Browsing by Subject "Cities and towns in literature"

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Eccentric cities: Nikolai Gogol's Saint Petersburg and Jan Neruda's Prague
(2005) Mayhew, Linda Marie; Pichova, Hana
In Universe of the Mind, Yuri Lotman proposes that some cities are “eccentric”. These eccentric cities do not clearly correspond to the nation in which they are located because of discrepancies in architecture, geography, or politics, thus pushing them to the edge or beyond a country’s identity. The cities of Saint Petersburg and Prague represent two examples of cities existing beyond the boundaries of their respective cultures in the nineteenth century. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire and “Window to the West”, represented a focus on foreign rather than native culture. Similar tensions between internal and external cultures plagued Prague, the capital of an imagined Czech nation, governed by the Austrian Empire and dominated by German language and art forms. This dissertation explores the ways in which these two eccentrically located urban spaces express the tensions between Western and Eastern Europe that arise from their geographical positioning and historical development as depicted in Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg Tales (1833-1842) and Jan Neruda’s Prague Tales (1867-1878). These short story collections reflect the complex cultural geography of Petersburg and Prague and the complications of daily living caused by each city’s particular eccentricity. In Chapters One and Two, I explore the dualities of cultural and physical space in Petersburg and Prague as portrayed in Gogol’s Petersburg Tales and Neruda’s Prague Tales. Based on a binary system of interior and exterior, I examine the physical and semiotic space within the city, contrasting characters’ homes with streets and workplaces. In order to connect Gogol’s and Neruda’s portrayals of these cities to the actual physical space in the city, I explore architectural trends relevant to their writing. In Chapters Three and Four, I expand the binary structure of interior and exterior space into a larger context of native and foreign, as I compare Gogol’s and Neruda’s portrayal of Petersburg and Prague to their short stories and essays on Western European cities. The contrast between Western and Eastern European cities reveals how the author’s utilize themes of natural and artificial cities, belonging and alienation, and spiritual fulfillment to define cities and differentiate them from each other.