Necropolis: The Flood Motif in the History of Petersburg Based on Examples of Selected Literary and Journalistic Texts

Petersburg was built in a space of death, on lifeless waters, which has influenced strategies of creating its urban space in a variety of texts. In these texts, one of the main leitmotifs is flooding. This essay analyzes how Russian and non-Russian authors of the first half of the nineteenth century represented the 7 November 1824 flood and the northern capital during this catastrophe. The author begins with a focus on two literary texts that correlate with one another: the Digression in Part III of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve and Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, which depict fully (or at least partially) the cosmogony of the city on the Neva. The poetic representations of the flood contrast with images of this water cataclysm as portrayed in journalistic texts, memoirs, and letters. The essay presents how authors of various genres create an image of the river – the most important element of the Petersburg landscape – and discusses motifs often accompanying the flood, namely: phantasmagoria, elusiveness, ephemerality, snow, mud, the cemetery, caskets floating through the city, and the corpse.Wydział Filologiczny, Uniwersytet Gdański826128