On the Question of Mykola Gogol’s Ethnocultural Identity

The article is devoted to the analysis of the cultural-historical and worldview-psychological contexts of Nikolai Gogol’s work and, in relation to this, to the comprehension of the origins and features of his ethnocultural identity. In the course of the analysis, the author substantiates the thesis that Gogol’s worldview was extremely ambivalent. This ambivalence was primarily a consequence of the phenomenon of double identification. This led to significant gaps between the Ukrainian “soil” and the imperial “fate” of the outstanding writer. Despite this, as an outstanding writer Gogol, was formed primarily on the Ukrainian ethnocultural soil and never, despite all the vicissitudes of fate, broke with it. At the same time, the author notes that consideration of Gogol as a representative of both Ukrainian and Russian cultures, who consciously and subconsciously combined and expressed them in his work, is methodologically correct. Therefore, it is hardly possible to present Gogol in some dichotomously expressed hypostasis - as “exclusively ours” (Ukrainian) or, conversely, “exclusively not ours” (Russian) without distorting the truth. The author defends the idea that the decisive factor in assessing the ethnocultural identity of a particular writer should not be the issue of language in itself. Despite the importance of the latter, researchers should take into account a wider range of issues regarding the ethnocultural origins of creativity, the specific authorial selection, comprehension and assessment of what fell into the writer’s vision, of course, the issue of figurative and stylistic means of organizing and expressing the author’s vision, as well as the issue of the nature of influencing this creativity on the fate of the corresponding ethnic group. The author believes that the aspects like essentially Ukrainian ethnocultural origins, vision, assessment, stylistics, - essentially made Gogol a classic of world literature. Moreover, all this determined the nature of his influence on Russian reality, and therefore on the further fate of its “Little Russian” component, since it in fact initiated the spread of a conscious desire for the development of Ukrainian identity.