Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode 290, an interview with the author of Wanted Empire, Gothic, and the Russian Imperial Uncanny.

Today we have a special guest, Valeria Sobel, who's a professor of Slavic

languages and Littatures, from the University of Illinois Urbana

Champagne. She's the author of Haunted Empire, Gothic, and the Russian Imperial Uncanny.

Welcome to the podcast, Professor Solow.

Thank you so much.

I'm very happy to be here.

It's an honor. Thank you. In the podcast, we've covered a number of literary giants in Russian and Soviet history like

Chekhov, Tolstoy, Akhmatova,yzen, Pasternak and Gorky, as well as the development of Russian literature.

But your book takes this to a whole other level that I believe many of my listeners would be fascinated by.

What intrigued me right away was two terms that are in the title of your book, Gothic and Unc uncanny. So what do you mean by them?

Yeah, thank you. So it's in different direction also because I don't really deal with many giants.

I look at a lot of minor figures actually in Russian and Ukrainian literary,

minor at least by, you know, by the standards of sort of canon. Yeah, so we can talk about it later, maybe, but in terms of Gothic and uncanny. So Gothic is, we're used to it more as an architectural term, right?

But it was also a literary genre.

So as an architectural term, right, we'll know basically what it means, right?

Cathedral's right of a medieval period

or neo-gothic, pseudo-gothic architecture

of many college campuses, not Urbana Champaign,

not a university, but not a university, but many others.

But the term itself actually dates

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