Abstract
Seriously depressed by the failure in the first performance of his own drama ${\ll}$The Government Inspector${\gg}$, N. Gogol sought out a space, Italy, which is obviously a turning point for the writer. Here in Italy, the writer could be able to explore an essential foundation for the national identity as well as self-identification of Russian traditional culture, all of which have already been epitomized in the Renaissance period in Italy. The city Rome itself provided Gogol with its grandness and harmonious perfectness, influencing something 'spiritual being' upon the writer. The work under discussion, "Rome," is thus created through these literary circumstances. Though it is made under the different title as "Annuntiata" and it delivers a love story between lovers, the story lines gradually turned into a fiction about the city, Rome. In comparison with city Paris, Gogol himself presents a negative view of the French metropolitan, saying that it is nothing but a by-product of the 19th century civilization. Interestingly enough, Rome for Gogol is totally different; it is the place of sublimity, that is a locus of harmonious, holy, and eternal city. Likewise, this pattern can be said of another description on the two contradictory cities: Paris and Rome. Again, Gogol fully pictures the city Paris as centripetal and Rome as centrifugal, in which the main protagonist makes the reader indulge in his own world. Throughout the story the writer tells us a transformation experienced by his character, and the work ends with an open denouement. Like Jerusalem, Rome is the city of resurrection for Gogol. Yet, this kind of possibility of transformation in the story is exposed to the hero, and it arguably depends on the extent to which he explores the readiness for encountering of 'eternity' in this "eternal city."