Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts

Acts of Logos examines the 19th-century foundations of St. Petersburgs famous literary heritage, with a focus on the unifying principle of material animation. Ever since Pushkins 1833 poem The Bronze Horseman, the city has provided a literary space in which inanimate things (noses, playing cards, overcoats) spring to life. Scollinss book addresses this issue of animacy by analyzing the powerful function of language in the citys literature, from its mythic originsin which the tsar Peter appears as a God-like creator, calling his city forth from nothingto the earliest texts of its literary tradition, when poets took up the pen to commit their own acts of verbal creation. Her interpretations shed new light on the canonical works of Pushkin and Gogol, exposing the performative and subversive possibilities of the poetic word in the Petersburg tradition, and revealing an emerging literary culture capable of challenging the official narratives of the state. See more