2009/06/01 by Robert Romanchuk · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies #Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication #Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies #Perversion #Etymology #Literature #Psychoanalysis #Psychoanalytic theory #Art #Philosophy #Psychology
paper · doi:10.1080/00085006.2009.11092615
openalex publication_date 2009/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Gogol'’s “Viĭ” offers readers a “clinic” on Lacanian perversion, taking them through key psychoanalytic agencies—letter, mother, father, phallus, voice, and gaze—in their perverse modalities. Rather than seeking a definitive “identity” for “Viĭ” (as have earlier analyses), this study proposes that “Viĭ” is a condensed bundle of manifest and latent signifiers—that is, what psychoanalysis calls the symptom. Indeed, the best “etymology” of “Viĭ,” far more transparent than those offered before (vyty, viia, Vasiliĭ, vuĭ, viiaty, viko), is simply viĭ: Ukr. “bundle (of brush).” “Viĭ” is literally the symptom of the tale, the missing signifier which, rather than objectively signifying the tale’s content, makes a cut into the text itself—figured in its paratextual inscription at the opening footnote—and structures it from within. “Viĭ,” precisely as symptom, condenses all of the “etymologies” proposed to date by scholars, and makes multiple, bilingual (Ukrainian-Russian) “returns” of the repressed in the text.