Haunted Empire

Valeria Sobol is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Febris Erotica and a coeditor of Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Haunted Empire is an outstanding contribution to nineteenth-century studies that brings the 'Gothic turn' to the fore and illuminates hitherto unexamined aspects of Russia's imperial experience.(The Russian Review) Valeria Sobol's closely researched, absorbingly written monograph turns a long-awaited Gothic lens on Russian and Ukrainian literature of the Romantic era.(Slavonic and East European Review) Timely, concise, and brilliant. Sobol's lucid and fluid prose ably traverses a host of conceptual frames and disciplinary fields. A necessary reading for Slavists, comparatists, and historians alike. Akin to finding a brittle old map of the Russian imperial consciousness with striking twenty-first century resonance.(Slavic Review) Valeria Sobol's book applies a colonial lens to analyze gothic motives in the Russian-language literature of the nineteenth century....While the English gothic has been studied from a postcolonial perspective, Haunted Empire pioneers this approach in the Russian imperial context.(Ab Imperio)

• Introduction: From the Island of Bornholm to Taman: The Literary Trajectory of the Russian Imperial UncannyPart I: The North1. A Gothic Prelude: Nikolai Karamzin's "The Island of Bornholm"2. In Search of the Russian Middle Ages: The Livonian Tales of the 1820s3. "Gloomy Finland" and Russian Gothic Tales of AssimilationPart II: The South4. Ukraine: Russia's Uncanny Double5. On Mimicry and Ukrainians: Empire and the Gothic in Antonii Pogorelsky's The Convent Graduate6. 'Tis Eighty Years Since: Panteleimon Kulish's Gothic Ukraine