Трагедия Матери Сырой Земли («Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки»)
The Tragedy of the Moist Mother Earth ("Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka")

Summary/Abstract: In Gogol’s Dikan’ka stories cycle, the absence of a fundamental figure for the genre in question (the mother) is evident. Each story, in fact, features a “stepmother” or a surrogate of some sort, who turns out to be a demonic entity, if not a witch. This paper argues that for Gogol the Mother God, originally venerated as the main deity, assumes the form of Moist Mother Earth, forgotten by the modern Slavonic man as he increasingly distances himself from the collective (the “mir”). This process culminates in the Dikan’ka’s tale The Terrible Revenge, in which Gogol highlights the transition from the feminine to the male principle, that is to say from the Moist Mother Earth to the apocryphal God of the Ukrainian sung epic poem (“duma”). Evenings on a Farm Near Dikan’ka tells of the dangerous path trodden by modern man, a path where he – in the empty space left by Moist Mother Earth – takes exclusively responsibility for the eponymous revenge.

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