Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny by Valeria Sobol

Abstract

Reviewed by: Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny by Valeria Sobol Anna Cavazzoni (bio) Valeria Sobol, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 198 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-50595. Valeria Sobol's book applies a colonial lens to analyze gothic motives in the Russian-language literature of the nineteenth century. While the English gothic has been studied from a postcolonial perspective, Haunted Empire pioneers this approach in the Russian imperial context.1 The book's greatest contribution is its framing of postcolonial analysis in the category of the imperial uncanny that serves a double role. It captures both the complexity of the imperial identity's construction and the anxiety caused by the encounter with the colonized other. Analyzing several literary works from the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, Sobol reconstructs a certain pattern in narratives about two regions: the Baltics including Finland, and Ukraine. Accordingly, the book is divided into two parts, "The North" and "The South," of three chapters each. Other imperial [End Page 299] regions, such as the Caucasus and Siberia, remain beyond the scope of Sobol's study. The book starts by explicating the meaning of the imperial uncanny using the example of Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. In the provincial town of Taman, the main character Pechorin meets a blind child who answers him only in Ukrainian. Characterized by Sobol as one of the most disturbing scenes in the entire novel, it exemplifies the imperial uncanny as the feeling of instability and the threatening ambiguity of the Russian imperial space. Lermontov employs many elements of the gothic mode to express this anxiety. The gothic and historicism were used together to construct the empire's colonial identity. There was a direct connection between remote time and exotic places as the chronotope of these novels. As English gothic constructed Southern Europe as both a timeless and barbaric place, Russian gothic was eradicating the history of recently annexed lands to justify imperial expansion as a civilizing mission. Accordingly, one of the discourses used by the Russian Empire to justify its expansion was historical. It argued that the annexed territory was inhabited either by people kindred to the Russians, such as the Finns, or by a separated branch of the Russians, as in the case of the Ukrainians. The second discourse was geographical contiguity, which was especially popular in justifying Russia's eastward expansion. The third discourse was the civilizing mission, which was rarely applied to Russia's European acquisitions. The categories of the North and South that divide the book into two parts reflect the mental mapping of the Enlightenment that still dominated the European symbolical geography of the period the same way that West and East structure our political geography today. As Larry Wolff reminded readers in his Inventing Eastern Europe, the South–North nexus dated back to the Renaissance division between the culturally rich South and the barbaric North, which had its origins in Tacitus's Germania. The Enlightenment reversed the cultural poles of the continent by proclaiming the superiority of the North. Subsequently, the locus of historical backwardness and barbarism was associated with the East to produce the familiar opposition of West and East.2 Russia was historically associated with the North, and the gothic novels of the nineteenth century embraced this symbolical geography. The North is essential for the gothic genre focused on medieval [End Page 300] Europe, and Livonian ruins and castles provided a perfect setting for Russian gothic novels. There was also an ideological advantage in exploiting the Livonian past. Associated with German domination, it allowed the Russian conquest to be presented as bringing the light of reason to a place that had been held in medieval darkness by its former overlords. Besides, the local populations were considered as historically linked to the Slavs. The Decembrist writers, such as Nikolai Bestuzhev and Vil'gel'm Kiukhel'beker (Wilhelm Küchelbecker), explored the Livonian theme for their political agenda. Decembrists approved of the series of reforms carried out by the imperial government in the Baltic provinces that emancipated serfs...