The paper explores how Gogol’s Viy constructs fear through language, focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the assumed reader’s experience of horror. Drawing on conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and conceptual integration theory, it argues that Gogol’s text transforms the metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING into the blend SEEING IS DANGEROUS, making perception itself the source of terror. The study situates these mechanisms within a biocultural framework of horror, suggesting that Gogol’s language targets evolved fear responses linked to uncertainty, darkness, and predation.

In Viy, fear arises not from explicit monstrosity but from subtler linguistic choices that destabilize perception and other familiar cognitive frames. Acts of seeing – especially Homa’s compulsion to look at Viy – are portrayed as fatal cognitive events in which visual perception, understanding and trauma converge. Verbs of vision prove crucial for understanding both the fear of predation and the focalizer’s fragile relationship with knowledge.