NARRATING THE NATIONAL FUTURE: THE COSSACKS IN UKRAINIAN AND RUSSIAN ROMANTIC LITERATURE by ANNA KOVALCHUK A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Comparative Literature and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2017 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Anna Kovalchuk Title: Narrating the National Future: The Cossacks in Ukrainian and Russian Romantic Literature This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Comparative Literature by: Katya Hokanson Chairperson Michael Allan Core Member Serhii Plokhii Core Member Jenifer Presto Core Member Julie Hessler Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2017 ii © 2017 Anna Kovalchuk iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Anna Kovalchuk Doctor of Philosophy Department of Comparative Literature June 2017 Title: Narrating the National Future: The Cossacks in Ukrainian and Russian Romantic Literature This dissertation investigates nineteenth-century narrative representations of the Cossacks—multi-ethnic warrior communities from the historical borderlands of empire, known for military strength, pillage, and revelry—as contested historical figures in modern identity politics. Rather than projecting today’s political borders into the past and proceeding from the claim that the Cossacks are either Russian or Ukrainian, this comparative project analyzes the nineteenth-century narratives that transform pre- national Cossack history into national patrimony. Following the Romantic era debates about national identity in the Russian empire, during which the Cossacks become part of both Ukrainian and Russian national self-definition, this dissertation focuses on the role of historical narrative in these burgeoning political projects. Drawing on Alexander Pushkin’s Poltava (1828), Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba (1835, 1842), and Taras Shevchenko’s Haidamaky (1842), this dissertation traces the relationship between Cossack history, the poet-historian, and possible national futures in Ukrainian and Russian Romantic literature. In the age of empire, these literary representations shaped the emerging Ukrainian and Russian nations, conceptualized national belonging in terms of the domestic family unit, and reimagined the genealogical relationship between iv Ukrainian and Russian history. Uniting the national “we” in its readership, these Romantic texts prioritize the poet-historian’s creative, generative power and their ability to discover, legitimate, and project the nation into the future. This framework shifts the focus away from the political nation-state to emphasize the unifying power of shared narrative history and the figurative, future-oriented, and narrative genesis of national imaginaries. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Anna Kovalchuk GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of California, San Diego DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, 2017, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, Literature, 2007, University of California, San Diego Bachelor of Arts, International Studies, 2007, University of California, San Diego AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Ukrainian and Russian Literature Cossack Literature, History and Myth Empire and Nation Nationalism and Narrative World Literature and Postcolonial Literature PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Instructor of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, 2013-2017 Instructor of English Composition, University of Oregon, 2012-2015 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Dissertation Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center, 2016 Russian Language Teachers Program, American Councils, Russian State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2015 STARTALK Summer Institute, Middlebury Russian School, 2014 NEH Summer Seminar, “The Late Ottoman and Russian Empires: Citizenship, Belonging, and Difference,” George Washington University, 2014 vi The Theodosius and Irene Senkowsky Prize for Demonstrated Achievement in Ukrainian Studies, Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, 2011 Summer Writing Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2011 Beall Educational Opportunity Award, University of Oregon, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am especially grateful to the director of my dissertation, Katya Hokanson, for the years of conversations, feedback, support and collegiality that have made this project possible and often enjoyable. I feel deeply honored to have benefited from the generosity and mentorship of all my committee members. I would like to thank Michael Allan, for the term id exams and for always questioning the stakes of reading, and Jenifer Presto, whose perspicacious readings bring clarity. I would also like to thank Julie Hessler for her excellent questions and Serhii Plokhii, whose prolific scholarship and kindness continues to inspire. The project has benefitted from the comments and questions of the panels and audiences at the American Comparative Literature Association at Harvard University, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Washington, DC, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages at Vancouver, BC, Austin, TX, and San Francisco, CA as well as those at the University of Oregon. All errors that remain are my own. I would also like to thank the Oregon Humanities Center for their invaluable support of this research. I am deeply indebted to my past and present professors, colleagues, and friends, especially those in the Department of Comparative Literature and especially Rachel Eccleston, whose friendship made every step of the way better. I owe my sanity to my husband Chris, whose perspective, love, and support always reminds me what is truly meaningful. Words fail me in thanking my parents, who brought me here and to whom I owe everything. viii For my family ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 12 II. THE ILLICIT BRIDEGROOM AND THE AUTOCRAT: UKRAINIAN UPRISING AND NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION IN PUSHKIN’S POLTAVA .......................................................................................... 15 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 65 III. ANCIENT MODELS AND NATIONAL REGENERATION IN GOGOL’S ARABESQUES AND TARAS BULBAS ................................................................. 73 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 136 IV. SHEVCHENKO’S HAIDAMAKY: LITERARY PARTHENOGENESIS AND THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF NATIONAL REBIRTH ................... 148 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 188 V. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 195 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 200 x CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In 1995, a thought-provoking discussion in Slavic Review began with Mark von Hagen’s essay, “Does Ukraine Have a History?”1 Von Hagen defines history as “a written record of [an] experienced past that commands some widespread acceptance and authority in the international scholarly and political communities” (658). Due to a lack of statehood in the nineteenth century, the essay explains that Ukraine and other central and eastern European states are “suspect candidates in the international order” and “have been denied full historiographical legitimacy” in the twentieth century (659-60). While arguing that no, Ukraine does not have a history, von Hagen understands Ukraine’s historiographical weakness as a strength “precisely because it challenges so many of the clichés of the nation-state paradigm” (673). While von Hagen’s article and the response essays focus on the twentieth century, another rich context for this debate can be found amidst the shifting imperial borders and emerging national narratives of the early nineteenth-century Romantic era. Though the nation-state dominates our contemporary understanding of borders, histories, and literatures, the concept of the nation is relatively modern and gained currency in the late eighteenth century amidst the declining legitimacy of autocratic and dynastic frameworks of power.2 While military might and imperial expansion legitimated civilizations in the eighteenth century, the post- Napoleonic world also required proof of national uniqueness and autonomous historical development made visible in literary language and narrative history. This dissertation focuses on the intertwined and overlapping development of national, historical, and 1 literary narratives in the early nineteenth-century Russian empire and situates the ongoing debates about Ukrainian history within a global story of national and narrative discovery. The nation’s relative modernity and its concomitant claims to antiquity evidence the importance of history to past and present nationalisms.3 Via a simultaneous discovery of the past, legitimation of the present, and