“St. Petersburg Flood Legend” and the Myth of the “End of Petersburg”

Abstract

The article examines the “flood legend” as part of the cultural myth of the “end of St. Petersburg” (ie, in essence, the end of the empire created by Peter I.). The existence of a “folklore flood legend” is postulated by all authors of works on the “Petersburg myth” and “Petersburg text”. It is believed that it is she who lies at the origins of literary works on this subject. In reality, the situation was the other way around: it was not a literary legend that arose from oral tradition, but the idea of “oral tradition” arose under the influence of an already existing literary legend. There is not a single early record of the “flood legend”, and the record published in 1888 by P.P. Karatygin cannot be accepted as historical evidence. The literary “flood legend” began with A. Mickewicz. It was he who created the first eschatological (in the exact sense of the word) image of the death of St. Petersburg from the flood and connected it with the idea of the original curse of the “city on bones”. Then this image was developed by Russian romantic poets, but the decisive role in the codification of the “legend” belonged to D. Merezhkovsky's novels “Peter and Alexis” (1904–1905) and “Alexander I” (1911–1912).