This article explores the ideological implications of the Gothic mode in Panteleimon Kulish's first novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). I show that the multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel—from Walter Scottian ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains, uncanny ethnic Others, and supernatural phantoms—produce an intricate play of temporalities, identities, and allegiances that ultimately create a highly ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dark period of chaos overcome by the country's incorporation into the Russian empire. Rather than dismissing Kulish's engagement with the Gothic as a tribute to the fashionable western trend, I argue that this mode serves as a conduit to some of the work's most pressing ideological and historical concerns and ultimately yields a more nuanced insight into the author's complex position as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire.

This article explores Aleksandr Herzen's use of the lovesickness topos in his novel Kto vinovat? (1847) in the context of the long literary and medical traditions of lovesickness and the specifically Russian situation of the 1840s. Valeria Sobol argues that Herzen was among the first Russian writers to exploit the semiotics and diagnostics of lovesickness in order to address the questions of human spirituality and the status of scientific knowledge. Given Herzen's frequentiy proclaimed antispiritualist and antidualist position and the novel's apparent anti-Romantic pathos, one would expect him to reject the essentially dualist notion of lovesickness as a “malady of the soul,” but the novel presents a far more complex picture. Herzen's struggle to reconcile the new scientific spirit of his age with the Romantic heritage reflects the transitional nature of the decade in which the novel was written.