The article is based on an extract from a short novel «The Night Before Christmas», which was Gogol’s first work of fiction featuring the image of Saint Petersburg.
The city is shown through perception of Vakula the locksmith, an inhabitant of Dikanka, and it appears that the aspects of the image are shaped entirely by the «distancing» technique. However, the comparison of this description of St. Petersburg with the one in «Boris Godunov», an earlier article by Gogol, reveals that the scenes witnessed by Vakula are very much the same as the ones described in the article. At the same time, St. Petersburg of «The Night Before Christmas» bears a certain resemblance to the corresponding scenes in «Nesvski Prospekt», another Gogol’s novel. What is most interesting, however, is that the description of St. Petersburg found in the Christmas tale reappears in other Gogol’s works, not set in St. Petersburg. What matters here is not that Gogol’s locus of St. Petersburg tends to expand, but the unity of the writer’s artistic thinking, resulting in numerous reiterations of his imagery in a variety of texts. Taking these correspondences into account brings to light many shades of meaning conveyed by the image of St. Petersburg in «The Night Before Christmas». More importantly, what these sematic correspondences indicate is the unity of Gogol’s creative thinking – the topic which has attracted attention of researchers, but has not been
thoroughly investigated. For this reason, the author of the article deems it necessary to create The Gogol Semantics Dictionary, which will help to clarify particular meanings of images or motives in their paradigmatic perspective.
For citation: Kapustin N.V. On semantic reiterations in Gogol’s prose: from “Evenings…” to “Petersburg Tales”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 4, pp. 15—21.