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Edyta Bojanowska: My name is Edyta Bojanowska. I am a professor of Russian Literature at
the Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Language and Literatures at Rutgers.
My area of research is 19th century Russian literature and intellectual history. I am
interested in the connection between literature and ideology in a particular ideology of imperialism
and nationalism. I study how 19th century literary works both reflected prevalent Russian
ideas about nation and empire, but also how they helped shape those ideas. My first book
focused on the work of Nikolai Gogol, a fascinating, puzzling, 19th century Russian writer, but
also very important cultural figure in his own time. What many don't know is Gogol was
actually a Ukrainian and he actually set foot in Russia at the age of 20. Ukraine at the
time was a province of the Russian Empire, but one that still had a very strong sense
of cultural and historic separateness. In my book I explore ways in which Gogol's work
display, and involving a very complex set of attitude towards Russian and Ukrainian
nationalist causes. My research shows that we need to deRussify and Ukrainianize our
view of Gogol. A lot of his writings about Russian nationalism feature very treacherous,
false bottom that if you read them closely, you begin to appreciate the many ironies of
those works. The most fascinating thing for me about Gogol was that he played with double
allegiances, that he straddles to nationalism and sorts of puts them in play, because for
many people, the fact that Gogol wrote his works in Russian is enough to classify him
as a Russian writer, totally and irrevocably. But the imperial context makes language really
a not reliable indicator of national loyalties. One of the examples is, Irish literature,
or we have works written in Irish but also in English, so you can't really base this
decision on language only. While I was working on my Gogol project, all I wanted to focus
on is the question of nationalism, that was my theme, that's all I really cared about,
but as I kept working on it, I found that the question of Imperialism kept intruding
into my project in ways that I didn't anticipate. So, I became interested in the question of
Russia as an empire and this indeed has become my second project. The book I'm writing now
is tentatively titled Empire and the Russian Classics, and in this book, I widen my roster
of writers and I also shift my focus from the first half of the 19th century towards
my work on Gogol, to the 2nd half of the 19th century. The question I have set myself is
this: how did the lived experience of this multiethnic, robustly expanding empire, how
is it reflected in the literature of the period. We're not used to thinking of Russia as an
empire, and in fact Russians themselves, especially in the Soviet period have been resisting the
idea that they were or are an empire. Russia may be a kind of an empire in denial, and
yet it is precisely imperial expansion that transformed this tiny little medieval principality
that built around the city of Moscow into an enormous empire. At its height it was 2nd
only to the British, and even today in its diminished state, this is territorially the
largest country on earth. What were the cultural echos of this process? How did Russians react
to the opportunities, challenges, and dilemmas of their imperial status. These are exactly
the kinds of questions that prompt my research. I found that every single major writer was
in some ways involved in the problems of empire and the questions of empire. Empire wasn't
just a brief fashion, for orientalists, exoticism, in fact continued throughout the 19th century
and every major writer engaged in the problem with the empire in some ways. What I want
to do in this book is to map out the ideas, images, and values that these writers attached
to empire in their work, to see how they treated the problems of multi-ethnicity, to see how
they weighed the interests of the nation against the interests of the empire, so what I hope
to produce is an analytic account of a lively debate that took place in Russian culture
in the 19th century about imperial questions and I would also like to contribute to the
larger humanistic scholarship about imperialic questions and the case of Russia has been
missing from these accounts, but I really think that it needs to be reintroduced into
that larger scholarship about Europe's imperialist past.
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