A GENDER OVERVIEW OF CITY IMAGE IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE: FEMALE MOSCOW - MALE PETERSBURG

Throughout history, Russia has experienced numerous capital changes. However, Petersburg which has been the capital for 206 years and Moscow which has been the capital since 1918 until the present time have a significant place in this respect. Therefore, it is a known fact that Moscow and Petersburg which have always been focal points in history have been compared with each other many times both in Russian and world literature. The struggle of these two cities which are defined as being the opposites of each other has been reflected in the works of many writers and poets who have felt the spirit of the times. In this light, the comparison of the contrasts of these two important Russian cities in Petersburg Notes of 1836 of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol who is one of the most important realist writers of 19th century classical Russian literature, Moscow-Petersburg (1993) of Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin who is one of the 20th century immigrant Russian writers and Sick Bird (1998) of Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov who is one of the founders of postmodernism in contemporary Russian literature, constitute the subject of our study.The person who has acted as a pioneer in attributing female and male genders to these two cities through the method of personification is Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. In the later centuries, Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin and Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov, who have given place to the Moscow-Petersburg contrast in their works by taking Gogol’s method as the basis, have added different dimensions to the images of these two cities within the framework of their unique understanding of art. Therefore, the views of Zamyatin and Bitov on Moscow and Petersburg will be interpreted throughout our study by being compared to Gogol’s method of personification. As a consequence of this analysis, it will be underlined that Gogol’s creative genius has continued to be effective for centuries. It has been aimed at identifying how the cities of Moscow and Petersburg have been perceived in different centuries and analyzing the evaluations in the works in question in a comparative manner. Within the framework of this method, it will be attempted to explain which gender the two cities have been identified with in different literary works in a more concrete manner through the quotations taken from these works and it will be scrutinized whether it is accurate to define the two cities as female and male genders according to Russian grammar rules.

کلیدواژه ها:

Moscow ، Petersburg ، Female ، Male ، Gender