My sister in christ: he was from the Russian Empire. He used the name Nikolai Gogol himself. He wrote about the Russian Empire. His novels are about Russian politics. He was not some Ukrainian folklorist.
Weirdest Ukraine propaganda yet.
My sister in christ: he was from the Russian Empire. He used the name Nikolai Gogol himself. He wrote about the Russian Empire. His novels are about Russian politics. He was not some Ukrainian folklorist.
Weirdest Ukraine propaganda yet.
How horrible.
Also, I only searched his Wikipedia, but it seems he’s only ever gone by Nikolai Gogol. A lot of times people have pen-names and stuff, but Wikipedia always mentions the real name. That was not the case here.
And even in his “Early Life” section, it doesn’t say he was born “Mykola Hohol” and changed his name - he was always Nikolai Gogol. His father was Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky. It was a paternal ancestor who was called Ostap Hohol.
His mother called him Nikola, a mix of Nikolai (Russian) and Mykola (Ukrainian).
It seems the author just took the Ukrainian parts of his heritage and put them together, ignoring anything else. You could also claim he was Polish, given that ancestor was given nobility by a Polish king, their last name “Janowski” was Polish, and they were trilingual - Ukrainian, Russian and Polish. In fact, if there was any oppression, it was against his Polish ancestry!
I’ll end with this. Gogol was “an adherent of the Slavophile movement” and “saw his work as a critique that would change Russia for the better.“
If there’s anything I’ve learnt from reading the article and then skimming the Wiki, it’s that modern Ukrainians are probably trying to create a divide where none existed (or at least not in the way it does today). It’s clear to me from the Wiki that Ukraine during Gogol’s time was not being oppressed. That was done to the Polish.
There’s probably more to this that I don’t know. But seriously. Don’t try to project current-day politics into history. It will never result in an accurate understanding.
Hah, this would be better alley for claiming he wasn’t Russian since Ruthenian nobility were completely polonised by the point, and the new Ukrainian nationalism comes not from them but from the burgeoisie
November 1830 was the start of biggest Polish uprising against Russia so claiming polish roots back then for Russian noble was basically admitting support for it.
yeah I came to the same conclusion, it just seems like trying to take the present divide and retroactively applying it the whole of Russian history. The Government Inspector was inspired by a conversation with Pushkin. He clearly didn’t see himself as part of a literary movement separate from the rest of Russia but as part of the whole of Russian literature, which itself included ethnicities other than just Russian.