The cluster of works known collectively as the Petersburg Text (PT) comprises a semantically and geographically unified "mastertext," a single, synchronic text written by different authors at various times in the city's history. The notion of a heterogeneous but semiotically unified PT was introduced in 1973 by V. N. Toporov, who famously theorized it as a system of binaries---such as nature/culture, chaos/cosmos that---repeatedly assert themselves, unifying the tradition's disparate chapters and epochs. Such traditional Structuralist models, while serving to reveal the dualities and patterns essential to the Petersburg tradition, ultimately provide an insufficient theoretical framework through which to examine and evaluate the salient themes of language and power inherent in the city's mythos.;My dissertation will reexamine four familiar nineteenth-century "chapters" of this Text---Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, Gogol's "Overcoat" and "Nose," and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment---to uncover and analyze the powerful, performative function of language in the city's literature. I explore this problem of Logos (the acts of the creative word, or the Word-made-flesh) within a traditional biblical-historical framework, offering close, comparative readings of each work and postulating new subtexts to these familiar texts. Tracing the Word through these four works exposes a pattern of verbal creation and oppression fundamental to the city's narrative, equally crucial to both its underlying mythos and to its continuing literary tradition. The introduction will offer a close analysis of Petersburg's underlying creation myth---in which the tsar Peter appears as a god-like creator, calling his city forth from nothing---in order to unearth an essential motivation for the significance of Logos, or verbal creation, in the texts that stem from it. Each subsequent chapter presents a close reading of one central episode of the PT within a biblical or historical context. Where my introductory reading of the Petrine mythos illuminates the Logos-Creation drive at the heart of the PT mastertext, my readings of its individual "chapters" further elaborate the model, revealing a hidden pattern of verbal rebellion on the part of Peter's "sons.".
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