Costumes in Petersburg and the Provinces : Nikolai Gogol's portraits of Ukraine and Russia

This theses examines the portrait of Ukrainians and Russians in the short stories St. Johns Eve, Christmas Eve, The Overcoat and the play The Goverment Inspector by the Ukranian born Russian 19th century author Nikolai Gogol from a post-colonial and sociological perspective. I investigate the function of clothes and the relationship between centre and periphery, and colonizer and colonized. The post-colonial theories that is used comes mainly from Albert Memmi, Homi K. Bhabha and Tamar Koplatadze, and the sociological terms that I use is founded by Erving Goffman. My conclusion is that both the Ukrainian och Russian population (except from the Romanovs) should be considerd as colonized and that the Ukrainians is trying to mimicry the Russian culture. On the other hand does Gogol portray an independent Ukrainian population who has the right of suverenity. I show that the Ukrainian mentality in Gogols’ literature is the same as today except from the lack of mimicry: Zelensky is not wearing suits like Putin – he’s wearing sweaters in military green with a text that says: ”I AM UKRANIAN”.