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Description of  Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity

One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his national identity. This book presents a completely new assessment of the problem: rather than adopting the predominant "either/or" perspective wherein Gogol is seen as either Ukrainian or Russian it shows how his cultural identity was a product of negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values. By examining Gogols ambivalent self-fashioning, language performance, and textual practices, this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance. Read more