Haunted Empire

Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny

Valeria Sobol

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501750571
• eBook ISBN: 9781501750588
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Haunted Empire shows that Gothic elements in Russian literature frequently expressed deep-set anxieties about the Russian imperial and national identity.

Valeria Sobol argues that the persistent presence of Gothic tropes in the literature of the Russian Empire is a key literary form that enacts deep historical and cultural tensions arising from Russia's idiosyncratic imperial experience. Her book brings together theories of empire and colonialism with close readings of canonical and less-studied literary texts as she explores how Gothic horror arises from the threatening ambiguity of Russia's own past and present, producing the effect Sobol terms "the imperial uncanny." Focusing on two spaces of the imperial uncanny—the Baltic north/Finland and the Ukrainian south—Haunted Empire reconstructs a powerful discursive tradition that reveals the mechanisms of the Russian imperial imagination that are still at work today.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

PART I

The North

CHAPTER 1

A Gothic Prelude

Nikolai Karamzin’s “The Island of Bornholm”

My reconstruction of the Russian imperial uncanny begins in 1794, when Nikolai Karamzin, the Russian leading Sentimentalist writer, journalist, and future official historian, published an enigmatic Gothic tale, titled “The Island of Bornholm” (“Ostrov Borngol′m,” 1793). In this story, the narrator, an educated Russian nobleman, recounts an episode that occurred as he was returning from England to Russia by sea, after an extensive voyage around Western Europe. During the ship’s stop in Gravesend, the traveler encounters a ghost-like, emaciated young man who sings a melancholy song in Danish; the song mentions the Danish island of Bornholm and some illicit love that prompted the young man’s exile from Denmark, a result of “a parental curse.”1 The narrator is deeply moved by the young Dane’s lot and is intrigued by the secret to which the song alludes. As he continues his sea journey back to Russia, his ship makes a stop near that very island, described by the captain as “a dangerous place,” because of its shoals and underwater rocks. Undeterred by these warnings, the Russian traveler sails to the island where his curiosity is rewarded: he is invited to spend the night at the castle and eventually discovers a young woman imprisoned in a cave. She turns out to be the young Dane’s beloved mentioned in the song. From an old man, the castle’s owner, the narrator learns the lovers’ “horrible secret” (673), which is not revealed to the reader.2

This story is framed as the narrator’s recollection, in the circle of close friends, of his past travels: “You know that I have traveled in foreign parts, far, far away from my fatherland, far from you, who are so dear to my heart; I have seen many marvelous things, have heard many astounding tales; I have told you a great deal, but I could not tell you all that happened to me” (661). By alluding to a journey reported previously to his friends, the narrator links himself to the quasi-autobiographical sentimental narrative persona of Karamzin’s travelogue Letters of a Russian Traveler.3 The Letters end with the traveler returning from England to Russia by boat, where he, quite appropriately, reads “Ossian” while the ship approaches Scandinavia; after a brief mention of the ship’s stop near Copenhagen, the narrative fastforwards to the traveler’s arrival in Russia. Both the Letters and the story describe the narrator’s seasickness with the waves “baptizing” him, literally and not just metaphorically, as he emphasizes in both cases. In a way, “The Island of Bornholm” fills a gap in the Letters’ description of the traveler’s journey home.

Karamzin’s travelogue constitutes an essential background to his Gothic tale: the Russian traveler of the Letters repeatedly stresses Russia’s “Northern” identity and, more generally, actively engages with a plethora of historical, political, philosophical, and cultural issues.4 In “The Island of Bornholm,” these issues are overshadowed by the story’s Gothic paraphernalia—the dramatic cliffs, the dangerous stormy sea, the gloomy and terrifying castle, and an allusion to a horrible secret it harbors, possibly incest. As a result, some scholars saw its significance merely in introducing “the gothic manner” into Russian literature and considered it less interesting compared to Karamzin’s later prose works.5 By contrast, in one of the earliest in-depth analyses of “The Island of Bornholm,” Vadim Vatsuro emphasized its philosophical aspect, particularly Karamzin’s engagement with the philosophy of history in the aftermath of the French Revolution.6 According to Vatsuro, the tale was not only an early Russian experiment in the Gothic genre but also “the first harbinger of budding historicism,” anticipating the exploration of the role of history in shaping the human mind and behavior in the Russian literature of the 1820s and 1830s.7 In this chapter, I explore a different aspect of this entwinement of the Gothic mode and historicity in “The Island of Bornholm.” By focusing on the ambivalent representation of the story’s eponymous setting as both foreign/Scandinavian and Slavic, as well as on the island’s historical ties to Russia established in the text, I demonstrate that this early text of the Russian Gothic lays the foundation for the later development of the tradition of the imperial uncanny in Russian literature.

Although produced in a different literary and cultural atmosphere and dissimilar in terms of plot and style, in many respects Karamzin’s story anticipates one of the key texts of the Russian imperial uncanny, Lermontov’s “Taman′.” “The Island of Bornholm” is also narrated in the first person, by a traveler who finds himself in an unknown, mysterious location marked by geographical liminality. His lodging also has bad repute with the local population: in “The Island of Bornholm,” the local boy describes the castle to the traveler in these terms: “We don’t go there. . . . And God knows what’s going on there” (666). In each work, the narrator experiences nightmares and wakes up in the middle of the night; prompted by his curiosity, he leaves the house and encounters a mysterious woman. Both protagonists are trying to solve an enigma, and at the end of the work leave by boat.

At first glance, the two works’ geographical settings could not be more different: Taman′ (a “disgusting little town,” in Pechorin’s words) is a small Cossack settlement located on the frontier of the Russian Empire, whereas the majestic Danish island of Bornholm is a territory of a foreign state. However, in each case we observe a similar conflation of the categories of native and foreign (svoe and chuzhoe). In “Taman′,” the seemingly familiar (the Russian town and its residents alternatively speaking Ukrainian and Russian) turns out to be confusing, unfamiliar, and threatening for the narrator, while in Karamzin’s story we find an opposite mechanism at work: what is supposed to be foreign and exotic is unexpectedly revealed to have kinship with the traveler and the world he comes from. The uncanny effect in each work derives precisely from such ambiguity.

The narrator of “The Island of Bornholm” repeatedly underscores the distant and exotic nature of his journey, describing his travels to “foreign”/“other” lands, “far” from his home country (in fact, the word “far” is used thrice in one sentence). The island’s inhabitants consistently address the Russian traveler as a “foreigner” (chuzhezemets, literally “the dweller of the other lands”), stressing thereby his otherness.8 The established cultural and geographical distance, however, is dismantled throughout the story. The Russian traveler happens to be fluent in Danish. Upon hearing the melancholy song of the Danish lover in England, he understands every word and offers a poetic rendition of this song in Russian. He informs the readers that he had learned the language in Geneva from his Danish friend Dr NN (the readers of the Letters of a Russian Traveler will recognize Danish Doctor Gottfried Bekker whom the biographical Karamzin met during his travels and who frequently appears on the pages of Karamzin’s travelogue).

The aura of danger associated with the island, too, dispels quickly. When the ship, carried by a strong wind, approaches the island, Bornholm presents a dreadful if sublime picture: “We could already see its fearsome rocks, from where the roiling streams hurled themselves, with roar and froth, into the depths of the sea. The island seemed inaccessible from all sides, enclosed from all sides by the hand of sublime nature; nothing but terror appeared on its gray cliffs. With horror I saw there an image of cold and silent eternity, an image of implacable death.”9 The wind soon quiets down, and despite the captain’s warning about the hidden perils of travel to the island, the narrator’s boat trip and his disembarkment are strikingly uneventful: “We sailed and safely landed in a small, peaceful bay” (665). The fishermen of Bornholm who greet him there, while “crude and wild people, . . . unfamiliar with the smile of a friendly greeting,” turn out to be “not cunning or malicious” (665–66)—unlike the treacherous smugglers in Taman′. Thus, the element of danger and threat set up by the Gothic description of the island and its otherness is consistently undermined by the subtle twists of the narrative, even as its external Gothic trappings continue to evoke the horrors associated with this genre.10

FIGURE 3. Georg Emil Libert, Landscape with the Ruins of Castle Hammershus, Bornholm, date unknown (no later than 1908). Oil on canvas, 33 cm × 44 cm (13 in × 17.3 in). Private collection.

The suspenseful atmosphere of the story builds up, as the local boy who accompanies the narrator to the castle trembles with unexplainable fear, implores him to turn back, and disappears as soon as the narrator enters the castle. A tall, silent man in black with a piercing gaze leads the visitor through “gloomy and empty” rooms of the crumbling castle to meet an old man, the castle’s owner (667). As was the case with the arrival on the island by boat, the effect of danger and dread the castle emanates is undone: far from a typical Gothic villain, the old man strikes a friendly if melancholy figure. He warmly greets his guest and engages him in a lengthy conversation about the European past and present. The encounter between the castle’s owner and the curious traveler might feel somewhat anticlimactic, at least according to the Gothic genre expectations. Both thematically and stylistically it is more in line with Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler, full of intellectual debates, than with the story about a mysterious castle, hiding some horrible secret. Let us take a closer look at this odd disruption of the Gothic flow of the narrative.11

In the beginning of the encounter, the old man addresses his visitor as a foreigner (chuzhezemets) but then immediately adopts the Enlightenment’s universalist perspective: “Foreigner! I do not know you but you are a human being—in my dying heart a love for people is still alive—my house and my embrace are open to you” (667). The binary opposition, native/foreigner, established between the two interlocutors is undone by their common humanity, as well as by their shared discourse of the Enlightenment. When responding to the old man’s inquiry about the situation in the contemporary world, the Russian traveler relies heavily on Enlightenment symbolism, even as he questions the triumph of this worldview: “The light of the sciences . . . is spreading more and more, but human blood still flows on the earth—the tears of the unfortunate are still shed—the name of virtue is praised while its essence is debated” (668). Both Vatsuro and Derek Offord read this exchange as reflecting a crisis in Karamzin’s Enlightenment values prompted by the French Revolution. Such a crisis, they argued, is also echoed in the tale’s Gothic plot, with its unresolved conflict between nature and law (“the laws condemn the object of my love,” sings the young Dane in the story).12

The conversation, however, does not stop here and soon turns to a more specific historical subject. Once the traveler’s nationality is mentioned, the old man seems to abandon his ahistorical universalism and delivers a monologue on the history of the island and its ties to the Slavic world. Characteristically, in this part of the conversation, the Enlightenment’s “light of the sciences” is replaced by the medieval “light of Christianity”:

Upon learning that I was a Russian (rossiianin), he said, “We descend from the same people as you. The ancient inhabitants of Rügen and Bornholm islands were Slavs. But you were illuminated by the light of Christianity before us. While in your parts, magnificent temples dedicated to the one God were already rising to the clouds, we, in the darkness of idolatry, offered bloody sacrifices to insensitive idols. You already celebrated the creator of the universe in solemn hymns, while we, blinded by error, praised the idols of myth in disharmonious songs.”—The old man spoke to me about the history of the northern peoples, the events of antiquity and modern times, and spoke in such a way that I could not help but marvel at his intelligence, his knowledge, and even his eloquence. (668)

After that excursus, the narrative returns to its Gothic register and does not explicitly revisit the questions raised in this brief interlude.

Scholarly studies of “The Island of Bornholm” have paid scarce attention to this episode. Vatsuro interprets the figure of the old man as an embodiment, for Karamzin, of his era’s erroneous concept of virtue, resulting in the “medieval barbarity” of the punishment he metes out. In this context, the scholar briefly mentions the “historical past looming over the inhabitants of Bornholm and Rügen,” which reinforces the medieval associations of this character.13 Offord offers the most detailed reading of the scene and suggests that, by asserting the superiority of the civilization of the Eastern Slavs, Karamzin separates Russia from the realm of Gothic horrors, represented by Bornholm, as well as from the social cataclysms of the late eighteenth century. “The Russians, a subtext of ‘The Island of Bornholm’ seems to tell us, are one of the northern peoples whose historical moment is approaching and who, even among the northern peoples themselves, enjoy pride of place by virtue of their spiritual heritage.”14

I read this scene somewhat less optimistically, as focusing more on the dark past than the bright future and more on the uncanny relatedness of the Russians and the locals than their separation. The established exoticism of the mysterious foreign island and the cultural and ethnic distance between the visitor and its population is now undermined not only by their common humanity but also by their shared ethnic origin. Thus, on the way home, the Russian traveler is already “at home,” as it were—if not in a literal, then in a historical sense. Therefore, by learning about the island’s past and the secret it harbors, our traveler discovers something about his own culture’s historical past.

An association between Russia and Bornholm also can be inferred from Karamzin’s later curious reference to his story. In a letter to Empress Mariia Fedorovna dated August 16, 1815, he offers a joking “happy ending” to the tale:

[The young woman] suddenly saw the light and the Gravesend melancholic who threw himself into her embrace with the exclamation, “You’re not my sister but my wife!” They exited the cave [and] became conjoined in a lawful marriage. The old master, admiring the now lawful love of his daughter and son-in-law, gives balls and himself dances a polonaise, while the dark cave, where the pale and languid beauty used to be imprisoned, is being prepared for yellow and fat Napoleon, should a storm strand him on Bornholm. This is the report I got from Denmark.15

Despite its mocking tone, this summary reinforces the relevance of history to the tale’s Gothic plot. The joke refers to Napoleon’s sea journey to his exile on St. Helena, which ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction. From the Island of Bornholm to Taman′: The Literary Trajectory of the Russian Imperial Uncanny
• Part I: The North
• PART II: THE SOUTH
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index