Gogol and the Geographical Imagination of Romanticism

The book presents an exploration of the initial stage of the emergence and development of modern geographical imagination in Russia. It deals with a period of the intellectual life around 1830s when a new paradigm of geography that arose from German Romanticism was adopted by Russian men of letters. The book focuses on the creative work of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) who was the first in Russia to grasp and describe the new approach to the science of geography in his article “Some Thoughts on the Teaching of Geography to Children” (1831). The book presents the archeology of Gogol’s geographical ideas and analysis of the intertextual relations between the author’s fiction and geographical sources he used. The subject of this book is Gogol’s geographical imagination, and the ways the theory and practice of modern geography are embodied in his prose. Through contact with geography, Gogol developed a unique geographical vision, reflected in his various landscapes. The aim of the book is to reveal the scientific geographical foundation of the fictional world represented in the author’s creative work.