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Reading Gogol’ in Azeri: Parodic Genealogies and the Revolutionary Geopoetics of 1905

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Leah Feldman
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Abstract

This essay investigates the geopoetic strategies through which Muslim writers contributed to as well as undermined the consolidation of the Russian literary canon. Its central focus is the Azeri writer Celil Memmedquluzade’s translation of Gogol’’s work, revealing the politicization of Gogol”s poetics in the Muslim south Caucasus in 1905. Drawing upon Gogol’’s prose about the Russian provinces, its translation in the Caucasus, and its resurrection in literary theory, I illustrate the ways in which the poetics of the imperial provinces intersected with the Russian and Soviet imperial gaze, highlighting the internalizing force of imperial expansion as well as the radical alterity of the colonial experience. The early twentieth century was marked by a series of revolutionary upheavals in the imperial capital and periphery, as well as a Bolshevik ideological campaign to envision literature as an enlightened enterprise, that is, one characterized by both its scientific and political power. In dialectical fashion, the creation of a revolutionary poetics involved a repetition of Gogol’’s prose in order to reconcile and thus transcend the series of binaries associated with nineteenth century literature: center/periphery, oral/written, self/other. Gogol’’s resurrection in Memmedquluzade’s translations and in the hands of his Formalist and postcolonial critics highlights the role of Russian imperial geopoetics in simultaneously sustaining and subverting a revolutionary literary culture

Type
Russian Geopoetics
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , Summer 2016 , pp. 256 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 2016

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References

1. Jelil Memmedquluzade (Calil M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, 1866-1932) was a dramatist, poet, prosaist, and literary critic. In 1887, he graduated from the Gori Pedagogical Seminary and taught at local schools in the Georgian countryside. In 1903 he moved to Tbilisi to work as a correspondent for the leading Azeri language newspaper The Russian East (Şarq-i Rus), which was edited by his friend M∂h∂mm∂d ağa Şahtaxtinski. When the paper closed he bought the press and founded the Azeri language satirical paper Molla N∂sr∂ddin (Molla Nasreddin) in 1906. His most notable works include the short stories: “The Events in the Danabash Village” (Danabaş k∂ndinin ∂hvalatian), “The Russian Girl” (Rus Qizi), “Freedom in Iran” (Iranda hürriyy∂t), “Gurbanali Bey” (Qurban∂lib∂y), and “The Post-box” (Poçt qutusu), as well as the plays: “The Dead” (Ölül∂r) and “My Mother’s Books” (Anamm kitabi).

2. See: Bojanowska, Edyta M., Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007)Google Scholar; Shkandrij, Myroslav, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal, 2001)Google Scholar; Koropecky, Roman and Romanchuk, Robert, “Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol’s Dikan’ka Tales , Book 1” Slavic Review 62, no. 33 (Fall 2003), 525-47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Memmedquluzade’s Russian language books are collected in the Institute of Manuscripts of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences in Baku (Əlyazmalar însitutu) f. 6, v. 552, s. 319.

4. Edward+Said, , “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., ed. Mitchell, W. J. T. (Chicago, 2002), 241 Google Scholar.

5. In particular Mitchell points to the influence of Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault on Harvey’s Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Preface to the Second Edition of Landscape and Power,” Landscape and Power, vii-xv. Mitchell explicitly uses the term geopoetics in his introduction to a 2000 volume of Critical Inquiry. See Mitchell, , “Geopoetics: Space, Place and Landscape” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 173-74Google Scholar.

6. Indeed, a collection of recent scholarship has made important efforts to expand the canon. Examples of such interventions include: Grant, Bruce, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Ithaca, 2009)Google Scholar; Gould, Rebecca, “Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev,” Comparative Literature Studies 50, no. l (2013): 87–107 Google Scholar; Haber, Erika, The Myth of the Non-Russian: Iskander and Aitmatov’s Magical Universe (Lanham, 2003)Google Scholar; Murav, Harriet, “Violating the Canon: Reading Der Nister with Vasilii Grossman” Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 642-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murav, Harriet, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia (Stanford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ram, Harsha and Shatirshvili, Zaza. “Romantic Topography and the Dilemma of Empire: The Caucasus in the Dialogue of Georgian and Russian Poetry.” Russian Review 63, no. l (2004): 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yountchi, Lisa, “An Ode to Great Friendship: Russia, Iran, and the Soviet Tajik Writer” Clio 41, no. 2 (2002): 173-96Google Scholar; Caffee, Naomi, Russophonia: Towards a Transnational Conception of Russian-Language Literature (PhD diss, UCLA, 2013)Google Scholar; Schild, Kathryn, Between Moscow and Baku: National Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers (PhD diss. University of California at Berkeley, 2010)Google Scholar.

7. As Thomas de Waal’s recent article in Foreign Policy attests, Gogol “s work is still called upon to explain Soviet and post-Soviet geopolitics. De Waal writes, “How about skipping the political science textbooks when it comes to trying to understand the former Soviet Union and instead opening up the pages of Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Fyo-dor Dostoyevsky?” See: de Waal, Thomas, “How Gogol Explains the Post-Soviet World (and Chekhov and Dostoevsky.) The case for re(reading) Russia’s Greatest Literary Classics” Foreign Policy 192 (2012), 106–11Google Scholar; Most recently, the Jordan Center at NYU hosted two blog entries from contemporary Slavists discussing the 2014 revolution in Ukraine through Gogol “s oeuvre. Edyta Bojanowska’s entry from April 22, 2014, “All the King’s Horses: Ukraine, Russia, and Gogol’s Troika,” traces the troika as a symbol for Russian messianism from Gogol “s work in the nineteenth century to the recent Olympic program. See: http://www.jordanrussiacenter.org/news/kings-horses-ukraine-russian-gogols-troika/#.VxUzcPkrLcs (last accessed 29 January 2016); In a post from March 2, 2014 entitled “Russia and Ukraine: Stupidity, Cynicism or Both?,” Eliot Borenstein concludes his critique of the historical inaccuracy of US media representations of Ukraine by turning to Gogol’ to explain the fruitlessness of disputes over identity, citing both Gogoľ’s Russified and Ukrainainized names, “You said it, Nikolai! Or Mikola. I really don’t care which one.” See: http://www.jordanrussiacenter.0rg/news/russia-ukraine-stupidity-cynicism/#.VxUOkfkrLcs (last accessed January 29, 2016).

8. Notable scholarship on Russian/Soviet imperial connections with pan-Turkic culture includes the work of Reynolds, Michael A., Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shissler, Ada Holland, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Hirst, Samuel J., “Anti-Westernism on the European Periphery: The Meaning of Soviet Turkish Convergence in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 72, no. l (Spring 2013): 32–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirst, , “Transnational Anti-Imperialism and the National Forces: Soviet Diplomacy and Turkey, 1920-1923,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 214–226 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ertiirk, Nergis, “Toward a Literary Communism: The 1926 Baku Turcological Congress” Boundary 2, 40.2 (2013):183–213 Google Scholar; Rorlich, Azade-Ayse, “The Challenge of Belonging: The Muslims of Late Imperial Russia and the Contested Terrain of Identity and Gender,” in Democracy and Pluralism in Muslim Eurasia, ed., YaacovRo’i, (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Rorlich, Azade-Ayse, “Intersecting Discourses in the Press of the Muslims of Crimea, Middle Volga and Caucasus: The Woman Question and the Nation,” in Acar, Feridé and Güneş-Ayata, Ayşe, eds., Gender and Identity Construction: Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey (Leiden, 2000)Google Scholar.

9. Postcolonial readings of Gogol’ (most notably those of Myroslav Shkandrij and Edyta Bojanowska) conceptualize representations of Ukraine through the conflicting forces of exoticization and domestication. Russian imperial narratives presented Ukraine through divergent and often anachronistic discourses of Romantic nationalism, westernization and Orientalism, marking its geopolitical linkages to Russia, Poland and the Caucasus. Shkandrij’s Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times is structured around a comparative Orientalism, linking representations of Ukraine to the Caucasus in Russia’s Asiatic or Oriental imperial periphery. Indeed, as Shkandrij highlights, Ukraine and its inhabitants were often described as “Asian.” Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine, 79. Bojanowska, ’s Nikolai Gogol: Between Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007)Google Scholar also dramatizes me tension oeiween mese contacting identity discourses ana geopolitical alignments in Gogoľ’s writings, focusing in particular on the ways in which Gogol’s works project the culture of the periphery onto their vision of metropolitan Petersburg. While Gogol’ has been the most popular focus of postocolonial readings, post-Soviet scholarship has also considered the topic of Pushkin’s blackness. See: Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer, Svobodny, Nicole, and Trigos, Ludmilla A., eds., Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Evanston, 2006)Google Scholar.

10. In his compelling discussion of translations and productions of Shakespeare in post-revolutionary Russia, Aydin Dzhebrailov highlights the ways in which these adaptations reveal a dynamic interplay between avant-garde and socialist realist aesthetics and Stalinization. Dzhebrailov notes the influence of Caucasian productions of Othello on Stalinist kitsch aesthetics. Though he focuses largely on the individual cult of Stalin and his role as a master censor, he nonetheless identifies the production of the play in the Caucasus and its thematic concern for political marginality as motivation for its ascension to prominence in the Soviet canon. See: Dzhebrailov, Aydin, “The King is Dead. Long Live the King! Post-Revolutionary and Stalinist Shakespeare,” trans. Porter, Cathy, History Workshop 32 (1991): 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Kujundžić engages with Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of parody in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics as the force generating the renewal or rebirth of the novelistic genre. Kujundžić, Dragan, The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheans After Modernity (Albany, 1997), 40–41 Google Scholar.

12. Ibid, 39.

13. Etkind argues that postcolonial criticism not only clarifies Gogol’, but that similarly Gogol’ explains Bhabha’s theory of “colonial doubling.” He appropriates the term from Bhabha’s influential essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in his 1994 book The Location of Culture (London, 1994). Etkind, Alexander, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, 2011), 14–15 Google Scholar.

14. Despite their common interest in Bhabha, methodologically Etkind’s analysis focuses on estranging postcolonial theory by exposing Bhabha’s and Said’s unacknowledged Russian sources. Kujundžic, on the other hand, introduces a critical reading of parody through which he reads the geopolitics of Russian imperialism. This entails introducing an intellectual genealogy—from Nietzsche to Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman—as a way of thinking through the geopolitics of Formalist poetics.

15. These included the series of uprisings across the Russian empire in 1905-1906, the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1907, and the Young Turk Revolution 1908.

16. For a discussion of social relations and the battle for identity in the 1905-1906 Azeri-Armenian conflict see, Sargent, Leslie, “The ‘Armeno-Tatar War’ in the South Caucasus, 1905-1906: Multiple Causes, Interpreted Meanings” Ab Imperio 4 (2010): 143–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Molla N∂sr∂ddin was an Azeri language satirical journal edited by Memmedquluzade. It was published between 1906 and 1917 in Tbilisi, in 1921 in the northern Iranian city of Tabriz and between 1922 and 1931 in Baku. The major issues of reform covered in the journal included education, as well as women’s and worker’s rights. See: Garibova, Jala, “Molla Nasraddin—The Magazine: Laughter that Pricked the Conscience of a Nation” Azerbaijan International 4, no. 3 (1996), at http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/43_folder/43_articles/43_mollamag.html (last accessed 29 January 2016)Google Scholar; See also Mir∂hm∂dov, ᣴziz, Az∂rbaycan Molla N∂sr∂ddini (Baku, 1980)Google Scholar; Bennigsen, Alexandre, “‘Molla Nasreddin’ et la presse satirique musulmane de Russie avant 1917” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 3, no. 3 (July-September 1962), 505-20Google Scholar; Bennigsen, Alexandre et Lemercier-Quelquejay, Chantai, La presse et le mouvement national chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 (Paris, 1964)Google Scholar. Füyuzat (Enlightenment) was a literary journal edited by the Azeri author and critic AH bey Hiiseynzade and was published in Baku between 1906 and 1907.

18. For more information about the mobilization of oil workers in the Caucasus and the recognition of the Hummat—the first all-Muslim Social-Democratic party—at the Sixth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1906, see: Bennigsen, Alexandre A. and Wimbush, S. Enders, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago, 1979), 14 Google Scholar; See also Kleveman, Lutz, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (New York, 2003), 11–30 Google Scholar.

19. See Altstadt, Audrey, “The Azerbaijani Bourgeoisie and the Cultural-Enlightenment Movement in Baku: First Steps Toward Nationalism,” in Suny, Ronald Grigor, ed., Transcaucasia, Nationalism, and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Ann Arbor, 1983), 199–209 Google Scholar.

20. Indeed, the play was performed six times in Tbilisi in 1906 and thus would have been familiar to the journal’s readers. See: Mamed, Takhira Gashamkyzy, Azerbaidzhan-skaia natsional’naia dramaturgiia (Tbilisi, 2001), 91 Google Scholar.

21. For a discussion of the particular reform agenda of the jadids see: Khalid, Adeeb, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, 1998)Google Scholar. This interest in reform as such can be read as analogous to the Russian avant-garde’s interest in revolution as such. On this topic see Nina Gurianova’s discussion of the “aesthetics of anarchy,” Gurianova, Nina, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Avant-garde (Berkeley, 2012)Google Scholar.

22. N∂sr∂ddin, Molla 1 (1906), cited in M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, Calil, Əs∂rl∂ri 4 cildd∂ (Baku, 2004), 2: 4 Google Scholar.

23. Ibid.

24. For instance, to a Persian an Azeri might be called “Turk” whereas for a Georgian, Armenian or Russian an Azeri speaker would be called “Muslim.” This shift was particularly relevant after the Russian annexation of the Caucasus brought more “gaurs” or unbelievers (as Russians were called) to the region. The general term Muslim would have also been used to refer to both Sunnis and Shi’a Muslims.

25. See: Swietochowski, Tadeusz, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920: The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge, 1985), 30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also: Altstadt, Audrey, “The Azerbaijani Bourgeoisie and the Cultural-Enlightenment Movement in Baku: First Steps toward Nationalism,” in Suny, , Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change, 199–209.Google Scholar

26. Gogol’’s line completes his satire of the provincial imperial bureaucracy when the mayor breaks the fourth wall to address the audience. He inquires of the audience, “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!” (Chemu smeetes’ ? Nad soboiu smeetes’!). Gogol’, , Polnoe sobraine sochinenii v 14 tomakh (Moscow, 1937-52), 4:94 Google Scholar. The trope of self-reflection also alludes to the play’s epigraph, which reads, “There is no blaming the mirror if your face is crooked” (“na zerkalo necha peniat,’ koli rozha kriva”). Gogol ‘, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tomakh, 4: 4.

27. The early figures of the Ukrainian national movement include, the poet Taras Shevchenko (18141861) and the ethnographer Mykola Kostomarov (Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov) (18171885). In his seminal Ukrainian nationalist ethnography, “Two Russian Populations” (Dve russkie narodnosti), Kostomarov distinguished the autocracy and collectivism of Northern or Great Rus’ (Russia), from the liberty and individualism of Southern or Little Rus’ (Ukraine). See: Kostomarov, Nikolai Ivanovich, “Dve russkie narodnosti,” Osnova 3 (1861): 33–80 Google Scholar and Kostomarov, Mykola, “Two Russian Nationalities,” in Lindheim, Ralph and Luckyj, George S. N., eds., Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995 (Toronto, 1996), 122–45Google Scholar.

28. The vision of literature as social critique is indebted to a genealogy of nineteenth century Russian social and aesthetic theory including the work of Gogol’, Vissarion Belinskii and Nikolai Chernyshevskii. To this end Chernyshevskii described this engaged literary tradition as “the Gogol’ period in Russian literature.” See: Chernyshevskii, Nikolai “Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury,” Svoremennik, 12 (1855), 1–2, 4, 7, 9-12 (1856)Google Scholar; “Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature,” in N. G. Chernyshevsky Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1953).

29. Gogol’ gained new popularity, particularly in the American academe, through the work of the Russian Formalists and Semioticians during the first part of the twentieth century. These include the essays of Tynianov, Eikhenbaum, Chizhevskii, and Bakhtin from the 1920s and Lotman’s work from the 1960s.

30. Eikhenbaum describes this in particular as “imitative skaz.” See Eikhenbaum, , “How Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ is made,” in Meyer, Priscilla and Rudy, Stephen, eds., Dosto-evsky and Gogol: Texts and Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1979), 119-21Google Scholar.

31. Bakhtin, , Problems ofDostoevsky’s Poetics, trans, and ed., Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis, 1984), 194 Google Scholar; Tynianov, Yuri, “Dostoevsky and Gogol: Towards a Theory of Parody,” in Dostoevsky and Gogol, 101-18Google Scholar; Eikhenbaum, Boris, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is Made,” in Dostoevsky and Gogol, 101-18Google Scholar; Chizhevsky, Dmitri, “On Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” in Dostoevsky and Gogol, 137-60Google Scholar.

32. Kujundžić illustrates the seminal role of Nietzsche in Russian Formalist thought. Dragan Kujundžić, The Returns of History.

33. The term Tatar language was used by Russian officials and orientalists to refer generally to Turkic Muslims of the Russian empire. However, the term designates distinct ethno-linguistic groups of Turkic Muslim communities inhabiting the Crimea, the Volga region, and Siberia.

34. M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, Calil, Əs∂rl∂ri 4 cildd∂, 2:11–12 Google Scholar.

35. Gogol’, , Polnoe sobraine sochinenii i pisem v 23 tomakh, eds. Annenkova, E. I. and Mann, lu. (Moscow, 2003) 1:70 Google Scholar.

36. Molla N∂sr∂ddin 5 (May 5, 1906) reprinted in Molla N∂sr∂ddin, 10 cild∂ (Baku, 1996), 1:6.

37. The Muslim modernist thinker Jamāļ Al-Dïn Al-Afghãni used the term to signify Islamic socialist governance. See Moazzam, Anwar, Jamal Al-Dīn Al-Afghāni: A Muslim Intellectual (New Delhi, 1983), 34 Google Scholar.

38. In the story, the romantic painter Piskarev procures opium through a Persian cloth merchant. As payment the merchant asks for a painting depicting himself accompanied by a beautiful woman reclining next to him on a divan. The orientalist fantasy thus serves as a frame for Piskarev’s hallucinations. Gogol’, , “Nevskii Prospekt,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tomakh, 3:7–46 Google Scholar.

39. In his article, “Gogol and Molla Nasreddin,” Aziz Sharif describes Memmedqu-luzade, citing his pen name Molla Nasreddin, as “the Azerbaijani Gogol’.” Sharif affirms that a comparison between “The Carriage” and “Gurbanali Bey” would provide “(t)he best means of determining the degree of the Gogolian influence on the Azerbaijani writer.” While the short format of the article does not allow Sharif to elaborate in detail on this comparison, he similarly cites Memmedquluzade’s attention to language, his capability to “masterfully construct his artistic language, which excites the reader’s passionate indignation regarding (these) events and their participants” as a distinguishing feature of his work. Aziz Sharif, “Gogol’ i Molla Nasreddin,” Bakinskii rabochi, March 4,1937.

40. Gogol‘‘s story was originally published in Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin’s journal The Contemporary (Sovremennik). See: Gogol’, , “Koliaska,” in Polrtoe sobranie sochenenii v 7 tomakh (Moscow, 1937-1952), 3:177-89Google Scholar. Memmedquluzade’s story was originally published in a booklet form by the publisher Qeyr∂t in Tbilisi, Georgia. See: M∂mma∂quluzad∂, , “Qurban∂li B∂y,” in “Qurban∂li B∂y” in Əs∂rl∂ri 4 cild∂ (Baku, 2004), 1:174-93Google Scholar.

41. Priscilla Meyer argues that Gogol’ drew upon elements of Honoré de Balzac’s fiction as material for his descriptions of city life, combining elements from Balzac’s psychological sketches with supernatural and fantastic traces of German Romanticism and Ukrainian culture when writing the Petersburg tales. Among the formal features of Balzac’s prose, his metonymie description of the carrik in La Comédie humaine (18151830), as Meyer argues, forms the basis for Gogoľ’s “The Overcoat” (Shintel’, 1842). Meyer, Priscilla, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Madison, 2008), 26–33 Google Scholar. See also Fanger, Donald, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study ofDo-stoevsky in Relation to Dickens and Balzac (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 101-29Google Scholar.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid. Indeed, these mustaches are echoed in Gogol’’s description of Akaky as a mustachioed ghost in “The Overcoat.”

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid, 185.

46. Ibid, 179.

47. Calil M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, “Qurban∂li B∂y,” 175. The name-day is a tradition in Russian Orthodoxy that corresponds to the days of celebration for the Orthodox saints.

48. Ibid.

49. Gogol’, “Koliaska,” 179.

50. Calil M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, “Qurban∂li B∂y,” 175. The term “meat (mincing) knives” refers to the specific knife used for preparing katlet, a Russian dish made of ground meat, formed in a patty and pan-fried.

51. Jacques Derrida outlines a relationship among outlaws: the beast and the sovereign. The beast is one who is ignorant of the law, and the sovereign is one who can suspend the law; yet man’s sovereignty operates between the figures of the beast and God. The sovereign makes/has himself a beast and in exercising this relationality between these forms of power and outsideness, Derrida highlights the intertwining relationship between logos and the nation-state, which in turn calls for the latter’s deconstruction. In this way, the sovereignty of the Russian police chief is both upheld and subverted by his objectification/animalization. Derrida, See, The Beast and The Sovereign, vol. 1, Lisse, Michel, Mallet, Marie-Louise, and Michaud, Ginette, eds., trans., Bennigton, Geoffrey (Chicago, 2011), 60-61Google Scholar.

52. M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, “Qurban∂li B∂y,” 191.

53. Ibid, 185.

54. Ibid, 177.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid, 191.

57. Ibid, 178.

58. Calil M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, “Qurban∂li B∂y,” 174.

59. Ibid, 191,193.

60. Ibid, 193.

61. Molla N∂sr∂ddin 14 (1909), see Calil M∂mm∂dquluzad∂, Əs∂rl∂ri 4 cildd∂, 4: 183-84.

62. See Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol, 189-210.

63. As Dragan Kujundžić argues, the very idea of the false inspector in Gogol “s work recalls the series of pretenders to the Russian throne by alleged sons of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, a tradition that “profoundly affected Russian genealogical, patrilinear certainty.” Dragan Kujundžić, “‘After’ Russian Post-Colonial Idenity,” 897.