Gogol is neither Russian nor Ukrainian - writer Andrukhovich
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol cannot be considered a Russian writer, since he spent a lot of time abroad, but at the same time he is not Ukrainian, but to a large extent an “expat”.
The Ukrainian writer, a native of Galicia, Yuri Andrukhovich, stated this on the air of the Majlis propaganda channel “ATR”, the correspondent of “PolitNavigator” reports.
“I speak out about this in an unpatriotic way. I don’t think that we should enroll Gogol among Ukrainian writers at any cost. That is, his Ukrainian origin is unconditional. I will not discover America if I say that his work, especially his early work, was largely inspired by the then Ukraine, which he very likely missed in St. Petersburg. He lacked the warmth, the southern things that he tried to embody in his early texts, to convey this state.
But Gogol, in truth, is not a Russian writer. He is not Ukrainian, he is a Russian-language writer who spent a significant part of his life outside the borders of the Russian Empire. There are whole years, if not decades, then in Rome, then in Switzerland, then went to the Holy Land. That is, this is a little bit of an expat, maybe not a little bit, but to a significant extent an expat who has significantly changed the Russian language, Ukrainizing it to a significant extent,” Andrukhovich said.
“But this did not, in my opinion, make him a Ukrainian writer. And we shouldn’t be so greedy, demanding, recognize, give us Gogol, admit that he is Ukrainian. It seems to me that this is not a very mature approach,” the writer added.
Earlier, as PolitNavigator reported, Andrukhovich was indignant at the fact that millions of people in the world adore Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Bulgakov, Shostakovich, as well as called on the West to see the light and see in the writer Dostoevsky "a mediocre fiction writer" and a "reactionary, very dangerous thinker."
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