The Bronze Horseman |
"The Bronze Horseman" is a rich and complex work that stands up to many possible interpretations, and so I'll limit my remarks to one literary device that Pushkin uses very skillfully: the confrontation between the two main characters. When you read the poem, please pay attention to the pair of meetings or confrontations between the Bronze Horseman (also called the "Image" in the poem) and the everyman hero, Yevgeni. This device is used frequently by Pushkin, and not only by Pushkin: setting up a confrontation between two key characters, then separating the characters and allowing some significant event to take place. Finally, the characters come back together for a final confrontation. Pushkin frequently suggests a shift in the status quo by the time the principle figures meet for a second time. At the second meeting, the tables are turned in some way, or the power relations are different than they were in the first meeting. This is right out of storytelling 101, but Pushkin does it exceptionally well.
The first confrontation, if we can even call it that, between Yevgeni and the statue comes at the very end of part I (p. 252) while the storm is still raging and the flood waters are rising all around him. Yevgeni is depicted as a small, pale, even comical figure. To escape the rising flood waters, he climbs up on a marble statue of a lion. He's described as being "motionless" and also "riveted to the marble." That is, he cannot move. We read that he's "afraid" but "not for himself." He doesn’t even feel the rain hitting his face or the water rising at his feet. He’s staring straight ahead. At what? (read quote).
(p. 252)
His desperate gaze
Was fixed on one distant point. Like mountains,
There the waves rose up from the seething depths,
And raged, there the storm howled, there wreakage
Rushed to and fro...God, God! There--
Alas!--so close to the waves, almost by the gulf
Itself, is an unpainted fence and a willow
And a small ramshackle house: there they live,
A widow and her daughter, Parasha, his dream...
Or is all this a dream? Is all our life
Nothing but an empty dream, heaven's jest?
He’s thinking of his fiancée Parasha, and is fearful that the house where she lives with her mother will not survive the storm. Yevgeni has a dream--a simple dream of marriage, children, work. And as the storm rages, he’s witnessing the destruction of his dream.
What about the Bronze Horseman? Remember that at the beginning of the poem, Peter also had a dream, or more to the point, a "vision" "To spite our haughty neighbor I shall found a city here." Now at this point in the poem Peter is represented as "The Image, with outstretched arm, on his bronze horse." Neither Yevgeni nor the statue move, both are depicted in terms of their stillness, but while Yevgeni is described using the passive "motionless" and "riveted," the stillness of the Bronze Horseman is conveyed using a more positive and powerful word: "unshakeable."
 Part One ends with the two "horsemen" looking out into the distance over the river at their very different versions of the future (Parasha's little house vs. Peter's extending his arm towards Russia's future).
Part Two of the poem is structurally the mirror opposite of Part One:
- flood has abated
- Yevgeni learns fate of Parasha
- Instead of being fixed in place, Yevgeni starts to wander
- he has a second confrontation with the Bronze Horseman (256)
On page 256, poor Yevgeni is wandering the city, when he comes back to the place where he rode out the flood. He recognizes the place and the statue: "him who motionlessly held aloft his bronze head in the darkness, Him by whose fateful will the city had been founded on the sea."
Peter is being blamed for his poor choice in city planning, for placing this new city in such a thoughtlessly dangerous locale.
Having shaken off his earlier immobility, Yevgeni now approaches the statue and confronts it, in a whisper: "All right then, wonder-worker, just you wait." Yevgeni seems to have lost his mind, he imagines that the "Bronze Horseman" has come alive and is pursuing him throughout the city. Yevgeni wanders in this way until he perishes, and is buried in an anonymous grave with no marker.
The poem is often read as a study in contrasts between the powerful Emperor Peter and the poor and weak Yevgeni. For our written discussion, I’d like you to answer the following question in a paragraph or two:
Question 1:
Do the poet’s sympathies lie with Yevgeni or with the Bronze Horseman/Peter I? Why has the poet opted to depict these characters in this way?
Question 2:
After you listen to the lecture on Peter the Great by Michael Petrovich, think about how you would describe Pushkin’s attitudes towards this ruler. Does Pushkin admire Peter? Loathe him? Or perhaps something else entirely?
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