| This dissertation traces a nexus of metaphors in literary works of the early Soviet period. I demonstrate how Russian writers employ metaphors of transformation in relation to literary characters in order to illuminate and critique plans for transformation of the body politic. Although I draw on the works of a large number of writers, I devote primary attention to Andrei Bely, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pilniak and Andrei Platonov.;In my analysis of transformation metaphors, I view the human body as a focal point where these tropes tend to cluster. I also consider metaphors related to the figurative refashioning of the body, such as clothing, and metaphors involving the "cultural operations" performed on the body politic by Peter the Great and then by the Bolsheviks two hundred years later. I argue that the Moscow works of Bulgakov, Bely, Pilniak and Platonov consciously draw from and allude to transformation metaphors appearing in a number of earlier works set in St. Petersburg, especially Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, the Petersburg Tales of Nikolai Gogol, and Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg. I further contend that the cultural legacy of Peter the Great becomes a primary backdrop for viewing transformations in Moscow in the early Soviet period. |
