The Origins of Ukrainian Gothic: History, Cultural Hauntings, and Political Imagination

Ukrainian dark prose that draws on the conventions of the British and western European Gothic novel emerged in the nineteenth century and continued uninterrupted until the early twentieth century. Writers like Orest Somov and Mykola Hohol' engaged the cultural capital of the Gothic literary tradition, adjusting it to their local contexts. However, as this study shows, Gothic conventions slowly became a platform to introduce politically dissenting views. Ukrainian Romantics who used horror as a distancing technique began to pursue the Ukrainian national idea, first covertly and later more openly. This was followed by an aesthetic shift in post-Romantic authors such as Marko Vovchok and Liudmyla Staryts'ka-Cherniakhivs'ka, who began to employ the horrific purposefully to condemn the colonial, imperialistic politics of the Russian Empire and its successor the Soviet Union toward Ukraine. This thematic direction shaped the character of the Ukrainian Gothic over the first century of its incipience, from the 1820s until the late 1920s, just before the Stalinist purges. Through a comparative study of the horror works of selected authors vis-à-vis major developments in the Gothic genre and the application of postcolonial theory, this monograph capitalizes on the subversive tendencies of the Ukrainian Gothic. Drawing novel theoretical conclusions about the development of the genre in its adopted Ukrainian context, this book depicts how the Gothic became a powerful tool of resistance and decolonization.

About the Author

Svitlana (Lana) Krys is an associate professor and the chair of the department of English at MacEwan University.