmountable gap between Ukraine's colorful autonomous past and its subdued provincial present. And yet, paradoxically, because of the presence of the ruins (both literal and symbolic), this past never fully recedes—just as ghosts reappear to haunt the sites of national traumas. In fact, Fritzsche explicitly compares ruins to ghosts as “the residue of historical disaster” that “possessed a sort of half-life,” as well as “a testimonial power” to speak through history.Footnote 37
Kulish appeals precisely to this testimonial power of ruins when describing an epic battle between militant Serbs and local Ukrainian lords and anticipating his reader's doubts about the possibility of these heroic—but also bloody and violent—events taking place in the relatively recent past:
Perhaps some of my readers … will not believe that under Russian rule such violence could be happening with impunity only eighty years ago, and they will ascribe all of this to the play of my imagination. But … is it possible that all these redoubts, ruins (razvaliny), names, and legends have popped up by themselves like mushrooms after the rain? Is it possible that the folk imagination, out of nothing better to do, invented beliefs that are alien to the contemporary daily life (byt) of Ukrainian peasants?”Footnote 38
As typical of Romantic antiquarian practices, physical ruins' value as a historical source here is comparable to that of folklore and ethnography (local toponyms and legends but also Serbian epic songs that Kulish explicitly draws upon in his portrayal of the battle). Thus, the boundary is elided between physical and verbal evidence, the ethnographic and the imaginary, historical and mythological, “Walter-Scottian” and “fantastic.” The interrogatory form of the narrator's argument, moreover, is not merely rhetorical. It betrays, in spite of his defensive position, the elusive and essentially imagined nature of the Ukrainian past of eighty years before.
The grounds for potential doubts regarding the possibility of such feudal battles and the general chaos in the region is, as the narrator states, the presence of “Russian rule” (the supposed guarantee of order) and the discrepancy between the mores of the time and the “current” way of life in Little Russia. What happens in between, as he reminds his audience, is precisely the unification of the administrative structure of the Russian empire under Catherine II, the destruction of the Sich and the “correct organization of [the Russian government's] provinces.”Footnote 39 As I have already suggested, it is the ultimate colonial moment—the full absorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire—that constitutes the rupture between Kulish's present and the “eighty years ago” and makes the Ukrainian past open to an imaginative reconstruction.
The narrator's evaluation of this rupture is highly ambivalent. First, he lauds the “domestication” of wild Ukraine by civilized Russia, which, “having drawn [the Ukrainian heart] closer thanks to the brotherly kinship, began to tame [it] bit by bit by its European measures.”Footnote 40 And yet this positive commentary ends with an already familiar nostalgic—and quasi-Gothic—invocation of the last traces of Ukrainian administrative and legal autonomy, “the shadow of its earlier independence which was about to irrevocably vanish forever.”Footnote 41
Kulish's use of Gothic ruins and the intricate play of temporalities in the novel is an important aspect of his ambivalent portrayal of Ukraine's past and present, but it is by far not the only one. In the two following sections of the article I will show how the insertion of Gothic Others in the novel—the demonic Jew Kryzhanovskii and the uncanny Serbs—problematizes both Kulish's apparent support for the Russian imperial project and his Romanticization of the Ukrainian independent heroic past.
The Jew
The imperial “Golshtein” campaign, as well as Mikhailo's participation in it, is called into question from the start by the very fact that it is the novel's ultimate Gothic villain, as well as its cultural Other—the converted Jew Kryzhanovskii—who forms the Cossack regiment in Little Russia. Local Cossacks describe the conscription process as an uncanny force that leads to severing family ties; the somewhat comical distortion of the terms “Golshtintsy” and “St. Peterburg” in their speech only emphasizes their cultural and geographical (as well as linguistic) distance from this imperial enterprise: “Everywhere one hears nothing but crying and screaming, for all the young men and boys are leaving their fathers and mothers and are going to some cursed ‘Gostintsy.’ It's even scary, I swear by God! … As if some evil (nechistaia) force is carrying them to that Petinburch.”Footnote 42 This description is clearly influenced by The History of the Rus΄, where we find a similarly worded narrative: “The local youth, as if by a magic force, rose up and took off in a bird flight from the South to the North.”Footnote 43 Notably, Kulish paraphrases what is described as a magic spell in the “chronicle” with more definitely demonic terms—and these infernal characteristics persist throughout the novel in the descriptions of Kryzhanovskii.Footnote 44
Katerina, Mikhailo's beloved, whom Kryzhanovskii also pursues, describes the inexplicable terror that envelopes her upon seeing him. She is positive that his supernatural demonic powers guarantee his full control of Mikhailo's will and the latter's resulting filial disobedience. Katerina quickly convinces her father (who is at first doubtful that Kryzhanovskii can be “some kind of a sorcerer or a vampire”) of the man's diabolical nature; in fact, in the course of this short conversation, Kryzhanovskii is upgraded from “an ominous bird” and “a sinner” to nothing less than “Antichrist” and “the enemy of the Christian race.”Footnote 45
This conversation clearly frames Kryzhanovskii as a traditional Gothic demonic figure, with a typical overlapping of Jewish/Judaist and vampiric motifs.Footnote 46 Critics have commented on the rather cliché character of Kulish's villain—a “ubiquitous,” deus ex machina sorcerer figure.Footnote 47 I would argue, however, that this “ubiquitous persona” in Mikhailo Charnyshenko has a very specific cultural genealogy that goes back to the legendary Wandering Jew who made his most memorable Gothic appearance on the pages of Matthew Lewis's The Monk in the 1790s. The main source of the legend is the apocryphal story, which arose in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean, of a Jerusalem resident who denied Christ a brief repose on the way to Golgotha, chasing him away from the steps of his house. The man was punished, as a result, by incessant wandering until Christ's Second Coming.Footnote 48 Later in the novel, we learn about Kryzhanovskii's wandering around eastern Europe and his elusive identity: while introduced in the novel as the converted Jew Kryzhanovskii in the service of the Russian empire in the Hetmanate, he is also the evil Jew Lutitsa who betrayed the novel's Serbian character, prince Radivoi, in his battle for the independence of Serbia from the Ottoman Empire; in addition, under the name of Kharlo, he had managed to ruin brave Cossack Shcherbina by betraying his friendship and destroying his family and his home. His characterization as an Antichrist and his indefinite exotic ethnicity (alternatively suggested as Jewish, Montenegrin, or Turkish) also belong to the classical arsenal of the Wandering Jew figure.
Establishing the provenance of Kulish's hero in the Wandering Jew tradition helps us elucidate his function in the novel, which proves far more complex than that of the structural deus ex machina or the stereotypical Gothic villain. As has been suggested in the studies of the Wandering Jew character in British Gothic fiction, this transgressive figure is intimately linked to the deep-set anxieties of the post-Enlightenment era in Europe, ranging from “the nature and parameters of the European national identity” to the doubts and aspirations concerning the process of modernization, rationalism, secularism, and advance of capitalism.Footnote 49 One of the greatest nightmares of late nineteenth-century Britain that the recurrent figure of the Wandering Jew embodied, according to Carol Davison, was that of conversion, or “Judaizing England”—not literally but by threatening what were traditionally held as “English” values.Footnote 50 Importantly, both Kulish's novel and the “chronicle” emphasize the fact that Kryzhanovskii is a recent convert (svezhii perekrest) who is essentially concealing his demonic nature, evil intentions, and Otherness under the mask of a fellow Christian. Unlike the British Empire, however, with its anxiety over a metaphorical conversion, in Ukraine religious conversion could be perceived as a rather real threat, following the Union of Brest in 1596 that submitted the Orthodox population in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Both the History of the Rus΄ and Mikhailo Charnyshenko refer to the Union in the most negative terms, associating it with oppressive Polish rule and Jewish exploitation and stressing its destructive role in the history of Ukraine. In History of the Rus΄, moreover, the Union is described as something that crept in “in a fox skin but with a wolf's throat”; the emphasis on its treacherous nature and deceptive appearance implicitly links it to the “freshly converted” Kryzhanovskii.Footnote 51 In Kulish's novel, this connection is made explicit. Upon hearing about Katerina's misfortunes caused by Kryzhanovskii, old Charnysh exclaims:
“What?! … Are the Jews and Poles (zhidy i liakhi) indeed back in Ukraine? So, did you, father Khmel΄nyts΄kyi, fight in vain for ten years? Has the cursed Union indeed come back after the Nalivaikos, Pavliuks and Ostrianitsas? I won't put up with Jews taxing Orthodox Christians for the use of their churches! I won't put up with the godless Polish priests traveling around the villages on the backs of the Orthodox priests! I won't put up with the bloodthirsty Polish beasts frying us in copper bulls and boiling Cossack children in cauldrons!”Footnote 52
The appearance of Kryzhanovskii is perceived as a return of the Union and all the evils associated with it. Poles and Jews appear interchangeable in their detrimental impact upon Ukrainian Orthodox identity; in fact, Polish Catholics here acquire vampiric characteristics that are typically the prerogative of the Jews. The Polish origin of Kryzhanovskii's name (from krzyż—a cross) contributes to the conflation of the two ethnic and religious groups clearly presented in the novel as the enemies of the Orthodox faith and Little Russia more generally.
The fear of conversion is tied to the problem of identity that leads us to another symbolic aspect of the Kryzhanovskii character. The Wandering Jew of Kulish's novel appears not across various epochs but across space in multiple military conflicts. Given the supernatural connotations of his characterization, he indeed transcends time. Homeless and rootless himself, he is the cause of other characters' displacements—he lures Mikhailo away from the parental house; he causes Katerina to flee from her relatives' home; he provokes the Serbian prince Radivoi's departure from his native land; and, finally, he is responsible for the Cossack Shcherbina's losing his home and family. The fundamental anxiety embodied by Kryzhanovskii, a protean character who changes names, religions, ethnicities, and loyalties, is also the one that dominates Mikhailo's plot—the fear of homelessness and a loss of identity. In a sense, Kryzhanovskii/Lutitsa/Kharlo can be seen as a dark and distorted doppelganger of rootless Mikhailo himself.
Moreover, Mikhailo and Kryzhanovskii are romantic rivals in the novel, competing for Katerina who is portrayed, as Petrov justly observes, as the embodiment of the Ukrainian Volksgeist. Unspoiled by western education, she expresses her soul in folk songs and is associated with folkloric supernatural characters. A typical Gothic heroine—an innocent displaced maiden threatened by the novel's ultimate villain—Katerina at the same time is allegorized as the contested nation. Interestingly, both Mikhailo chasing the ghost of heroic Ukraine and Kryzhanovskii, the rootless Jew, pose danger to Katerina (Ukraine) who is threatened by the latter but eventually dies from the hand of Mikhailo's Serbian lover Roksanda.
Kryzhanovskii's attempts to seduce Katerina with his lavish gifts, which appear “as if by magic,” and his reputed supernatural power over women parallel his quasi-infernal luring of the Ukrainian youth into the imperial service.Footnote 53 In other words, he poses the threat of devilish temptation to the entire Ukrainian nation. The History of the Rus΄ briefly mentions that this historical moment highlighted each nation's most characteristic traits: “When extraordinary circumstances arise, typically the national characters or their dispositions reveal themselves, so, for example, with the Little Russians' enthusiasm for military service, the Jewish (Iudeiskaia) inclination for business deals has manifested itself.”Footnote 54 In his recruiting effort, then, Kryzhanovskii capitalizes (literally) on the very essence of the Ukrainian nation, its proclivity for military heroism.
As the personification of that uncanny force that makes young men leave their home, the recruiter Kryzhanovskii, moreover, embodies the imperial power itself. Significantly, the author of the History of the Rus΄ emphasizes the direction of the recruits' movement “from the South to the North,” from Ukraine to St. Petersburg. Ironically, this centripetal force is embodied by the novel's quintessentially homeless and nomadic character.Footnote 55 The empire's Other, paradoxically, also becomes the manifestation of its very essence. The threat posed by the converted Wandering Jew in Kulish's novel thus is to turn young Ukrainians into eternal travelers, like himself—into uprooted and nomadic subjects of the Russian empire.Footnote 56
The Serbs
Kryzhanovskii looms large in Mikhailo's Gothic (and partly prophetic) nightmare where Kryzhanovskii, unresponsive to the young man's plea for protection, pushes him into the abyss with demonic laughter.Footnote 57 Notably, Kryzhanovskii appears in the dream surrounded by the mysterious “red zhupans”—men in red jackets worn in Poland and Ukraine at the time—who stayed briefly at the same house as the Ukrainian Cossacks and aroused Mikhailo's anxiety. These “red zhupans” turn out to be Serbian fighters for independence who had to flee their native land for fear of persecution and secretly settle in Little Russia.Footnote 58 They subsequently attempt to capture Mikhailo and his fellow travelers, thus launching the “Serbian” subplot of the novel, which dominates the narrative until the end. Mikhailo's nightmare, thus, associates the Serbs with the Jew and presents the novel's ethnic Others as a threatening and demonic force. As in Kryzhanovskii's case, however, the boundaries between the national self and the demonic and exotic Others prove highly unstable.
After the mysterious visitors precipitously depart, the master of the house, pan Bardak, comments on their elusive identity: “See, here you go: they came, ate and drank plenty, and left; but if you ask me who these guests were, I myself won't be able to tell you. Their dress is not like ours, they pronounce words in a strange way, and all their manners are completely not like ours. Only one thing I know is that they do cross themselves in a Christian way.”Footnote 59 The Serbs thus are introduced in uncanny terms—not only because of their mysterious and alarming behavior but also because of their quality of being both exotic and Other and yet somewhat recognizable and culturally relatable.Footnote 60 Shcherbina is also alarmed by his inability to place the strangers: their itinerant lifestyle seems to suggest an affinity with the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, “however, by their attire and manners, I can see they're not from Zaporozh΄e.”Footnote 61
The Serbs' dwelling (which Senkovskii would call sarcastically “the Radcliffian cave of Ukraine”) is presented in markedly Gothic terms: the captive Cossacks are led through a gloomy, hilly landscape to a tower built out of the ruins of a former monastery that kept locals away thanks to some superstitious legends associated with it.Footnote 62 There they meet their leader who, again, reveals the exotic/familiar dynamics: “His attire was also distinguished by particular luxury; however, it was not at all like the dress worn by Little Russian gentlemen. One could rather take him for a Turk, if the large golden cross hanging on his chest did not contradict this.”Footnote 63
This uncanny quality of the Serbs' presence in the novel is reinforced linguistically—above all, through the abundant use of the Serbian language throughout, which is, as a related Slavic language, both somewhat understandable to the Russian and Ukrainian reader and yet not fully comprehensible.Footnote 64 The title of the Serbian leader, moreover, linguistically epitomizes the peculiar Otherness this group of characters represents. The subordinates address him as ban, which, as Kulish explains in a footnote, means kniaz΄ (prince) in Serbian.Footnote 65 The Serbs themselves explain the title to the perplexed Shcherbina: “Our ban is just the same pan (lord), that you have so many of in Ukraine.”Footnote 66 Ban is indeed almost like a pan—just as the Serbs are both understandable and familiar and yet threateningly incomprehensible Others.
To stress the Serbs' difference, Kulish heavily Orientalizes them. Examples of such Oientalization abound, from Radivoi's Turkish and “semi-asiatic” attire to his “oriental” hospitality and his status as a tyrant who inspires fear and awe. “The king of beasts among his motley subjects,” Radivoi is repeatedly described as fierce like a lion, bloodthirsty, and crude.Footnote 67 His daughter Roksanda (who falls in love with Mikhailo) wears “an Asiatic dress” and is surrounded by divans, which, together with the Oriental aromas, remind Shcherbina “of Crimea and Turkey.”Footnote 68 She is described as a typical wild, natural and passionate Oriental beauty and is clearly juxtaposed to the meek and somewhat bland “native” heroine Katerina, whom she eventually kills in an “attack of horrible jealousy and Asiatic vengeance.”Footnote 69 Both heroines are closely associated with their native lands—notably, when falling in love with Roksanda, Mikhailo is ready to fight for “sweet Serbia”; while seeing Katerina at the end of the novel makes him realize not just his betrayal of his beloved but also his abandonment of his native Ukraine.Footnote 70
If Mikhailo's temporary loyalty to Serbia is largely determined by his romantic infatuation with Roksanda, the Cossack Shcherbina's affinity with the Serbs, stressed throughout this part of the novel, is more complex. With Radivoi and his people, he shares a condition of displacement, a common enemy (the Jew and ultimately an empire), Oriental characteristics, and above all the valorization of military courage. While Shcherbina observes the differences between the Serbian community and the Sich, including the latter's more democratic organization, he wonders whether he has not encountered “another Sech΄.”Footnote 71 Later he is described as a kind of “little koshovoi” (the leader of a Zaporizhzhian Cossack military unit) in this “new Sech΄.”Footnote 72
The most dramatic moment of Shcherbina's identification with the Serbs comes when he is deeply moved by Roksanda's singing a folk song, whose melody he describes as “somewhat familiar” and invoking some kinship (chto-to rodnoe), even though he had never heard it before (3:96). Nakhlik suggests that this affinity reflects the author's views on the solidarity of the Ukrainian and South Slavic peoples in their struggle for independence.Footnote 73 This aspect of identification certainly exists but it cannot solely explain the persistent theme of uncanny recognition. It is important to bear in mind that this closeness to the Serbs is attributed specifically to Shcherbina, the Zaporizhzhian Cossack, who represents the nomadic, militant, and masculine ethos in the novel—as opposed to his fellow traveler Cossack Sereda, who is deeply connected with his family and traditional values, and successfully returns home at the end of the novel. The most artistically-successful character in the novel according to unanimous agreement by critics, the colorful, witty, and courageous Shcherbina, nonetheless embodies a questionable set of values, from the point of view Kulish-kul΄turnyk—military prowess, anarchic love for absolute freedom, and disregard for family ties. Serbs are also portrayed ambivalently in the novel: the narrator is often disturbed by their purported cruelty, militarism, irrationality, “Asiatic despotism,” and the lack of legal institutions in their society. Rather than emphasizing the “solidarity” between Serbs and Ukrainians, Kulish, I would argue, portrays the Serbs as the Cossacks' own dark twins, using their subplot as a cautionary tale of the danger of excessive valorization of militant heroism. But the western, “knightly,” and democratic Cossacks are just different enough from their Orientalized Slavic “brothers” to preclude a complete identification of the two and to preserve the ambivalence of portraying the Cossack heroic past simultaneously as a lost national ideal and a chaotic and destructive period of Ukrainian history.Footnote 74
The Chalice
The final episodes of the novel bring together its various Gothic subplots—the evil demonic Jew is beheaded by Radivoi, meek Katerina is murdered by passionate oriental Roksanda, and Mikhailo's dead body is only accepted by the earth after his father prays to God for his forgiveness. The very final scene of the novel emphatically focuses not on the remaining characters' destinies, however, but on the fate of an artifact. “I would much rather find out,” the narrator states provocatively, “who now owns famous Doroshenko's cup” (Doroshenkova charka).Footnote 75 This magnificent (and even “supernatural”) cup appears earlier in the novel during Mikhailo and his friends' stay at pan Bardak's house. Clearly inspired by the golden bear-shaped goblet of the house of Bradwardine in Scott's Waverley, the “supernatural” cup in Kulish is also heavily laden with history. The goblet was supposedly a gift from Petro Doroshenko, the Hetman of right-bank Ukraine in the 1660s and 70s—a turbulent period of Ukrainian history after Khmel΄nyts΄kyi's death, known as Ruina (The Ruin). The novel essentially ends with a “lost and found” ad—the narrator playfully invites the readers, in case one of them may own the precious artifact, to send him its detailed and accurate drawing. But he also considers the possibility that “this invaluable wine goblet has already been forged into some silly sugar bowl or a useless coffee pot. Perhaps, I myself, unaware of this, own an item made out of silver that used to be part of Doroshenko's chalice.”Footnote 76
The moralistic and tragic ending of Mikhailo's plot is undermined by the playful tone of the final scene, just as the supposed triumph of modernity over Mikhailo's anachronistic heroism is called into question by the “reappearance” of the missing chalice. Doroshenkova charka acquires symbolic connotations beyond its significance as an antiquarian object. It figures as a fragment (or a ruin) of a heroic history which has been trivialized by Ukraine's embrace of modernity, with its emphasis on consumerism: “Given the lamentable dissemination of false education, antiquity, in the eyes of the descendants, is negligible compared to a fashion or an accessory shop.”Footnote 77 Metonymically, moreover, the lost chalice represents that inaccessible and irrevocable Ukrainian past, the Holy Grail that the knights of the novel sought in vain.Footnote 78 But this past is tantalizingly revived in the final line of the novel that cites “the most interesting inscription on the edges of the goblet: ‘He who will drink this cup at once to the end, is worthy of standing under Doroshenko's bunchuk.’”Footnote 79 The seeming finality of the ending that seals up the protagonists' destinies in their semi-mystical quest for a lost Ukraine is contradicted by the open-endedness of the chalice episode. Kulish's use of the Scottian “cup” motif highlights, once again, the difference between the two writers' treatments of the past. In stark contrast to the tragic and yet open ending of Mikhailo Charnyshenko, with the chalice that may or may not be lost forever, the “Blessed Bear of Bradwardine” is duly recovered at the end of Waverley, having been salvaged from the devastation of the civil war, and thus provides a safe closure, along with the hero's happy marriage and his abandonment of the rebellious Highlanders' cause. The Scottian “end-of-our-history” perspective, however, is not sustained in Kulish's novel, where the ghost of heroic Ukraine continues to haunt its colonial present.Footnote 80
The Gothic mode in Mikhailo Charnyshenko, as I have maintained, does not appear exclusively because of its widespread popularity; nor do I read it as a kind of Aesopian language, a “safe” literary code for addressing problematic political topics, although it can certainly play this role as well. In this novel—and throughout the Ukrainian and Russian Gothic traditions—this mode functions rather as both a symptom of ambiguity and an alternative discursive space.Footnote 81 Kulish's extensive reliance on the Gothic tropes produces a rich, if contradictory, fictional world where the past and the present are simultaneously alive and where the empire acts as both a benevolent agent of civilization and a demonic homogenizing force. The novel's ambivalent ideological agenda vividly captures Kulish's predicament as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire—a predicament shared by other Ukrainian and, to a degree, Little Russian writers, such as Nikolai Gogol΄ (Mykola Hohol), Antony Pogorel΄skii, Ievhen Hrebinka, and Oleksa Storozhenko, caught between lofty ideals of Romantic nationalism and their adherence to the principles of enlightenment, order, and civilization, embodied, however imperfectly, by the empire into which they were born.Footnote 82
