Bandura Y. Constructing of images of Rus in M. Hohol`s creative legacy.

The PhD thesis is devoted to constructing of the images of Rus as a root metaphor in M. Hohol`s creative legacy and its reception in the intellectual space of the Russian Empire in the first half of XIXth century. The relevance of this work is related to the problem of M. Hohol`s national identity, the cultural and ideological influences, which is one of the central questions of the Ukrainian and Russian historiography. Hohol`s role as a European intellectual and Christian thinker in Hohol studies and other related fields of humanitarian disciplines is actualized. Accordingly M. Hohol`s reflection on the nation-building processes in the Russian Empire and Europe should be considered as a meaningful imperial image of Rus as a national idea and cultural myth, which was studied and formed during the period of Slavic romanticism. In this regard the thesis examines M. Hohol's historiosophical concept of «all-Russian» history from the point of view of the utopian and temporal projections on the past, present and future of Russia, mainly from the Ukrainian perspective. In this work for the first time formed a holistic (systemic) vision of the ways of constructing of images of Rus / Russia in the creative legacy of M. Hohol`; the degree of influence of the nineteenth century representatives of the Polish emigration (B. Zalieski, A. Mickiewicz) has been specified on the formation of M. Hohol`s «all-Russian» identity; the reception of the images of Rus in the early Ukrainophile tradition was specified (T. Shevchenko, P. Kulish, H. Andruzky); the role of M. Hohol`s linguistic ideas in the context of the formation of the Slavic linguistics as a scientific discipline is clarified; it has been deepened the knowledge about the ways of constructing of M. Hohol`s national (ethnic) «Ukrainian-Russian / Russian» identity within the framework of the «bat effect» formulated in the study – the situation of the «conflict» psychological state in which the Little or Southern Russian political and intellectual elite of the XVIIIth-XIXth centuries was; the research further developed the study of the contexts in which the writer's creative imagination was formed; it has been also made a complex interpretation of M. Hohol's creative legacy as an object of the utopian studies. A conclusion is made about M. Hohol's creation of the images of Russia as a critical Christian utopia in which the Ukrainian imagery that was grounded on the historical visions of the Ukrainian Slavophile occupied a prominent place. The results of this work can be used for further study of the conceptual, political-ideological, linguistic, historiosophical and theological aspects related to the formation of the intellectual field of the Russian Empire in the XIXth century. The experience of the Hohol`s biography and reinterpretation of the creative legacy reveal broad perspectives within the framework of the post-colonial theory, the study of imperial legacy in Ukraine; it reveals the features of imperial and colonial thinking and highlight the history of the modern Christian thought during the period of the long nineteenth century revival of the Slavic nations.