Authors

Antonia Pintaric¹;  ¹ University of Zadar, Croatia

Discussion

The aim of the paper is to analyze the elements of supernatural in Gogol's "May Night, or the Drowned Maiden". As one of the stories from Gogol's Ukrainian cycle, "May Night" abounds in images of Gogolian village life merging with the supernatural. We propose that in order to understand how supernatural arises and what effect it produces, one must look at the specific ways Gogol uses language. Starting from Lovecraft and taking into account some of the contemporary developments, we complement the theory of the supernatural with a cognitive linguistics perspective on language, which takes into account cognitive, cultural and textual dimensions, as well as the relationship between creative and conventional.