모방과 창조, 주체와 타자 사이에서: 알렉세이 K. 톨스토이의 『부르달락 가족』을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper analyzes Aleksei K. Tolstoy’s short story “The Family of a Vourdalak” as an example of hybridity, using the framework of Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and Alexander Etkind’s internal colonization. Tolstoy’s vampire story, written in French and narrated by a French narrator, imitates and uses literary forms and devices popular in contemporary Western Europe. Yet in creating an “almost the same, but not quite same” narrative in a new cultural, historical context, the story reappropriates and recreates the imported narratives, including the Slavic vampiric image appropriated by Western literatures. In this way, the story resists the inferiority complex toward the West. But at the same time, Etkind’s internal colonization reveals one more layer of interpretation of this text as a gap between the “shaved man” and people[narod]. Therefore, the text reveals the ambivalent position of the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century as the colonized and the colonizer, as the subject and the other.