Literature as “pioneering” philosophy: reflection on “anti-history” in the Ukrainian culture of the 1st half of the 19th century

The article is aimed to prove that the most innovative ideas of social philosophy historically first appear in literature, in the half-conscious artistic form, before they become assimilated and clarified by scholarly discourse. The proposed case to illustrate this statement is the subject of “anti-history” with which Ukrainian writings had been preoccu pied in the most critical period of Ukraine’s colonial history within the Russian empire — the 1800s—1840s. The predominant intellectual consensus of the time was that Ukraine had been politically “dead” (a “non-historical nation”, according to Hegel), and it is in this cultural context that the author scrutinizes the key necrophiliac images in Nikolai Gogol’s works (the “dead beauty”, the vindictive dead, etc.). Gogol’s inner conflict is thus revealed as occurring between his subaltern’s emotional self, on one side, and his social persona, on the other side, rather than between his Ukrainian and Russian nationalism, as claimed by many contemporary scholars. The article traces also how Gogol’s version of Ukraine’s “anti-history”, after having been reversed in political writings by “brothers of Saints Cyril and Methodius”, has affected the subsequent development of Ukrainian cultural nationalism.