Harkusha the Noble Bandit and the “Minority” of Little Russian Literature

From the 1820s to the 1840s, there appeared a number of texts by such writers as Vasilii Narezhnyi, Orest Somov, and Hryhorii Kvitka‐Osnov'ianenko that tell tales of Semen Harkusha, a figure straight out of Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits who terrorized the rich and powerful in eighteenth‐century Ukraine. Written in Russian, Ukrainian, or in an idiom that oscillates between the two, this corpus of texts articulates the obverse, darker side of what the authors of this article argue elsewhere, in connection with Gogol's Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka , is “the singing and dancing” that defines the field of Little Russian literature. If only by virtue of its “strange” linguistic practices, “incomprehensible to a Russian,” this “supposed” literature, as Russian critics of the day put it, would accord with the notion of a “minor literature” as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. However, besides the disruption these texts introduced into the Russian imperial literary system through their generic lability, the “high coefficient of deterritorialization” that the two critics insist is characteristic of literary minority is also effected in the Harkusha texts on a diegetic level, as the political (noble banditry) expressed Oedipally (in scenes of transgressive seduction and matchmaking); and on the level of enunciation, as (the internalization of) the work of the imperial censor's office.