Radical Critics: 'Narodnaya literatura' and Ukraine

• In Event: Russian Radicals in Ukraine, Russian Radicals on Ukraine: Reception and Exchange

Abstract

This paper will explore the notion of Russian literature’s “narodnost’,” or lack thereof, as laid out by Nikolai Dobroliubov in his 1858 essay “O stepeni uchastiia narodnosti v razvitii russkoi” and other essays on poetry and folk song (Kol’tsov, Nikitin, Myl’nikov) in the context of his writing on literature written in Ukrainian (Shevchenko), to consider the meaning and significance of the notion of “narod” for the radical critics. For Dobroliubov, as well as Chernyshevsky, conceiving of the “narod” as an ethnically Russian collective was not as significant as conceiving of a “popular” collective rooted in the lower classes and the peasantry; in this context, he associated the Ukrainian language with folk culture, and the contemporary Russian literary language with the nobility, and described an interest in a future literature, and literary language, that would be medium between the two. Dobroliubov thus in certain respects rejects national hierarchy within the Russian Empire and in others reproduces the imperial and colonial subjugation of Ukrainian culture to Russian culture.

Author

• Helen R Stuhr-Rommereim, U of St. Andrews (UK)