The Rhetoric of Memory and the "Crisis" in Ukrainian-Russian Relations

Dmitrii Medvedev, visibly perturbed despite the tranquility of his surroundings, addressed the public in a new videoblog entry today to decry the Kremlin's relations with Kyiv, explicitly throwing himself into Ukrainian presidential election politics perhaps earlier than expected. In his remarks, based on a letter sent today to Viktor Yushchenko, Medvedev cites Gogol''s 1842 imperial-friendly edition of Taras Bul'ba as an elegy to, in his view, less acrimonious times -- Нет уз святее товарищества, "There is no stronger bond of fellowship" (i.e. than the bond between Ukrainians and Russians), words not original to the 1835 edition of Bul'ba -- and identifies Ukrainian efforts to come to terms with the legacy of Soviet terror as evidence of a larger "anti-Russian" project.

Remembering Gogol' / Hohol'

"Знаю, что мое имя после меня будет счастливее меня, и потомки тех же земляков моих, может быть, с глазами влажными от слез, произнесут примирение моей тени."  

"I know that after I'm gone my name will be happier than me and that the descendants of my countrymen, perhaps with teary eyes, will make peace with my shadow."

-- Gogol' to Zhukovskii, 12 November 1836 

Are today's descendants of the countrymen of Mykola Hohol' / Nikolai Gogol' making peace with his shadow?  The recent furor over Vladimir Bortko's new film adaptation of Taras Bul'ba, which the New York Times rather oddly called "a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraine's Western-leaning leadership," seems to suggest otherwise.   

Films come and go, but the incorporated practices of ritual commemoration are forever -- or at least they aspire to be.  So how did Ukrainian and Russian political figures mark the 200th anniversary of Mykola Hohol' / Nikolai Gogol's birthday on 1 April?  Below, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko lays a wreath before Hohol''s statue in Kyiv, and Russian Minister of Culture Aleksandr Avdeev pays tribute before Gogol''s grave in Moscow.

The photos offer us two different Gogols. In the first photo, the appearance of Tymoshenko (wearing her trademark zachiska) and those that flank her (wearing colourful Cossack sharovary and other forms of national dress) suggests Mykola Hohol' the Ukrainian auto-ethnographer, the playful author of the early Dikanka stories (1831-32). Bright, bountiful flowers celebrate him. In the second, Aleev and the Orthodox clergy suggest Nikolai Gogol' the Russian sermonizer, the defender of Christian morals of the later Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). Modest candles mourn him.

There are many Gogols indeed. As to the question of whether he is 'Russian' or 'Ukrainian' -- a question given new life with Bortko's Bul'ba -- it's high time we moved away from reductive 'either-or' identitarian vocabulary.  Lest we forget:

«Сам не знаю, какая у меня душа, хохлацкая [украинская] или русская. Знаю только то, что никак бы не дал преимущества ни малороссиянину перед русским, ни русскому перед малороссиянином. Обе природы слишком щедро одарены Богом, и, как нарочно, каждая из них порознь заключает в себе то, чего нет в другой, – явный знак, что они должны пополнить одна другую. Для этого самые истории их прошедшего быта даны им непохожие одна на другую, дабы порознь воспитывались различные силы их характера, чтобы потом, слившись воедино, составить собою нечто совершеннейшее в человечестве».  Gogol' to Smirnova, December 1844