Петербург

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.

Vazov's travelogue "Outside Bulgaria" enters into the "Petersburg's text" and the "Moscow text" of Russian culture. Although written by a foreigner, this travelogue includes both the outsider's view of Russia, and the assimilated insider's Russian viewpoint. Metaphorically, Vazov turns out to be both inside and "outside Bulgaria". The writer perceives Russia through the Russian national auto-stereotypes; the Russian myths of Moscow as the "soul of Russia", of the "great Russian soul", and of Petersburg as a "window on Europe" are present in his text. The Russian viewpoint is embodied in many quoted proverbs. However, the insider's viewpoint in the text combines sometimes opposite stands on Russian culture (these of the "Westerners" and the "Slavophiles"). Besides the writer also perceives Russia from a foreigner's point of view where the negative sides of Moscow appear (the uncleaniness, the fatalism of the Russians, the drunkenness), and to whose mind Petersburg's cold calls out the image of the gardens of Eden in Bulgaria. Thus, Ivan Vazov does not limit himself to the area of one genre, combining the mythologization of Russia (through the Russian viewpoint) with its demythologization, containing both the Russian viewpoint and that of the foreigner.