In this presentation, Professor Sobol will introduce her book project that examines the Gothic elements in Russian literature (mysterious castles, ruins, haunted landscapes, ghosts, persecuted maidens, etc.) in their imperial context. While the predilection for Gothic tropes in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian literature has been typically interpreted as a tribute to the fashionable Western trend, Haunted Empire argues that, instead, Russian Gothic fiction was a key literary form that dramatized deep historical and cultural tensions unique to the Russian imperial situation: a peculiar symbiosis of the imperial and national identities; blurred boundaries between the subjects and objects of colonization and imperial dominance; and instability of the relationship between center and periphery. This study applies the “North/South” geocultural axis, typical of British Gothic literature, to the particularly Russian situation where the Finnish/Baltic “North” and the Ukrainian “South” figure as colonized Others that are paradoxically integral to Russia’s own mythology of origins. Through specific literary examples, Professor Sobol will demonstrate that, in the Russian Gothic, the empire’s Northern and Southern borderlands are consistently depicted as dangerous uncanny places that destabilize the characters’ imperial and national identities.