Authors

Inna Tigountsova¹;  ¹ The Brilliant Club/Researchers in Schools, UK

Discussion

This paper focuses on the neo-Gothic in a selection from the post-socialist literary production of a contemporary Russian woman writer, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and compares her style of Gothic to that of a novel by a young Ukrainian writer Andrii Liubka Karbid to place both in post-colonial East European context. Petrushevskaia’s texts I investigate here include her horror novel Nomer odin, ili v Sadakh drugikh vozmozhnostei (2004) and four dialogues from her collection Chernaia babochka (2009). Contrary to earlier Petrushevskaia, Nomer Odin’s fictional discourse focuses on political implications of colonial policies in the ‘Russian’ Arctic Siberia in its post-colonial state. I argue that Neo-Gothic mode is used to portray the irrational and the uncanny in post-Soviet literature, and it is especially helpful in depictions of the humorous uncanny in post-Soviet Liubka and Petrushevskaia. “Monstrosity marks a . . . destabilization of power relations,” and is used, I propose, in postcolonial discourse to address the traumas of the past. (Botting, 10)