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Speakers): Robert Romanchuk, Associate Professor of Slavic, Florida State University

Donald Fanger, in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Harvard UP, 1979), writes that Mirgorod is “a pivotal work in Gogol's development and his most personally revealing book. As such, it is particularly inviting to psychoanalytic interpretation.” We should take "pivotal," even more so than "personal," as an antecedent of Fanger's "as such." For Mirgorod occupies a crucial transitional place between the more conventional Dikanka Evenings and the often anthologized Petersburg Tales: if the former foregrounds the "mystery of love," a mystery that sharpens into an impenetrable riddle in the latter (as Hugh McLean first observed), Mirgorod poses a troubling challenge to desire altogether. It resists analysis, decomposes structure, and to date has evaded monographic study. This study takes seriously Lacan's claim that the work of fiction is a "forgery of the unconscious," but not mimetic of anything; it reads Gogol to the letter when he subtitles Mirgorod "Tales Serving As a Continuation of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka," in place of the expected continuation itself; and interprets as structure McLean's diachronic observation that Gogol's book, which begins "I love very much" and ends "It's dreary in this world, gentlemen," represents a "symbolic transition from love to non-love." On this foundation it argues that Mirgorod forges a perverse symptom that implicates its reader. For Gogol's subtitle, in which Mirgorod stands in place of the absent sequel to Dikanka, is congruent with the role of the letter in the unconscious, as a "symbol only of an absence" (Lacan), while the pivot in the attitudes toward love inscribed in its opening and closing words is precisely the perverse "wish for a father's Law that reveals its absence" (Rothenberg and Foster). Perversion is the awful masquerading as the lawful. It is built upon the disavowal of the choice of submission to a limiting signifier and the repeated, ritualized stagings of this choice, whose aim is to bring desire into fleeting existence.
 
ROBERT ROMANCHUK graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Since 2000, he has worked at the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2007. He is the author of the monograph Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North: Monks and Masters at the Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, 1397-1501 (published by University of Toronto Press, 2007) and a number of the journal publications. He is also a co-author of the textbook of Ukrainian language Rozmovljajmo! Let's Talk. A Basic Ukrainian Course with Polylogs, Grammar, and Conversation Lessons (2005). His research interests fall into three largely unrelated areas: 1. the culture of obrazovanie (including both pedagogy and spiritual direction/psychagogy) and hermeneutics (textual interpretation) in the Orthodox Middle Ages; 2. the "Little Russian" literary tradition out of which Nikolai Gogol emerged; and 3.  the Byzantine "romantic epic" Digenis Akritis and its medieval Slavic reception.