Eccentric cities : Nikolai Gogol's Saint Petersburg and Jan Neruda's Prague

Eccentric cities : Nikolai Gogol's Saint Petersburg and Jan Neruda's Prague

literature, urban culture, Gogol Nikolai, Neruda Jan, urban space, urban life, identity

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.

Mayhew, Linda Marie

The University of Texas at Austin

2005

Pichova, Hana. Supervisor

en

Thesis

http://hdl.handle.net/2152/2281

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/items/show/954

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/archive/files/2d95160d36a68503e3ad9d710f345b16.jpg