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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

Art · Etymology · Literature · Perversion · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · Philosophy · Psychology

• Viy in Nikolai Gogol's Novella and Related Mythological Creatures in Ukrainian Folklore

  Open Access•Kostyantyn Rakhno•Religions•2023

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