Nikolai Gogol — as a biographical person and as a set of texts written by him — has become a fact not only of literature, but also of politics, and, more broadly, of nation- building process. From the answer to the question “who was Gogol?” — literally the following depends: which historical figures we are ready to retrospectively include in the body of the Ukrainian political nation that is now forming before our eyes. What civic, ideological and cultural parameters determine Ukrainian identity now and determined it in historical development. What is the relationship between the rhetorical and the factual in modern Ukrainian socio-political discourse.

In my article, I will consider different strategies for appropriating Nikolai Gogol by warring political discourses: from the classical imperial (“Gogol is a great Russian writer of universal importance”) to the modern reactionary-postmodernist (“Gogol as a model for Little Russian identity in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine”); from complete rejection in the context of the development of Ukrainian culture of the 19th century (“Gogol is a traitor to his native identity and language”) through attempts to mythologize Gogol’s creative circumstances (“Gogol is an agent of the tsarist secret police”) to the full integration of the writer into the Ukrainian literary canon by leading modern Ukrainian literary scholars.

In my work, I will rely on the reception of Gogol’s work and life by his contemporaries (V. Belinsky, P. Kulish, T. Shevchenko, F. Dostoevsky, etc), texts by political scientists and propagandists, as well as the works of modern Ukrainian and foreign researchers devoted to the issue of Gogol’s identity (M. Nazarenko, O. Ilnytsky, Yu. Ilchuk etc).