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Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol'’s Dikan'ka Tales, Book 1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Roman Koropeckyj  and
Robert Romanchuk
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Abstract

In this article, Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk present a Lacanian reading of the preface and “The Fair at Sorochintsy” from Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, vol. 1 (1831), viewed through the prism of American blackface minstrelsy. They trace representations of ethnicity and class in Gogol'’s “performance” of Ukraine. Their analysis of the preface demonstrates how Pan'ko’s Ukraine reaches a Russian lowerclass audience through the intervention of the gaze of an Other, an elite nonreader. The self-absenting of this Other opens a space for the audience’s imaginary identification with the Ukrainian minstrel, while structuring this space symbolically. Their analysis of “The Fair” demonstrates how this “opening” creates a fantasy of Ukraine as a world of unbridled sexuality, simultaneously repressed and re-presented by the story’s Russian- language fabula and elegiac “bookends.” The repressed Ukrainian content irrupts, symptomatically, in the story’s epigraphs. Akin to minstrelsy’s “blackening” of American popular culture, the tension between the repressed and the expressed adumbrates the “Ukrainianization” of Russian national culture.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , Fall 2003 , pp. 525 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

The following colleagues read and commented on various drafts of this paper: Jean Graham-Jones, Oleh Ilnytzkyj, W. T. (Rip) Lhamon, and Tomislav Longinovic. To them, as well as to our two anonymous referees for Slavic Review, are due all of our thanks, but none of our errors. The epigraph is taken from Slavny bubny za gorami Hi puteshestvie moe koe-kudav 1810 godu (Moscow, 1870), 243.

1 “My piglet saw the light of day quite a while ago. I sent you a copy to Sorochintsy.“ Nikolai V. Gogol’ to A. S. Danilevskii, 2 November 1831, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS), 14vols. (Moscow, 1937-1952), 10:213.

2 Ibid., 10:203.

3 Ibid., 10:237-38.

4 For a satirical description of the Russian book merchant in Ukraine, peddling wares described as incomprehensible nonsense to a Little Russian landowner who, in the end, prefers “Kotliarevs'kyi’s£«ej and the tales of Hryts'ko Osnov'ianenko,” see Hrebinka, IE. P., “Tak sobi do zemliakiv” (1841), Tvory u tr'okh tomakh (Kiev, 1981), 3:488–90Google Scholar.

5 Gogol’ would later (in the 1834 controversy around the Biblioteka dlia chteniia) abuse this provincial reader precisely for enriching the likes of Smirdin (cf. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative [Cambridge, Mass., 1986], 93-105), not to mention that he soon (February 1833) repudiated the idea of a second edition (see PSS, 10:256-57). Once it brought him the fame he desired, Dikan'ka’s gold turned to lead, at least for Gogol’ himself. At diis stage, however, he was being more pragmatic.

6 Zelinskii, V., ed., Russkaia kriticheskaia literatura oproizvedmiiakhN. V. Gogolia: Khronologicheskiisbornik kritiko-bibliograficheskikh statei (hereafter RKL), 3d ed., 2 vols. (Moscow, 1903), 1:37Google Scholar.

7 That is to say, skaz not only inscribes the transition from an “oral” culture, the object of an ethnographic gaze, to a “literate” one, structured by the market; as a figure of rhetoric, skaz calls the reader’s attention to the acoustical conventions of narrative and makes the reader into the implicit or complicit subject of the prose, (retroactively) constituting the reader as the “proper” audience. On skaz as performative rhetoric, see Peter Hodgson, “The Paradox of Skaz: Vicious Circles in ‘Notes of a Madman’ and ‘Notes from Underground,'” in Peter Rollberg, ed., And Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A.Moseron the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (Columbus, Ohio, 1997), esp. 113-17.

8 PSS, 10:203.

9 If one can take Biblioteka dlia chteniia’s, 1836 review of the second edition of Dikan'ka at its word, then Gogol’ succeeded in this respect: “Mr. Gogol“s public ‘wipes its nose with the hem of its overalls’ and smells strongly of tar… . This … public is still one step lower than the celebrated public of Paul de Kock.” RKL, 1:142.

10 PSS, 10:140-42.

11 See, for instance, Vasyl’ Sypovs'kyi, Ukraina v rosiis'komu pys'menstvi, pt. 1, 1801-1850 rr. (Kiev, 1928); Gippius, V. V., Gogol, ed. and trans. Maguire, Robert, 2d ed. (Durham, 1989), 28–30 Google Scholar; Luckyj, George S. N., Between Gogol’ and Ševčenko: Polarity in the LiteraryUkraine: 1798-1847, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, vol. 8 (Munich, 1971), 68–87 Google Scholar; and Saunders, David, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750-1850 (Edmonton, 1985), 113–99Google Scholar.

12 PSS, 9:495-538. Gogol’ apparently began keeping this notebook as early as 1826, when still in Nizhyn, and continued adding material to it, in particular the information he received from his mother, until 1831-1832. See PSS, 9:653-57. Iurii Barabash is being somewhat disingenuous when he implicitly backdates, among other things, Gogol“s notes on “customs, rituals, games, clothing, national dishes, names” to the Nizhyn period. Barabash, , Pochva i sud'ba. Gogol’ i ukrainskaia literatura: Uistokov (Moscow, 1995), 58 Google Scholar.

13 Cf. Gippius, Gogol, 30

14 Kulish, Panteleimon, “Obzor ukrainskoi slovesnosti. IV, Gogol',” Osnova, 1861, no. 4 (April): 79 Google Scholar.

15 RKL, 1:27. In his own review of the first volume, Andrii Tsarynnyi (A. IA. Storozhenko), who identifies himself as a Little Russian, also came to the conclusion that its author was not from Ukraine on the basis of what Tsarynnyi claimed was his gross nescience regarding things Ukrainian. Tsarynnyi then spends some seventy-five pages proving this in pedantic detail. See his “Mysli malorossiianina, po prechtenii povestei pasichnika Rudogo- Pan'ka …” Syn otechestva 47 (1832): 41-49; 101-15; 159-64; 223-42; 288-312.

16 RKL, 1:139.

17 Lhamon, Cf. W. T. Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Croxv to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 9–18 Google Scholar.

18 In addition to the theoretically informed studies by Lhamon and by Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1995), overviews and descriptions of nineteenth-century American minstrelsy can be found in Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, 1962), and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974).

19 For a Bakhtinian attempt to draw parallels between Russian (but not Ukrainian) and African American experiences and writing, see Peterson, Dale E., Up from Bondage: TheLiteratures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, 2000)Google Scholar.

20 Gogol, Nikolai, Sorotchintzy Fair, adapt. Schonfeldt, Sybil, trans, from the German by Reynolds, Daniel (Boston, 1991)Google Scholar.

21 Lott, Love and Theft, 39.

22 Lhamon, Raising Cain, 3.

23 For an analysis of these drawings and prints, see ibid., 1-55 (the relevant illustrations can be found on 23, 26, and 27).

24 It is interesting to note that this urban dandy, the prototypical “b’hoy” Mose who became the hero of his own repertoire on the New York popular stage, had metamorphosed into a performer in blackface by the 1850s, that is, into a caricature of an urbanized free black. Saxton, Cf. Alexander, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1975): 8–11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Zholtovs'kyi, P. M., Ukraϊns'kyizhyvopysXVII-XVIIIst. (Kiev, 1978), 298, 300Google Scholar. Shapiro, Cf. Gavriel, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (University Park, Penn., 1993), 60 Google Scholar, who briefly discusses the latter in the context of the ostensible influence of luboks on Gogof’s imagination.

26 This dandy is identified as a liakh (Pole) in Zholtovs'kyi, Ukraϊns'kyi zhyvopys, 300.

27 In this respect, what we call the “triangulation” of minstrelsy is a special instance of the coincidence of our view and the Other’s gaze operative in nostalgia: both the minstrel show and Gogol“s Dikan'ka are nothing if not nostalgic. Žižek, Cf. Slavoj, Looking Aiory:An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 111–16Google Scholar.

28 Cf. Tsarynnyi, “Mysli malorossiianina,” 41.

29 “I've never had to bother with printed writing before…. You look, and it’s an Izhe for sure; but then you look closer, and it’s either Nash or Pokoi.” Gogol', PSS, 1:317.

30 Gogol', PSS, 1:103. All translations from the Dikan'ka tales are based on Kent, Leonard, The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Garnett, Constance and Kent, Leonard J., vol. 1 (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar, with our own modifications when we considered it appropriate.

31 Ibid., 1:103-4.

32 The centrality of food in Gogol“s universe is the subject of Alexander P. Obolensky’s Food-Notes on Gogol, Readings in Slavic Literature 8 (Winnipeg, 1972), which does not, however, draw any substantive theoretical conclusions. Karlinsky, Simon, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton, with Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures,” CaliforniaSlavic Studies 5 (1970): 169–86Google Scholar, comes closer to the crux of the matter when he connects comestibles to Gogol'’s “word gluttony,” in particular noting his obsessive arrangement of foodstuffs into lists that still do not serve to “convey the impression of the scene“ (182-83). Karlinsky nonetheless limits his observations to the symptomatic level, that is, Gogol“s linguistic “need to play with” words, and not its cause. On the sublime object of desire and its “impossibility,” see Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), 194–95Google Scholar.

33 Gogol', PSS, 1:105.

34 Pan'ko describes Foma’s attitude toward printing in the introduction to “Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala” (St. John’s Eve): “It happened that one of these people … scriveners or something … wheedled this story out of Foma Grigor'evich, and he completely forgot about it. But then that very panych in the pea-green coat … arrives from Poltava, brings with him a little book, and … shows it to us… . Since I know how to read after a fashion … I began reading it out loud. I had hardly read two pages when [Foma Grigor'evich] suddenly took me by the arm. ‘Hold on! Tell me first what it is that you're reading.’ … ‘What do you mean, what I'm reading, Foma Grigor'evich? Your tale, your own words.’ ‘Who told you that those are my own words?’ ‘What better proof do you want? It’s printed here: “As told by such-and-such a sexton.“’ ‘To hell with whoever printed that! The son of a bitch Russian is lying. Is that how I told it? What’s one to do when a man’s got a screw loose in his head! Just listen, I'll tell it to you now.“’ Ibid., 1:137-38. Of course, Foma is also articulating here Gogol“s own annoyance with the editor of Otechestuennye zapiski, who, he felt, bowdlerized the story when it was first published in that journal under the title “Basavriuk.” See ibid., 1:521-23.

35 Ibid., 1:105-6.

36 For example, “Eneus noster mahnuspartus / I slavnyi troianorum kniaz',/ Shmyhliav po moriu, iak tsyhanus, / Ad te, o reks! pryslav nunk nas.” Kotliarevs'kyi, Ivan, Povne zibranniatvoriv (Kiev, 1969), 113–14Google Scholar; more such verses at 188-89.

37 Gogol', PSS, 1:105.

38 Ibid., 1:106.

39 S. T. Aksakov, Istoriia moego znakomstva s Gogol'em, ed. E. P. Naselenko and E. A. Smimova (Moscow, 1960), 10.

40 Gogol', PSS, 1:104.

41 Ibid., 1:106-7, 104, 106. In this way, Pan'ko’s skaz introduction to Dikan'ka may be counted among Gogol“s “dramas of abortive communication.” Hodgson, “Paradox,“ 113. Yet the communication not achieved with the elite reader, who has been figured in the sermocinatio of the introduction’s first words, is the foundation for the communication, or, more precisely, for the identification, that does take place. Ibid., 111-12.

42 Gogol', PSS, 1:103.

43 “It wouldn't matter so much if it were important servants; but no, some little kid … pesters you too ‘Where are you going? Where? Scram, peasant, out with you!'” Ibid., 1:103.

44 Ibid., 1:105.

45 Ibid., 1:106.

46 Ibid., 1:107.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 1:137.

49 Blair, Cf.John, “Blackface Minstrels in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” American StudiesInternational 28, no. 2 (1990): 58–59 Google Scholar; Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy,” 8-11.

50 Hrabovych, Cf. Hryhorii [Grabowicz, George G.], “Semantyka kotliarevshchyny,” Do istorü ukraϊns'koϊ literatury: Doslidzhennia, ese, polemika (Kiev, 1997), 321–22Google Scholar.

51 RKL, 1:139.

52 Sobaka-vivtsia (The dog-sheep) and Prostak (The simpleton), both by Gogol'’s father, Vasyl’ Hohol'-Ianovs'kyi.

53 Gogol', PSS, 1:134.

54 Ibid., 1:114.

55 Ibid., 1:127. A pig, of course, functions as a signifier of sexual anxiety with astonishing insistence and consistency in a number of Gogol“s stories.

56 ‘“What’s lying there, Vlas?’ ‘Why, it looks like two people/men [chelovek]: one on top, the other on the bottom. Which of them is the devil I can't make out yet!’ ‘Why, who is on top?’ ‘A woman!’ ‘Oh, well, then that’s the devil!'” Ibid., 1:128-29. Gogol“s use of the word chelovek (which means “person” in Russian, but “man” or “husband” in Ukrainian) is ambiguous.

57 Ibid., 1:122.

58 It might be noted in this connection that Spirin’s cover illustration to Sorotchintzy Fair “quilts” these signifiers together, borrowing the laughing Cossack (in his red jacket) from Repin’s painting and making him the emblem for the devilish enjoyment of the fair.

59 Cantwell, Robert, Bluegrass Breakdozun: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Urbana, 1984), 265 Google Scholar.

60 Gogol', res, 1:136.

61 Cf. Lott, Love and Theft, 96; as well as Rogin, Michael, Blackface, While Noise: JewishImmigrants in the Hollywood MeltingPot (Berkeley, 1996), 48–49 Google Scholar, who draws an analogy between minstrelsy and the cultural negotiations of Scots and English in the late eighteenth century.

62 Gogol', PSS, 1:135-36.

63 Hrabovych, Cf. Hryhorii [Grabowicz, George G.], “Hoholia mif Ukrainy,” Sucasnisl, 1994, no. 19 (October): 145 Google Scholar.

64 Sacks, Cf. Peter M., The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, 1985), 6–9 Google Scholar.

65 Tsarynnyi, “Mysli malorossiianina,” 311.

66 Lott, Love and Theft, 89-107.

67 Hrabovych [Grabowicz], “Semantyka kotliarevshchyny,” 331. We would propose the term recentering in place of decentering, insofar as the “carnivalesque” moment evoked by Grabowicz is rather Utopian.

68 RKL, 1:139.