In this extensive, interesting new study of the collective literary output we know as the Petersburg text, Kathleen Scollins seeks to redirect an extensive critical debate to the linguistic register. As the author tells us, language serves as “the basis and unifying principle” of the Petersburg text, and the object of the book is to fully illustrate these linguistic origins. Focusing on the earlier part of the Petersburg text, the author produces innovative and engaging readings of well-loved texts by Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol΄. In her readings, Scollins aims to show the might of words and the rivalries they can incite among those who seek to wield their performative and creative power—whether literary authors or political figures, like Peter the Great.

Rather than seeking an overarching theoretical paradigm, Scollins presents close readings of key literary examples from the St. Petersburg text in each of the book's five chapters. Through these case studies, in which the word is substantiated or made fleshy in some significant way, the author captures the distinctiveness of each example in its biblical and historical contexts.

Chapter 1 and 2 focus on Pushkin texts, first The Bronze Horseman and then “The Queen of Spades.” As Scollins shows, in The Bronze Horseman there are rich echoes of the Old Testament story of Job, in which Pushkin took great interest. Scollins convincingly illustrates that the Bronze Horseman and the Book of Job are mixed-genre poems, both featuring blameless men who “suffer devastating loss at the hand of divine or semi-divine forces” (16). By relying the biblical subtext as a backdrop, Pushkin is able to express his own ambivalence about the Petrine world creation at a politically precarious time after the Decembrist revolt. The powerless curse of the little clerk, who has no other recourse, assumes strong performative power in the poem, holding the imperial authority accountable through its subversion and rebellion. In her treatment of “The Queen of Spades” in Chapter 2, Scollins similarly notices a rebellion of the powerless in the figure of Germann, who seeks to advance himself beyond his low rank and supplant Peter, the historical creator of modern Russia. Like Evgenii, Germann pronounces his word and uses his own linguistic capability to “upend the inflexible power structure of Petersburg” (79).

The remaining three chapters focus on Pushkin's “eager and ambitious protégé,” Gogol΄, who inherits and reinvents the Petersburg texts (96). In Chapter 3, Scollins returns to the Biblical subtext to suggest that in “Nevsky Prospect,” Gogol΄ paints the main avenue of St. Petersburg as a mouth of hell, thus casting the city as a hellish anti-icon of sinfulness and the author's own art as similarly demonic. Continuing on the exploration of biblical overtones in the Petersburg text, in Chapter 4, Scollins presents a discussion of “The Nose” that focuses on the story's Christological aspects in order to reveal the “relationship between nose and Word, flesh and spirit, and to examine how these elements operate within their specific Petersburg context” (128). In the fifth and final chapter, which addresses “The Overcoat,” Scollins argues that Akakii is the human representation of the Cyrillic character K (kako) who, much like previous little men, rebels and breaks out of the strict, alphabetic structure of Peter's city.

Scollins reads best when she is weaving in different historical and religious context into up-close analyses of individual literary texts. For this reason, the approach she chooses, of giving each text its unique due, is wise, because her narrative voice does not emerge quite as powerfully in the more theoretical opening of the book. Yet, even this quibble aside, the introduction will nonetheless provide a helpful summary of theoretical approaches to the Petersburg texts for scholars looking to approach this corpus of texts.

Through extensive discussion of biblical and historical contexts, as well as through consideration of the tension between orality and writing in the tradition of texts about St. Petersburg, Scollins has written a compelling and persuasive reevaluation of familiar texts. The book should prove useful to a broad audience of undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in literary representations of St. Petersburg and the evolution of the Russian canon.