Join CSEEES for some tricks (and possibly some treats) as we host a special, spooky edition of our Graduate Student Lecture. Our autumn 2023 lecture entitled "'To Viy or not to Viy?': Adaptations of Nikolai Gogol’s 'Viy'" will be given by Andrey Ridling and Siobhán Seigne (Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures).
Abstract
The beginning of the lecture will involve an overview of the original text of Nikolai Gogol’s “Viy” and the films we will be discussing, the Soviet adaptation Viy (1967) and the Serbian adaptation Sveto Mesto (1990), as well as an introduction to some theories that are used in the analyses (adaptation theory and psychoanalysis). A common feature of adaptations of Gogol’s “Viy” is the varying extent to which the characters in the original text are elevated to greater roles, reduced to minor characters, or, as is often the case for the eponymous monster Viy, are excluded altogether. Seigne will explore the witch character pannochka in three ways (1) her increasing visibility and agency through the adaptations, (2) gender ambiguity, and (3) ultimately her lack of place in the Symbolic Order. Ridling will focus on the religious aspects of Viy. Gogol’s original text is based around seminary students, Orthodox Christian traditions regarding funerals, and an inferred struggle between the protagonist’s Christian faith and the undefined magical powers of the witch/pannochka. However, there are very few explicit references to Christian theology or texts. In contrast, Kropachyov and Ershov expand the vague ‘prayers’ and ‘incantations’ that Khoma reads in the original text into specific readings from the Bible. Ridling argues that these function as both narrative devices (which accentuate Khoma’s declining faith) and thematic devices (which show the impotence of religion in the face of the supernatural powers of pannochka).
Following the two presentations, the audience will be invited to discuss the analyses and broader topics, such as the validity of ‘fidelity,’ the importance of the monster Viy, and the potential multiplicity of adaptations of a single work.
Speaker Bios
Andrey Ridling is a second-year student in the Russian for the Professions Master’s program in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and FLAS fellow. Andrey received his BA in Russian language, culture, and literature and Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina. He also spent three years living in Russia working as an ESL teacher. His primary research interests include the Udmurt language, culture, and literature, indigenous studies of the former Soviet Union and modern Russian Federation, and Russian literature and poetry.
Siobhán Seigne is a FLAS fellow in her second year of the combined MA/PhD program in the department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. She is on the literature and culture track and specializes in Russian as well as South-Eastern European Language, Literature and Film. Siobhán earned her BA in Russian at the University of Rochester in 2019. Following graduation, she participated in two Fulbright grants as an English Teaching Assistant, teaching in Novosibirsk, Russia, Bender, Moldova and Zagreb, Croatia. Her current research interests are depictions of women in Russian and South-Eastern European literature and film and theories of violence.
