Трагедия Матери Сырой Земли ("Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки")

In Gogol's Dikan'ka stories cycle, the absence of the mother is evidentement. Each story, in fact, features a "stepmother" or a surrogate of some sort, who turns out to be a demonic entity, if not a witch. This paper argues that for Gogol the Mother God, originally venerated as the main deity, assumes the form of Moist Mother Earth, forgotten by the modern Slavonic man as he increasingly distances himself from the collettive (the "mir"). This process culminate in The Terrible Revenge in which Gogol highlights the transition from the feminine to the male principle, that is to say from the Moist Mother Earth to the apocryphal God of the Ukrainian sugna Epic poema ("duma").