After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian society faced a new reality. The new reality involved consolidation and transformation of collective identities. The reinvigoration of national ...identity led to a change in the emphasis on how the past was dealt with – many things which were regarded as negative by the Soviet regime became presented as positive in independent Ukraine. The war-time nationalist movement, represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), became one of the re-configured themes of history. While most of the studies of memory of the OUN and UPA concentrated on the use of this history by nationalist parties, this study goes beyond the analysis and scrutinizes the meaning of this history in nation- and state-building in relation to memory work realized on the small-scale regional and local levels. Moreover, this book focuses not only on the “producers” of memory, but also on the “consumers” of memory, the area which is largely understudied in the field of memory studies. Drawing on studies about post-colonial subjectivities and theories of remediation developed in memory studies, this book explores the changes in memory culture of contemporary Ukraine and examines the role of memory in producing new meanings under the rapidly changing conditions after the collapse of the Soviet Union up to 2014. The book contributes to the studies of memory culture in post-Communist countries as well as to the studies of society in contemporary Ukraine.
The Opponent Livak, Leonid
The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination,
09/2010
Book Chapter
Women should then personify the Opponent in Gogol’s story. This conclusion is indeed suggested in Simon Karlinsky’s study The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which downplays the theological ...dimension of “Taras Bul'ba.” However, the Cossack crusade has several ostensible targets, among which women are overshadowed by “the jews” as Christ’s original enemy, and by the Catholic clergy as the figure of the Heretic (compare Taras’s phrases “unclean Catholics” and “Catholic infidels” nechestivye katoliki, 1835:134; katolicheskie nedoverki, 1842:68). In the 1842 text, the advance of the crusading army puts to flight the “multitudes of monks, Jews, and women” (34); whereas the
The article raises the fundamental problems of textual criticism of N. V. Gogol’s story “Taras Bulba.” The author of the article provides an analytical review of the translation and publishing ...practice of representatives of Ukrainian nationalism of the 19th–20th centuries, the features of the publications of Gogol’s story with textological “innovations” by P. A. Kulish, M. O. Lobodovsky, M. Sadovsky (N. K. Tobilevich), I. A. Malkovich. The distinctive feature of the listed cases is the ideological character of the violation of the fundamental scientific principle of choosing the final wording of the text. The preference for the publication of the early edition of Taras Bulba over the later one leads to the fact that Taras Bulba’s famous speech about partnership, the image of the path of the traitor Andriy to enemies, the words of the Cossacks before death about devotion to faith and homeland, Gogol’s prophecy about Russian tsar and the narrator’s exclamation about the irresistible Russian power became “an appendix” without author’s context. The paper clearly shows the need for a comprehensive, complex solution of textual problems and the inadmissibility of ignoring the last writer’s will.
The author analyzes Cossack culture in the original Russian text of Taras Bulba, a novella by Nikolai Gogol and in the Polish translation of this text. The analysis is based on two editions of the ...original version and on a contemporary translation of the work by Aleksander Ziemny. The author takes into consideration various components which illustrate the Cossacks’’ point of view and presents Cossack culture in both the source and the target texts.
This chapter argues that the text of Notes from the House of the Dead does not completely enclose Isay Fomich, inextricably tying him to the ridiculous role for which he was ostensibly conceived; but ...that there is a creditable deconstructive alternative for Dostoevsky's Isay Fomich similar to the one proposed for Gogol's Jewish characters. It shows that just as Gogol was not able to control the damage that Yankel did to the status of his epic hero, Taras Bulba, so Dostoevsky is often unable to control the far more serious damage that Isay Fomich does to his narrator, and by extension to the author of the semi-autobiographical novel who stands behind him.
Introduction Rosenshield, Gary
The Ridiculous Jew,
09/2008
Book Chapter
This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, to explore the Jewish stereotype in the works of three prominent Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, ...Ivan Turgenev's “The Jew,” and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. The focus is on the ways in which Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky exploit the stereotype of the ridiculous Jew for different literary and cultural ends. The chapter then discusses representations of the Jew as devil and homo economicus, the good Jew, the inscribable Jew, Jewish assimilation and conversion, and the Jewish body. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
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