IN THE GROTESQUE MELTING POT. ON THE LITERARY WRITING OF MYKOLA HOHOL (GOGOL) – FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

The article analyzes Mykola Hohol’s (Gogol’s) works with respect to the category of the grotesque. Identifying a broad range of literary contexts for Gogol’s writing (Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe etc.), it argues that he gave a unique shape to the grotesque and used it flexibly to represent the Russian reality. The writer not only caricatured his heroes, but also showed a positive but hidden side of the world he lived in. Thanks to this, Hohol became an important inspiration for later authors who employed the category of the grotesque in their works.

The literary background of Hohol’s grotesque was undoubtedly European Romanticism. Grotesque became the Romantics’ weapon in the fight for the right to express subjective, “irrational” associations and in the pursuit of free, unrestricted fantasy. On the aesthetic plane, it motivated the emergence of new categories in art that negated classicist taste and at the same time anticipated modernism.

These included ugliness. It undermined and relativized the dominant, aesthetic canon of idealized beauty. It paved the way for images of low, trivial, puppet-like, rhizomatic reality. Grotesque expressed demonic and satanic motifs close to “black romanticism”, which also appeared in Hohol’s works. The grotesque removed the cognitive, communicative, moral and aesthetic self-censorship of the imagination, imposed on writers and artists by institutions and bodies guarding the political order. It shaped the liberated, authentic language of artistic fantasy.

Hohol’s mercilessly exposing novels and short stories reveals grotesque deformations in phenomena generally considered “practical”, “lifelike”, “acceptable”, “obvious” and “natural”. Romantics therefore saw the grotesque as a guarantor of freedom of creation, of unmasking and critical perception of the world free from moralizing, of discovering deformations inherent in the nature of existence itself: in interpersonal, class or ethnic relations. By combining with the Romantic affirmation of individualism, subjectivity and agency, the grotesque consequently gave writers and artists a free hand in relation to the prevailing patterns, conventions and genre norms.