Санкт-Петербург: граници и лица (двойно юбилейно)
St. Petersburg – Frontiers and Faces: Two Anniversaries

Summary/Abstract: This article was influenced by two anniversaries – 300 years of St. Petersburg and 170 years of the poem “Bronze Horseman”. Special features and peculiarities of the St. Petersburg’s mythology and Poushkin’s poem were examined in the light of the category “boundary” – one of the most useful concepts in the contemporary Bulgarian studies in Russian literature. This approach helps the reader see different faces of the city: ceremonious and tourist advertising, on one hand, and nightly, sad, infernal – on the other hand, and their reflections in the poem (“Petra Tvorenie” and “Petropol”). In this new way of reading, special attention was paid to the interaction and the counteraction between the two main myths of the St. Petersburg’s mythology – the myth about creation and the eschatological myth. For the first time in the same text the fragmented eschatological myth was examined in its close connection with the myth of creation typical for before-Poushkin era and the attention was focused on the changes in “behavior” of the last one. Undermined by Poushkin in the contraries of its nature, the myth of creation was first compromised and then inversed. After all, due to dramatic conflict between History and Mythology (where they were in condition of dynamic balance), the myth of creation was absorbed in an anti-myth.

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