The Bronze Horseman has a firmly established reputation as a mysterious work, and this despite the fact that it has been studied from a variety of angles and it is probably difficult to make a new judgment about the poem or make a new observation that has not already been expressed in one form or another. The mystery of the poem is itself mysterious. There are no unclear places or dark symbols in it. It is not the individual particulars that are mysterious, but the whole, the general idea, the thought of the poet.

The varied interpretations of “The Bronze Horseman” and the solutions to its riddle still revolve, as a rule, around one point - the conflict between Eugene and Peter, the individual and the state. We want to offer a slightly different reading of the poem. A reading that would be based on the enormous work on the study of this work done by Russian Pushkin studies, on the analysis of the text itself, its artistic structure, those complex figurative connections in which, as it seems to us, Pushkin’s thought is contained.

Introduction

“The Bronze Horseman” opens with an Introduction, which is a kind of overture to the poem. But this solemn overture, both semantically and stylistically, sounds like a counterpoint to the main text, to the sad “Petersburg story.” Such counterpoint, devoid of a final, synthesizing, harmonizing chord, determines the entire structure of “The Bronze Horseman” and manifests itself at its most varied levels. The introduction consists of five passages, each of which presents a relatively complete whole.

“On the shore of desert waves // stood He full of great thoughts // and looking into the distance. The river rushed wide before him.” These opening lines identify the two central characters of the poem: “He” and the wide rushing river. The fact that Peter's name is not mentioned is significant. Both “Peter” and “tsar” were found in the drafts, but Pushkin preferred the more capacious and comprehensive one? "He". Pushkin is historically specific and accurate, but behind every historically specific detail a different, broader symbolic meaning shines through. "He" ? it is greater than Peter, and greater than the king; "He" ? this is a person taken in his generic essence. (This is exactly how Pushkin saw Peter: “Now an academician, now a hero, // now a navigator, now a carpenter, // he was a worker with an all-encompassing soul // on the eternal throne.”) In this way, Peter is akin to epic heroes, folk kings who are elected heroes , according to Hegel, “not out of aristocracy and preference for noble persons, but in search of complete freedom in desires and actions, realized in the idea of ​​royalty.”

And the city? This is not only St. Petersburg, but an image of civilization, a form of life, where the will of man triumphs over the elements, over natural wildness. This is how Petersburg appears in Peter the Great's Blackamoor. “Linked dams, canals without embankment, wooden bridges demonstrated the victory of human will over the resistance of the elements.”

The landscape is also symbolic. A forest (a traditional symbol of wild nature), a wide rushing river, the poor boat of a lonely Chukhon - all these are attributes of the picture of the “state of nature” as the 18th century imagined it.

The distance into which Peter's gaze is turned is not so much spatial as it is temporal - the distance of the future, the great future of Russia. ("Here will the city is laid down", "all the flags are visiting will to us and let's record in the open" (emphasis added). At the same time, “here” and “there” lose their spatial meaning and become temporalized. “Here” becomes synonymous with “before”, “there” - “now” (“Here the city will be founded”, but “now there, along the busy banks of the city, slender buildings are crowded with palaces and towers”).

Peter's great plan is devoid of personal arbitrariness. Peter carries out the will of history, fulfills the aspirations and hopes of Russia. (“Nature here we are destined» “to open a window to Europe”, “to stand firmly by the sea” (our italics). Peter speaks not on his own behalf, but on behalf of the whole; he embodies the collective power of the people and the strength of the Russian state.

The second passage, “A hundred years have passed and a young city,” is the first summing up of Peter’s activities. It is written in the style of an 18th-century ode. In 1803, in connection with the centenary of the founding of St. Petersburg, many poems dedicated to this anniversary appeared. They contain two formulas used by Pushkin: “A hundred years have passed” and “where before - now there.” Both of them are connected with the central problem of “The Bronze Horseman,” a poem that sums up Peter’s civilization. The passage develops the theme of the beginning - the contrast of the “natural state” (“darkness of forests”, “topi blat”, a lonely fisherman throwing his decrepit net into unknown waters) and civilization (huge palaces and towers, ships rushing from all corners of the earth to rich piers , bridges hanging over the waters). It seems that all of Peter’s plans came true (“the city ascended,” “the Neva was dressed in granite; // bridges hung over the waters, // islands were covered with its dark green gardens,” “old Moscow faded”). The city and the river form a single harmonious whole. The feeling of this harmony is created by the fact that nature itself, and not man, is the subject of action here: “the Neva is dressed in granite,” “the islands are covered with its dark green gardens,” etc.

But the formula “A hundred years have passed” gives this passage the character of a quotation (After all, not a hundred, but a hundred and thirty years have passed). Here we come across an important side of the poetics of the mature Pushkin. Pushkin thought in literary styles and solid genres; style was for him a certain literary mask and was perceived as one of the possible, but far from the only point of view on the world. In The Bronze Horseman there is no complete coincidence between the author and the style of classicist ode he uses; the style is, as it were, put in quotation marks, it is half alien, and a distance arises between the word and the object; the word only points to the object, the object lives, as it were, a life of its own independent of the word. The image of Petersburg, as it is given in this passage, is not all of Petersburg as Pushkin knows it. It has its own truth, its own poetry, but it also has its own limitations, and Pushkin also feels it keenly. Therefore, this passage is simultaneously a quotation, someone else’s and the poet’s own word.

The third passage, “I love you, Peter’s creation,” is the most difficult. It is usually perceived as a direct expression of Pushkin's poetic self. Meanwhile, it cannot be correctly understood outside the context of the poem and, above all, the context of the Introduction itself.

Before us is the same classic image of St. Petersburg, although this passage is written in a different stylistic manner. In St. Petersburg, severity and harmony are emphasized, the granite in which the Neva is forged, cast-iron fences, and the slender, unsteady formation of infantry armies. There is nothing dark, vague, mysterious - everything is extremely clear, everything is given in the bright light of day, and even the “darkness of the night” is not allowed “into the golden heavens.” This Petersburg, flooded with light, contrasts with the beginning of the poem, where “the forest, unknown to the rays, rustled all around in the fog of the hidden sun.” In this strict order, in this clarity and light, however, something motionless and deathly appeared: “busy shores” gave way to “deserted streets” and the very air of the city became “motionless.” Verbs disappear, they are replaced by verbal nouns (“the flow of power”, “the running of the sleigh”, “the noise and chatter of balls”, “the hiss of foamy glasses”, “the shine of these copper caps”).

And what is especially important is that the very beauty of St. Petersburg takes on an ornamental character. The poet loves, or rather, admires the view (“I love your strict, slender appearance”), the appearance of the city - in each phenomenon he emphasizes, as if extracting a purely ornamental effect from it, its visible and sound side: from the fences? “pattern”, from nights - “moonless shine”, from balls - “glitter, noise and talk”, from a bachelor’s party - “the hiss of foamy glasses and punch, a blue flame”, from girls’ faces - blush (“Girls’ faces are brighter than roses”) , from victory over the enemy - “smoke and thunder” of cannon fire. This St. Petersburg has more external beauty (“monotonous beauty”) than internal beauty.

L. Pumpyansky called the style of this passage Onegin. This is true, but the Onegin style is now perceived by Pushkin as something already gone. Nothing came of the attempt to write “Yezersky” in this style, and the poem remained unfinished. And if Pushkin turned to him in The Bronze Horseman, then also as a special literary mask - the mask of a poet of the 20s
"good friend", Onegin. This is emphasized by a note (“see Vyazemsky’s poems to Countess 3.”), which seems to alienate this passage from the present Pushkin, just as the formula “A hundred years have passed” alienated the previous passage. "

The fourth passage, “Beauty the city of Petrov and stand,” sounds like a kind of spell:

May he make peace with you

And the defeated element;

Enmity and ancient captivity

Let the Finnish waves be forgotten.

The direct link between the third and fourth passages is the cross-cutting image of the Neva, encased in granite, but still remaining to the end an undefeated, free element - the only movable and, therefore, living principle in this beautiful, but deathly motionless city, ( ...having broken its blue ice,//the Neva carries it to the seas//and, sensing the spring days, rejoices). The fourth passage sums up the entire Introduction and therefore echoes its beginning. Peter's great plan was realized, but not completely; the victory of rational will and strict order over the elements was not complete. In the original version this idea was expressed more directly.

But the defeated element

He still sees us as enemies...

But Finnish waves more than once

They went to the menacing attack in rebellion

And they shocked, indignantly,

Granite at the foot of Peter.

The opening line of the fifth passage, “It was a terrible time,” rhythmically closes the previous passage and sounds like an answer to the words of the spell: “May the defeated element make peace with you.” This is what it is - reality itself, as opposed to what was only wished for, and perhaps a formidable foreshadowing of the future. In the white manuscript presented to Nikolai, the last lines sounded like this:

And be it, friends, for you

The evening is just a terrible story,

And not an ominous legend.

But the words “It was a terrible time” are at the same time the beginning of the last, fifth passage, which is a transition to the main text of the poem. These words formulate its main theme: “About her, my friends, I will begin my story for you.” We are talking, of course, not only about a specific event, but flood of 1824. The enormous historical scope of the Introduction gives the words “terrible time” a broader meaning. We are talking about a whole period of Russian history. Looking ahead, let's say right away that the epithet “terrible” is one of the key words of “The Bronze Horseman.” In the last lines of the Introduction, a new image of the poet appears - not the 18th-century ode-writer, not the singer Peter, not the “good friend” of Onegin, but the author of the “Petersburg story”. The solemn tone disappears, the whole tone of the poem changes: “My story will be sad.”

Flood

Already from the opening lines of the first part we enter a different world, contrasting with the Introduction. White nights of June, clear sunny frosty days of the cruel St. Petersburg winter, the festive and solemn day of the spring ice drift are replaced by a dull autumn landscape. (“November was breathing the autumn cold” “the rain was beating angrily on the window and the wind was blowing, howling sadly”). St. Petersburg, illuminated by light, is now enveloped in darkness (“Over Darkened Petrograd” “It was Already Late and Dark”). The image of the river has also changed. This is not the broadly splashing Neva of the beginning, and not the powerfully flowing Neva, along which ships “... from all corners of the earth strive for rich piers,” and not that spring, jubilant one, which, having thrown off the icy shackles, strives for the sea. Now the Neva no longer wants to put up with the coastal granite, she does not fit into her “slender fence”, rushes about in it “like a sick person in his restless bed”: and then “angry, seething”, “a cauldron bubbling and swirling” rushes at her long-time enemy - the city and floods it: “And Petropol surfaced like Triton, // waist-deep in water.”

Before describing the flood, Pushkin makes a note referring to Mickiewicz’s poem “Oleshkevich.” In a poem by the Polish poet, the artist Oleshkevich welcomes the raging elements (“With the rising of the sun the day of miracles will come”), seeing in the flood God’s punishment for the Russian Tsar, who “fell low, loving tyranny, and became the prey of the devil.” Pushkin's attitude towards Mickiewicz's poem is sympathetic (it is called one of the best), but in his depiction of the flood he lacks realistic accuracy of description. “It’s just a pity that his description is not accurate. There was no snow, the Neva was covered with ice. Our description is more accurate, although it lacks the bright colors of the Polish poet.” This is where the difference between the two artistic systems comes into play. Pushkin’s symbolism is never given; it always grows from within the realistic picture itself, through its deepening.

However, the poet’s words: “our description is more accurate” have another meaning. Pushkin argues with Mickiewicz on the merits. The motif of God's wrath is also found in The Bronze Horseman. “The people are witnessing God’s wrath and awaiting execution.” But in Pushkin’s poem this is the view of the people, and not the point of view of the poet himself. The flood in Pushkin’s eyes is not God’s punishment, but a rebellion of the elements, which they tried to tame, subordinate to the sovereign will, regardless of its nature, and it is now taking revenge on the city and man, becoming a hostile, destructive force. Civilization turned out to be weak in the face of the elements because it was violent towards it. The river, wide and calmly carrying its waters to the sea, not knowing any obstacles on its way, now “blocked”, “went back,” “swelled and roared,” “and flooded the banks.” And the “strict, slender appearance” of St. Petersburg turned out, in the words of Tyutchev, to be just a “brilliant veil” behind which lurks an abyss “with its fears and darkness,” and the flood tears off this veil, turns everything inside out, and what was hidden is hidden and invisibly, now floated out and filled the beautiful city of Peter.

Fragments of huts, logs, roofs,

Stock trade goods,

The belongings of pale poverty,

Bridges destroyed by thunderstorms,

Coffins from a washed-out cemetery

Floating through the streets!

Extended comparisons and metaphors, generally not characteristic of the style of “The Bronze Horseman,” characterize the description of the flood, and they are all the more significant.

Siege! Attack! Evil waves

Like thieves, they climb into windows...

...So a villain,

With his fierce gang

Having burst into the village, he breaks, cuts,

Destroys and robs, screams, grinding,

Violence, swearing, anxiety, howling!..

The comparison of a flood with a robber raid is eloquent. Simultaneously with The Bronze Horseman, in the Boldino autumn of 1833, Pushkin was working on The History of the Pugachev Revolt. He returned to Boldino after a trip to the Urals, where he collected material for his future book. The flood, of course, is not an allegory of Pugachev’s uprising, a peasant spontaneous rebellion, “senseless and merciless.” This is a multi-valued image of a rebellious element, which for Pushkin includes the beginning of a popular rebellion.

In the same Boldino autumn of 1833, “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” was written, echoing “The Bronze Horseman” with some of its motifs. The fairy tale and the poem share a common theme - anger, the revenge of the “free elements” on the excessive claims of man. The motive is purely Pushkin. It was not in the source of “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” a Pomeranian tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife” in the collection of br. Grimm. There the old woman is punished for her desire to become the Lord God himself. From Pushkin for wanting to become the “mistress of the sea” and command a goldfish.

“The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” is similar to “The Bronze Horseman” and has a sad tone, which is not characteristic of other Pushkin fairy tales. Everything returns to the original joyless beginning, the “broken trough,” and the metamorphoses that the heroes undergo look like something ghostly, like “an empty dream, a mockery of heaven over the earth.” A similar motif is present in “The Bronze Horseman”, although, of course, it does not determine the entire content of the poem. In the last, crowning passage of the poem, “A small island is visible on the seashore,” highlighted in the white manuscript presented to Nicholas, in a special part - Conclusion - instead of the “magnificently and proudly” ascended city with its “slender bulks” and “busy shores” - again “ deserted island”, again a lonely fisherman (“the fisherman lands there with a seine // a fisherman on a belated catch // and cooks his poor dinner”). Again - “a dilapidated house” - “it remained above the water like a dilapidated bush” (compare with the beginning: “black huts here and there, a shelter for a wretched Chukhon”).

The well-known closeness of the poem and the fairy tale does not exclude the differences that exist between them. In fairy tales, the elements are a formidable but intelligent force. She has a human face. In "Saltan" the soul of this element - the swan - turned into a beautiful princess, without losing its elemental power, its cosmic greatness ("The moon glitters under the scythe, and the star burns in the forehead"), and the golden fish, retaining all its mystery to the end , nevertheless, “speaks with a human voice” and administers a harsh, but right, fair judgment over the heroine. In The Bronze Horseman it is different: Mitskevich saw in the flood divine retribution for the Russian Tsar, but Pushkin shows that it is the innocent heroes who suffer first of all: poor Eugene and his Parasha. The element acts as a wild, faceless, destructive force:

AND all of a sudden like a wild beast,

She rushed towards the city. In front of her

Everything ran, everything around

All of a sudden empty - water all of a sudden

Flowed into underground cellars...

The irrationality of the elements is emphasized here by the threefold repetition of the word “suddenly.” And just as suddenly, “fed up with destruction and tired of the insolent riot, the Neva was drawn back, admiring its indignation,” but under the waves the fire continues to smolder, ready to flare up every minute with new destructive force. And yet, in this furious element, in this suddenly opened abyss, lies for Pushkin enormous strength and power, its own special poetry, perhaps no less attractive than in the slender bulk of the civilization built by Peter.

Pushkin's attitude towards the elements was complex. For him, the elements contained that “incomprehensible”, mysterious force, both productive and destructive, which Goethe once called demonic. Pushkin knew that without contact with this force, without its inspiration, nothing great is born, just as it is not born without resistance, without opposition to it. The poet felt the charm hidden in “wild freedom,” in the play of elemental forces, in the “angry ocean” and “the breath of plague.” But he himself always preferred to stay at the “dark abyss on the edge,” “near the shores” (“I stayed at the shores”). When Pushkin wrote that the poet, like “the wind and the eagle and the heart of a maiden, has no law,” he meant that, surrendering to his “secret dreams,” the poet in the elements sees what Blok calls “the clarity of God’s face” (“Command God, oh muse, be obedient"), but Pushkin at the same time was afraid of the elements, for he knew that it also had another face - “inevitable darkness”, “the whirling of ugly demons in the minute play of the month.”

I'm going, I'm going in an open field

Bell ding-ding-ding,

Scary, scary involuntarily

Among the unknown plains.

Pushkin felt this demonic, mysterious, attractive and frightening force in all the “poetic faces” of Russian history; not only in Razin and Pugachev, who embody the elements of peasant rebellion, but also in Peter, the great transformer of the Russian state, and treated them with “peaceful delight and horror.” He himself admitted that he looked at Peter “with fear and trembling.”

Peter comes out. His eyes

They shine. His face is terrible.

The movements are fast. He is beautiful.

He's like God's thunderstorm.

This is Peter during the Battle of Poltava. This is how he is in many ways at the beginning of The Bronze Horseman. Peter is able to tame the elements and carry out his daring plan - “to found a city under the sea” only because he himself carries the element within himself, its “fatal will”, its creative and destructive energy. (“Peter I at the same time Robespierre and Napoleon, Revolution Incarnate” – VIII, 585). But a hundred years have passed, and this daring creative spirit is no longer present in the “insignificant heirs” of the “northern giant”, and at one pole there is a city as beautiful as a monument, and at the other there is the rebellious Neva, full of destructive energy. Now the passage “I love you, Peter’s creation” can be read in a new way. Pushkin persistently repeats the word “love” five times, and it sounds almost like a spell: I love because I am afraid of the faceless destructive elements, I love because I know the dangerous spell of wild freedom hidden in it, I love, despite the fact that in this “lush "the spirit of bondage", "boredom, cold and granite" reigns in the city.

The indignant element is given by Pushkin in relation to three heroes: Eugene, Alexander and the Bronze Horseman. To the three heroes who replaced Peter of the Introduction, in which man, the tsar and the power of Russian statehood were merged into one whole. Now (this is the result of the past years) - the man is represented by Eugene, the king - by Alexander, and the power of the Russian state, already alienated not only from “poor Eugene”, but also from the reigning Alexander, by the statue of Falcone.

Tsar

About Alexander it is said:

In that terrible year

The late Tsar was still in Russia

He ruled with glory. To the balcony

Sad, confused, he went out

And he said: “With God's element

Kings cannot control.” He sat down

And in the Duma with sorrowful eyes

I looked at the evil disaster.

The contrast to Petru is striking. The name of Alexander, like the name of Peter, is not mentioned. But instead of Peter there is “He”, instead of Alexander there is a king. The image of Peter is given in an epic distance, in the zone of the “absolute past”, not correlated with the time of the singer. (The passage “On the Shore of Desert Waves” could have been written by both a poet of the 18th century and our contemporary.) Peter the Monument (“Only you, hero of Poltava, erected a huge monument to yourself”), removed from the run of time, towering above him.

In the unshakable heights,

Over the indignant Neva

Stands with outstretched hand

Idol on a bronze horse.

On the contrary, the epithet “deceased” correlates Alexander with Pushkin of 1833, removes him from the timeless present in which Peter resides, and includes him in the real flow of historical movement with its destructive power.

In contrast to the unshakably standing Peter, Alexander sits, and in this pose, in this movement (sat), his confusion (confused), his powerlessness in front of the raging elements is expressed. Peter's thoughts are great, Alexander's thoughts are sorrowful. In the draft version, the contrast between Peter and Alexander appears even sharper. The beginning of “he stood, full of great thoughts” was opposed: “he sat and looked with bitter thoughts.” Alexander is the king of the “terrible time”, the hero of the sad “Petersburg story” (“my story will be sad”). In his mournful powerlessness, he is closer to “poor Eugene” than to Peter. The connection with Eugene is also emphasized rhythmically. Alexander's theme is given in the same intermittent, stumbling rhythm, replete with hyphens, as Eugene's theme.

Pushkin’s thought is clear: autocracy has ceased to be a force capable of curbing the elements, and the creative “Let it be” emanating from Peter’s lips contrasts with Alexander’s powerless words “not to control.”

Human

Evgeny is the central character of the “Petersburg story”. He appears at the beginning of the first part, and the poem ends with his death. Into the world of the historical poem, where everything is “based on truth” and even the flood is described from documents (“The curious can cope with the news compiled by V.N. Berkh”), a fictional character is introduced, created by the poet’s imagination, and it is important that Pushkin considered it necessary emphasize this, as if exposing your artistic technique.

At that time from the guests home

Young Evgeniy came...

We will be our hero

Call by this name. It

Sounds nice; been with him for a long time

My pen is also friendly.

In itself, the combination of a great historical figure and a fictional character within one work was not news for Pushkin’s era. It was an essential feature of the historical novels of Walter Scott and his many successors and imitators and was considered an indispensable condition for a truthful depiction of history. The peculiarity of “The Bronze Horseman” is that history and fiction, the fate of Russia and the fate of an individual, the past and the present, politics and everyday life are combined here without any attempt at organic synthesis, on the basis of a sharp genre and stylistic counterpoint. Peter's theme is given in the style of an epic poem and an ode to classicism, Eugene's theme is in the novel genre of the “Petersburg story”, addressed to modern times and based on free artistic invention. Emphasizing that Evgeny is a fictional and not a real hero, Pushkin not only depicts the historical past, but also expresses it with his very artistic structure and style. The genre and stylistic diversity of “The Bronze Horseman” acquires a figurative meaning and becomes an expression of the historical change of eras.

But it's not only that. As a fictional image, Eugene falls in line with the poet’s other creations. Pushkin himself establishes a connection between him and another Eugene, the hero of his poetic novel. In the last stanzas of Onegin, Pushkin says goodbye to the entire Onegin world as a whole strip of his own life and a whole strip of Russian history, the end of which was marked by the uprising on Senate Square and the beginning of a new reign.

But those who in a friendly meeting

I read the first verses...

There are no others, and those are far away

……………………….

Oh, fate has taken away a lot, a lot.

The eighth chapter of the novel was written in the Boldino autumn of 1830, and at the same time “Belkin’s Tales” were created, marking the beginning of a new stage in Pushkin’s creativity.

The image of Evgeny, of course, belongs more likely to “Belkin” than “Onegin” Russia - and in terms of his social status (“he lives in Kolomna, serves somewhere, shuns the nobles,” “he was poor” and “he had to work hard to to achieve both independence and honor”), and according to his aspirations, the most ordinary, prosaically everyday ones (get a “place”, set up a “humble and simple shelter” and calm Parasha in it, etc.). However, there are also significant differences between Evgeny and the heroes of Belkin’s stories: the heroes of “Belkin’s Tales” still remain on the periphery of Russian life—spatial (province) and historical. Eugene, on the contrary, stands in the very center (“metropolitan citizen”), on the highway of Russian history, he became the hero of the time, replacing Onegin, the hero of the twenties.

Eugene and Onegin are not only two historical types of time; they are also objectified lyrical images of the poet himself, living with his lyrical energy. True, in The Bronze Horseman the distance between the author and his hero is much greater than in Onegin, but the lyrical connection between them is no less deep. Evgeny's theme echoes Pushkin's lyrics and journalism of the late twenties and early thirties. Introducing the reader to his hero, Pushkin writes:

We don't need his nickname.

Although in times gone by

Perhaps it shone

And under the pen of Karamzin

In native legends it sounded;

But now with light and rumor

It's forgotten...

These lines contain the most important formula of the entire poem: “where before - now there” (formerly “shone” - now “forgotten”). Eugene's social fate is also one of the results of Peter's civilization. On the other hand, these lines establish a connection between the poet and his hero.

Childbirth is a decrepit bummer.

(And, unfortunately, not alone)

Boyar of old I am a descendant

I, brothers, am a petty tradesman."

("My Pedigree")

The same motives are heard in Pushkin’s journalism: the name of my ancestors, the poet claims, “is found on almost every page of our history” (VII, 195). “My family is one of the oldest nobles” (VII, 194). But now the ancient nobility “is a kind of middle-class family with us” (VII, 207), “from the bar we climb into tiers?tat” (IV, 344), “I’m just a Russian tradesman (III, 208). At the helm of power stands “the new nobility, which received its beginning under Peter the Great and the emperors” (VII, 207). The last remark is especially important for our topic. Pushkin's attitude towards Peter's transformations was always ambivalent. This duality is already palpable in “Notes on Russian History of the 18th Century,” written at the very beginning of the 20s.

Highly appreciating the personality of Peter (“Strong man”, “northern giant”) and the progressiveness of his reforms (Peter introduced European enlightenment, which should have had as its inevitable consequence people’s freedom), Pushkin does not close his eyes to the shadow sides of Peter’s reforms: the disunity of the enlightened, Europeanized parts of the nobility and the people, general slavery and silent obedience (“History suddenly presents his general slavery... all states, indiscriminately fettered, were equal before him with a baton. Everything trembled, everything silently obeyed." And yet the poet is full of historical optimism. It seemed to him that the Russian nobility, deprived of political freedoms, would replace the third estate, which was absent in Russia, and, despite the cultural disunity with the people, would unite with them in the struggle “against the common evil”, and would be able to win, even without resorting to bloodshed. “The desire for the best unites all conditions” and “firm peaceful unanimity”, and not “a terrible shock” will destroy “inveterate slavery” in Russia and “soon place us along with the enlightened peoples of Europe.” (VIII, 125-127).

But these hopes were not destined to come true. Pushkin thought a lot about the failure of the December uprising. In his “Note on National Education,” he wrote that people who shared the way of thinking of the conspirators, “on the one hand, ... saw the insignificance of their plans and means, on the other, the immense power of the government, based on the power of things.” By “the power of things” Pushkin meant the “spirit of the people” and public opinion that was absent in Russia. (“General opinion, not yet existing”). This means that the gap between the Europeanized, enlightened part of the Russian nobility and the people who managed to “keep a beard and a Russian caftan” is not in vain, and “universal slavery”, universal silent obedience is not in vain.

Therefore, the assessment of Peter’s transformations also changes. According to Pushkin, it was Peter who managed to destroy the hereditary nobility as a social force, which played such an important role in the Moscow period of Russian history. And in place of the ancient hereditary nobility, whose main qualities were independence, courage and honor, and whose purpose was to be “powerful defenders” of the people “1a sauvegarde of the hardworking class,” came the bureaucracy. “Despotism surrounds itself with devoted mercenaries and thereby suppresses all opposition and all independence. The heredity of the highest nobility is a guarantee of this independence. The opposite is inevitably associated with tyranny, or rather, with low and flabby despotism.” Hence the conclusion: the end of the nobility in a monarchical state means slavery of the people (VIII, 147-148).

But the people are not silent and do not put up with their slavery. The theme of popular revolt becomes one of the central ones in Pushkin’s work of the thirties. (“The History of the Pugachev Rebellion”, “The Captain’s Daughter”, “Scenes from Knightly Times”, “Kirdzhali”, “Dubrovsky”). As we have seen, it is reflected in “The Bronze Horseman” - in the image of a rebellious element. (The very image of St. Petersburg, as it is given in the poem - a city that grew “from the swamp of blat” - symbolizes the inorganic nature of Peter’s civilization, which turned out to be unable to accommodate the original life of the people). The theme of popular revolt was caused by life itself. The threat of a peasant war once again loomed over Russia. In 1831, in connection with a cholera epidemic, popular riots broke out in different cities of the country. They even reached St. Petersburg. “You probably heard about the disturbances of Novgorod and Old Rus',” Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky. - Horror. More than a hundred generals, colonels and officers were massacred in the Novgorod settlements with all the subtleties of malice... It’s bad, Your Excellency” (X, 373). It seems that “not a firm peaceful unanimity”, but a “terrible shock” alone can destroy “inveterate slavery” in Russia, and this is also one of the consequences of Peter’s reforms.

Pushkin was always proud of his six hundred years of nobility (“savagery, meanness and ignorance,” he wrote, “does not respect the past, groveling before only the present”): and at the same time, although with some challenge, but at the same time seriously and even proudly , called himself a “Russian tradesman” With pride, for “there is a dignity higher than the nobility of the family, namely: personal dignity” (VII, 196) and “A person’s self-esteem is the key to his greatness.”

A tradesman in the eyes of the poet is one who “through labor had to gain himself both independence and honor,” and even though his life is limited to the “home circle,” within this small circle it comes into contact with the fundamental principles of existence - work, family and love. All this now merges for Pushkin into the concept of home. “Youth has no need to be at home, mature age is horrified by its solitude. Blessed is he who finds a girlfriend - then he succeeds home. Oh, how soon will I transfer my penates to the village - fields, gardens, peasants, books; poetic works - family, love, etc. - religion, death" (III, 521).

The motif of “home” as a kind of small space, opposed to the chaos of Russian reality, has become one of the most important in Pushkin’s lyrics since the late twenties. It is usually given in opposition to the road, or more precisely, to the impassability, to the absence of a path. In this sense, the poem “Road Complaints” is especially expressive, where the image of the road appears as a metaphor for the path of life, on which the poet faces various types of troubles and deaths, one more absurd than the other, and the only refuge, the only salvation from all this disorder of Russian life is home.

Whether it's a glass of rum,

Sleep at night, tea in the morning;

What a difference, brothers, at home!

Well, let's go, drive!

A house is a symbol not of happiness or even will, but of peace (“My ideal is now a housewife, // my desires are peace”). Pushkin hoped: “If I get married, I’ll live happily as a tradesman” (X, 333). Peace, however, turned out to be a pipe dream. Pushkin wrote to his wife: “It is very possible to live without political freedom; without family immunity, inviolabit? de la famille, impossible; hard labor is far better" (X, 487-488).

The house motif also occupies a central place in The Bronze Horseman. Much has been written about the contrast between Peter’s “great thoughts” and Eugene’s “small dreams”. 1

Marry? Well... why not?

It's hard, of course.

But well, he's young and healthy,

Ready to work day and night;

He'll arrange something for himself

Shelter humble and simple

And in it Parasha will be calmed down...

More important, however, is the comparison itself, seemingly at first glance, of such incommensurable quantities. It is full of deep meaning. Peter strives to found a city, Eugene - a house. But the city is not only huge palaces and towers, coastal granite, the Admiralty needle, rich piers to which ships from all over the world rush, bridges that hang over the waters. A city is, first of all, houses in which people live. The house is the condition of city life and its highest goal. And Evgeniy’s dreams of happiness, of a home for Pushkin are not at all small and private, but, on the contrary, universal, unconditional and fundamental. And they should not oppose, but complement, continue the great thoughts of Peter. But house and city in “The Bronze Horseman” become opposite, even mutually exclusive concepts - they constitute the most important opposition of the poem. And Eugene’s modest dream of finding peace in the “dilapidated house” where “the widow and daughter, his Parasha” live, turns out to be less feasible than Peter’s grandiose, daring plans. The happiness of the heroes is destroyed without any fault on their part: Parasha died, Evgeny goes crazy, the house was demolished by a flood. “Where is home?” – Evgeniy exclaims in horror. Where is home? - the poet asks with horror, does he exist, is he possible in this proudly and magnificently ascended young city?

Only at the beginning of the poem do we see Pushkin’s hero in the four walls of a house (actually, this is not a house, but a “deserted corner”, which, when the time comes, the owner will rent to the poor poet, the same homeless wanderer), and then only on the streets and the squares of St. Petersburg, unprotected by anything, open to all the evil winds of history. And in the poem a new comparison of Eugene and Peter arises, different from at the beginning.

Riding a marble beast,

Without a hat, hands clasped in a cross,

Eugene…

Eugene here is correlated not only with the Bronze Horseman (more on that later), but also with Peter of the Introduction. This is emphasized by the Napoleonic gesture, arms crossed on the chest (I have already spoken about the connection between Napoleon and Peter), and the place (according to legend, this is where Peter stood, planning to found the city). Eugene’s gaze is turned to the very distance into which Peter was looking: “his desperate gaze was fixed on the edge alone, motionless.” This is finally emphasized by the five times repetition of the word “there”. (“The waves rose there and were angry, // there was a storm howling, // debris was rushing there... God, God! there...” “an unpainted fence, and a willow // and a dilapidated house: there is one, // a widow and a daughter, his Parasha "). Here again the main formula of “The Bronze Horseman” sounds: “where before, there now.” This is another important result of the past years: Evgeniy sees what Peter did not see, what the 18th-century chronicler did not see, what Pushkin himself did not see in Onegin’s time.

Peter saw a magnificent city. Evgeniy is a dilapidated house; Peter was concerned about the fate of Russia, Evgeniy was concerned about the fate of an individual; Peter thought about the future, Evgeny - about the present.

Here two opposing, two irreconcilable points of view collide. What is Peter the fate of Evgeniy and Parasha and these little ones in general, when he is faced with the grandiose task of founding a beautiful city, creating a powerful military power (“from now on we will threaten the Swede”), overcoming centuries-old Russian backwardness, putting Russia on a par with other European powers, and humanity Peter , according to Pushkin, he despised even more than Napoleon.

What is a magnificent city to Eugene, if in this city he has no home and “there is water all around him and nothing else”? What does he care about the city in which his Parasha died, “his dream” and where evil children will throw stones after him and the coachman’s whips will whip him? What is the future for him when there is no present, “and life is nothing like an empty dream, // a mockery of heaven over the earth”?

But the comparison between Eugene and Peter is not limited to this. It also appears in the second part of the poem. Deafened by the “noise of internal anxiety,” continuing to hear the “rebellious noise of the Neva and the winds,” Eugene was “silently full of terrible thoughts.” For the first time, Pushkin, in relation to Evgeniy’s thoughts, applies the solemn word “thoughts” (formerly: various reflections; “dreamed” - something vague). This is significant. The image of Eugene is given in evolution. At first he thinks about himself, during the flood he already fears “not for himself,” but for another person close to him, now his thought concerns the common fate, the fate of Russia, and therefore meets and comes into conflict with the thought of Peter. This is emphasized by the stylistic repetition: “full of great thoughts” and “silently full of terrible thoughts.” Peter's thoughts are great - they are about the great future of Russia, Eugene's thoughts are terrible - they are about a “terrible day”, about a “terrible time” in Russian history. Peter puts his thoughts into carefully constructed phrases, Evgeniy is silent. His thoughts are too vague, too terrible to be put into words, but when his thoughts become clear and the word is found, albeit vague, albeit unclear, “for you,” Eugene will turn him not to Peter, but to the “proud idol” , The Bronze Horseman - the title character of the poem.

"Idol on a bronze horse"

Next to the “indignant Neva” and “poor Eugene”, the protagonist of the poem is Falconet’s monument to Peter. It appears, on the one hand, as a thing, as an element of the architectural ensemble of St. Petersburg, as a statue made of copper (the Bronze Horseman) and, on the other, as a meaning, as a symbolic image that contains the whole concept of Russian history. At the same time, the idea embedded in Falconet’s monument and the idea that Pushkin extracts from the monument are not identical to each other.

Falconet outlined his plan in a famous letter to Diderot. In the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, the sculptor strives to show in his hero “the personality of the creator, legislator, benefactor of his country.” “My king does not hold any rod, he extends his beneficent hand over the country he travels around. He climbs to the top of the rock that serves as his pedestal,? it is an emblem of the difficulties he has conquered. So, this fatherly hand, this jump up a steep cliff? This is the plot given to me by Peter the Great."

In Falconet's statue, the rider and the horse are sharply opposed to each other: the spontaneous, rapid movement of the horse, which flew up to the very top of the rock, and the sovereign will of the rider, who brought the horse back abruptly, stopping its run over the very abyss. But the will of the rider and the spontaneous movement of the horse not only contradict each other: the stop at the very gallop is motivated by the position of the horse in front of a steep cliff. This is where the plastic unity of horse and rider arises. Trampling on the snake - the emblem of malice and deceit, the horse seems to carry out the will of the rider. This artistic solution corresponded to Falconet’s historical concept. In Peter he saw a vivid expression of the dormant forces of Russia itself, which the horse was supposed to personify. Diderot wrote to Falconet: “The hero and the horse in your statue merge into a beautiful centaur, the humanly thinking part of which, with its calmness, makes a wonderful contrast with the rearing animal part.” Here, a broader philosophical idea was expressed - the harmony of civilization and nature, reason and the elements, central to the entire age of Enlightenment.

Such an understanding of the historical role of Peter was not alien to Pushkin. (“What thought is on his forehead!//What power is hidden in him!//And what fire is in this horse!”). But overall its concept is different. The very name “The Bronze Horseman” contains an oxymoron: inanimate material (copper) and an animate character (horseman), and the “copperness” of the horseman is included, as it were, in the very concept of Pushkin’s image and acquires a metaphorical meaning). The boundaries of living and nonliving things in the poem are fluid. The statue comes to life, the living Peter turns into an “image”. The revival of the statue occurs not only in the sick imagination of the insane Eugene. Already in the very description of the monument, the boundaries between Peter and his statue are so shifted that it is difficult to say who rises with the “brass head” - the idol or Peter himself.

He found out...

And lions, and the square and Togo,

Who stood motionless

In the darkness with a copper head,

The one whose will is fatal

A city was founded under the sea... (this is Peter),

and everything merges into one indecomposable whole in the following lines:

He is terrible in the surrounding darkness!

What a thought on the brow!

What power is hidden in it!

But the most interesting thing is that this violation of the boundaries of living and nonliving concerns not so much the statue, but also the person, “poor Eugene,” even in the first part of the poem.

Riding a marble beast,

Without a hat, hands clasped in a cross,

Sat motionless, terribly pale

Eugene…

“The marble beast” is the same oxymoron as the bronze horseman: marble lions are as if they were alive (“with raised paws, two guard lions stand as if alive”), and the living Eugene is like a statue (“And he seems to be bewitched, as if to chained to marble, he can’t get off”).

In contrast to Eugene, seated on a marble lion, at the end of the first part the title character of the poem, “an idol on a bronze horse,” appears for the first time.

And with my back turned to him,

In the unshakable heights,

Over the indignant Neva

Stands with outstretched hand

Idol on a bronze horse.

A horseman protecting the city he created from flooding is a motif often found in Russian poetry (in Petrov, Kostrov, Shevyrev and others). “The Bronze Horseman” partly adheres to this tradition. The raging elements seem powerless to disturb the “eternal sleep of Peter.” But in Pushkin’s image of the monument, other semantic overtones are also noticeable: the Horseman’s back is turned to Eugene, and his “outstretched hand,” according to Falconet’s plan, “beneficent,” “fatherly,” does not serve as protection for anyone. And his very immobility is dual. It is not only an expression of majestic contempt for the rebellious Neva, confidence in the steadfastness of the city he created (“Beaut yourself, city of Petrov, and stand unshakable, like Russia”), but also cold indifference to its victims, and perhaps even powerlessness in front of it. It is this side of the Horseman that is shaded and emphasized by the image of another horseman - Eugene, chained to a marble lion, but eager for action and doomed to immobility by the raging elements themselves (“There is water around him and nothing else”). In contrast to the tragicomic, almost grotesque, pathetic, but deeply humane figure of Eugene, we feel with particular acuteness the inhumanity of the motionless greatness of the copper idol.

A new and most developed image of the Falconet monument appears in the second part of the poem. It is the same as at the end of the first part, and at the same time different.

And right in the dark heights

Above the fenced rock

Idol with outstretched hand

Sat on a bronze horse.

Let's pay attention to the last two lines. Compared to the first part, their syntactic structure has changed. There it was: “An idol on a bronze horse stands with an outstretched hand” (“Idol on a bronze horse” is not only a syntactic, rhythmic, but also a semantic whole). Now “Idol” seems to be separated from the horse. This separation and even the opposition of the rider and the horse is emphasized in the poem by a number of other details: the horse is proud, the idol is proud; the horse is bronze, the rider is copper; the horse is fiery, the rider is cold. (In the version: “how cold is this motionless gaze, and what fire is in this horse!”). The contrast between the rider and the horse is palpable, finally, in the very interpretation of the monument: the horse is full of dynamics, it gallops (“Where are you galloping, proud horse?”), the rider lifts him up on his hind legs with an iron bridle over the very abyss. Vyazemsky claimed that the expression “Russia was raised on its hind legs” belongs to him: “My expression said to Pushkin when we passed by the monument; I said that this monument is symbolic: Peter rather raised Russia on its hind legs than drove it forward.”

A drawing by the poet has been preserved, accurately reproducing Falconet’s monument, but without the figure of Peter himself. According to A. Efros, the drawing is connected with the first plan of the “Bronze Horseman”. “Peter disappears from the pedestal, but not together with his horse, as in the final edition, but alone, that is, Eugene is pursued by the bronze figure of Peter, just as the marble figure of the Commander kills Don Juan in The Stone Guest.”

It is difficult to agree with this hypothesis. The drawing is in the drafts of “Tazit” and dates back to 1829, when it is unlikely that Pushkin’s idea for “The Bronze Horseman” could have originated. It is more natural to assume otherwise. The figure follows the lines:

The procession is ready for the road.

And the cart started moving. For her

Adehi follow sternly,

Silently subduing the ardor of the horses.

Pushkin's drawings in the margins of his manuscripts reveal the secret course of his thoughts, his hidden associations. Like the Adehi, the Horseman subdues the “ardor of the horse” (“And what fire is in this horse!”), but the horse still throws off the rider. This motif was found in Pushkin back in “Boris Godunov”, where the rider symbolized the king, and the horse symbolized the rebellious people.

Boris: “People are always secretly inclined to confusion,

Like a greyhound horse gnawing on its reins.”

Basmanov: “Well, the horseman calmly rules the horse.”

Boris: “A horse sometimes knocks down its rider.”

The possibility that a horse will knock down its rider is also palpable in “The Bronze Horseman,” but here it threatens the horse itself, which the rider holds with an “iron bridle” at the very edge of the “abyss.” After the words “Russia was raised on its hind legs” there is a note referring to Mickiewicz’s poem “a monument to Peter the Great, in which the Polish poet puts the following lines into the mouth of Pushkin himself:

Tsar Peter did not tame the horse with a bridle,

The cast horse flies at full speed,

The trampling of people seems to be rushing somewhere,

Sweeps away everything, not knowing where the limit is.

In one leap he took off to the edge of the cliff -

It's about to fall down and break.

(translated by V. Levik)

We must remember that the synonym for “abyss” for Pushkin was an angry element.

There is ecstasy in battle

And the dark abyss on the edge

And in the angry ocean

Among the menacing waves and stormy darkness

And in the Arabian hurricane

And in the breath of the Plague. (emphasis added)

In “The Bronze Horseman” there is a dialogue between a horse and a rebellious river.

But victories are full of triumph,

the waves were still boiling angrily,

It was as if a fire was smoldering underneath them,

foam still covered them,

And Neva was breathing heavily,

Like a horse running back from battle.

(The horse-fire rhyme itself, repeated in the description of the monument, is also important here). This association follows from the very symbolism of the poem - the horse personifies Russia, the element of people's life.

This is how the most important alternative to the “Bronze Horseman” arises – the elements and the sovereign will, the “abyss” and the “iron bridle”. It also determines the very structure of the poem, its composition: the first part is the triumph of the elements, the second – the “iron bridle”. But both are equally hostile forces to man, and when “everything returned to the previous order,” nothing changed in the fate of “poor Eugene.”

As on the eve of the “terrible day,” St. Petersburg in the second part of the poem is enveloped in darkness: “it was gloomy,” “a gloomy wave splashed onto the pier,” “in the darkness,” “in the dark heights,” a copper-headed horseman rises. The rain is dripping, the wind howls sadly, but an “iron bridle” reigns over all this darkness. It is palpable in the “fenced rock”, over which it no longer stands, but “sits” on a bronze horse “an idol with an outstretched hand”, in “like a petitioner at the door of judges who do not heed him”, “murmuring fines”, on the smooth steps a gloomy wave splashes; in that with the sadly howling wind now “the sentry called to one another in the darkness of the night.”

This is the same image of the “terrible time,” but the horror now comes not from the raging elements, but from the Bronze Horseman: “He is terrible in the surrounding darkness!” It is not without reason that for Eugene himself, the “past horror”, the death of Parasha, the house demolished by the flood, and the present horror, embodied in the Horseman standing motionless in the darkness, merge into one whole.

The element has come to terms with itself, but the human person cannot come to terms with it. Full of “terrible thoughts”, deafened by the “noise of internal anxiety”, Eugene challenges the “iron bridle”, the “proud idol” - the power of Russian statehood created by Peter and embodied in the monument, for it not only did not protect him, but deprived him of the very foundations human existence. Eugene's rebellion is justified and necessary. “Neither this nor that, neither an inhabitant of the world, nor a dead ghost,” in rebellion he finds the reality and life he had lost (“a flame ran through his heart, his blood boiled”). Rebellion is the only form of his human self-affirmation, and at the same time he is powerless - the power of the formidable king is immense. It is not Peter who is pursuing Evgeniy, but the Bronze Horseman - the monument itself, something deathly, mechanical (“as if thunder was rumbling // heavily ringing galloping // along the shaken pavement”) - a symbol of an alienated, inhuman, faceless state. Whether the Horseman, the “formidable king,” would have the strength to cope with the rebellious elements - Pushkin was not sure of this, but that he would always have the strength to suppress any personal protest - the poet had no doubt about this. He himself felt in the position of his hero when he once dared to resign, and then “failed,” and knew well what “heavy, ringing galloping along the shocked pavement” was.

This does not mean that the poet completely merges with his hero. A distinctive feature of the style of “The Bronze Horseman” is the absence of a direct author’s word, not refracted, not put in quotes from someone else’s style. Pushkin, as it were, hides behind various stylistic masks (the mask of an 18th-century odopist, his own style of Onegin’s time, the styleless, everyday prose words of Eugene), without merging with any of them. Each of these masks, embodying a special point of view on the world, exists next to the others, complementing, refuting or correcting them. In this regard, the notes referring to Mickiewicz are also significant. Pushkin is not simply polemicizing with the Polish poet, as is commonly believed, and does not identify with him, using notes as a special code, as some researchers claim, but, it seems, he attracts another point of view, introduces another voice into his polyphonic poem .

Noting this feature characteristic of Pushkin’s style, M.M. Bakhtin wrote about “Onegin” that “almost not a single word there is a direct Pushkin word,” and at the same time “there is a linguistic (verbal-ideological) center.” The author, the researcher claims, “is located at the organizational center of the intersection of planes, and various planes are separated from this author’s center.”

It is extremely difficult to find such an author's semantic center in The Bronze Horseman. The fact is that the author's point of view in the poem exists more as a statement of a question than as an answer to it. Hence the mystery of the poem. Each of her images is extremely polysemantic, includes many different meanings, sometimes opposite, which not only complement, but sometimes exclude each other. That is why it is perceived as a question, as a riddle. In fact, who is the Horseman, the “powerful lord of fate” or the copper image? And what is the “unshakable height” from which he looks at the raging Neva - an expression of his greatness or powerlessness before it? Eugene's rebellion is powerless, but is he really so powerless if he could move the monument from its place and make it gallop through the deserted and dark streets of St. Petersburg? It is not for nothing that the key phrases of the poem are expressed in the form of a question: “where is home”, “where are you galloping, proud horse, and where will you land your hooves?”

The last question, the most important for the entire poem, cannot be reduced to the alternative of the “iron bridle” and the “abyss.” This alternative is the alternative to the “terrible time” when, in the words of the poet himself, “the lack of common opinion, this indifference to everything that is duty, justice and truth, this cynical contempt for human thought and dignity - can truly lead to despair” ( X, 872-873). But Russia was not limited to the “terrible times” for Pushkin, even the “St. Petersburg” period of its history. In the image of a horse flying into the distance, full of fire with a powerful rider, the poet’s faith in the hidden enormous forces of Russia, pride in its past and, despite everything, hope for its “special destiny” are palpable. In the same letter to Chaadaev, Pushkin wrote: “I would not like to change my fatherland or have a different history other than the history of our ancestors, such as God gave it to us.”

“The Bronze Horseman” is a summary of Peter’s transformations, the poet’s thoughts on the future of Russia, on the mystery of its history.

The poem is imbued with the feeling of the end of the noble period of the Russian liberation movement, with which it is connected and from which Pushkin’s creativity itself grows. The image of Eugene symbolizes this end. The uprising of December 14 - an attempt by the best part of the nobility to fulfill its historical destiny - to be “1a sauvegarde of the hardworking class” - in the eyes of Pushkin could not bring any practical results. He wrote: “The gradual fall of the nobility: what follows from this? accession of Catherine II, December 14, etc.” (VIII, 148). Now the “immense power of the government”, the “iron bridle” is opposed by the personal self-awareness of the individual and the formidable element of popular uprisings.

“Where are you galloping, proud horse, and where will you land your hooves?”

All thinking Russia of the 19th century will reflect on this question, on this riddle, giving a variety of, sometimes opposite, answers, but all of them, one way or another, as a possibility, as a hint is already contained in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman”.

"Bronze Horseman"

In November 1824, the most destructive flood in its history occurred in St. Petersburg. The water rose 410 centimeters above the ordinary level and flooded almost the entire city. According to official data alone, more than four thousand houses were completely destroyed and damaged. The flood left a heavy mark on the memory of St. Petersburg residents. The most incredible rumors circulated about him for a long time, many of which were transformed into folk tales, legends and simply myths.

This was not the first flood in St. Petersburg. Even the first residents of St. Petersburg were well aware of the danger posed by floods that were repeated year after year and frightening in their regularity, ancient legends about which were passed down from generation to generation with superstitious fear. They said that the ancient inhabitants of these places never built strong houses. They lived in small huts, which, when the water rose threateningly, were immediately dismantled, turned into comfortable rafts, simple belongings were piled on them, tied to the treetops, and they themselves “escaped to Dudorov Mountain.” As soon as the Neva entered its banks, the residents safely returned to their rafts, turned them into homes, and life continued until the next rampant of the elements. According to one of the curious Finnish legends that has reached us, floods of the same destructive force were repeated every five years.

The mechanism of St. Petersburg floods is actually surprisingly simple. As soon as the atmospheric pressure over the Gulf of Finland significantly exceeds the pressure over the Neva, it begins to squeeze water out of the gulf into the Neva. It is clear that the floods were associated with the dangerous proximity of the sea. Sayings: “Expect grief from the sea, trouble from the water; where there is water, there is trouble; and the king of water will not stop” is clearly of St. Petersburg origin. If you believe the legends, in the old days, during floods, the Neva flooded the mouth of the Okhta River, and in some years it even reached the Pulkovo Heights. There is a well-known legend that Peter I, after one of the floods, visited the peasants on the slope of Pulkovo Mountain. “Pulkov is not threatened by water,” he said jokingly. Hearing this, a Chukhonian who lived nearby answered the king that his grandfather remembers well the flood, when the water reached the branches of an oak tree at the foot of the mountain. And although Peter, as the legend tells about it, went up to that oak tree and cut off its lower branches with an ax, this did not increase peace of mind. The Tsar was well aware of the first documentary evidence of the flood of 1691, when the water in the Neva rose by 3 meters 29 centimeters. We, today's St. Petersburg residents, with any such excursion into the history of floods must take into account that in the 20th century, in order for the Neva to overflow its banks, its level had to rise by more than one and a half meters. In the 19th century, this level was about a meter, and at the beginning of the 18th century, forty centimeters of water rise was enough for the entire territory of historical St. Petersburg to turn into one continuous swamp.

The nature of St. Petersburg constantly reminded itself of itself with destructive floods, each of which became more dangerous than the previous one. In 1752, the water level reached 269 centimeters, in 1777 - 310 centimeters, in 1824, as we know, the Neva rose by 410 centimeters. Such floods are called “Petersburg floods” in folklore. Back in the 18th century, an ominous saying and prediction arose in St. Petersburg: “And there will be a great flood.”

The most dangerous thing about floods was their unpredictability and the rapidity of water spreading throughout the city. They escaped from the raging elements, as from a living enemy, by running, jumping over fences and other obstacles. There is an anecdote about a certain merchant, who, fearing theft, beat unfortunate people on the hands with a stick when they rushed to escape the water through the fence of his house. Having learned about this, Peter I “ordered a medal made of cast iron weighing two pounds, with the inscription: “For the salvation of the perished,” to be hung around the merchant’s neck for life.” However, for some, such floods were considered “lucky”. There are cases when foreign merchants attributed the number of goods lost from the flood in order to benefit the state from it. One of the foreign observers wrote home that “in St. Petersburg they say that if in any year there is no big fire or very high water, then surely some of the foreign factors there will go bankrupt.”

There were some oddities during the flood of 1824, about which there were especially many eyewitness accounts in the memoir literature. There is a well-known anecdote about Count Bartholomew Vasilyevich Tolstoy, who lived at that time on Bolshaya Morskaya Street. Waking up on the morning of November 7, he went to the window and, to his horror, saw that Count Miloradovich was riding in front of the windows of his house on a 12-oar longboat. Tolstoy pulled away from the window and shouted to the valet to look out the window too. And when the servant confirmed what the count had seen earlier, he barely said: “Like on the longboat?” - “So, your Excellency: there is a terrible flood in the city.” - And only then did Tolstoy cross himself with relief: “Well, thank God it’s so, but I thought that the fool had come over me.”

Looking ahead, let us recall that the flood of 1924 was no less terrible, when many streets of Leningrad were suddenly left without road surfaces. At that time it was end-to-end, that is, laid out from special hexagonal wooden blocks laid at the ends. Apparently, the inventors of this ingenious way to cover city roads did not count on such natural disasters. Since then, end pavements have disappeared from the city streets forever. The memory of them is preserved only in folklore. There is a well-known children's riddle with the answer: “Flood”:

What was the name of the one with Dvortsova

Did you steal masonry from the end of the pavement?

I must say that floods today no longer cause such fear. Folklore even notes some confusion with cause-and-effect relationships that appeared in children's heads. To the question: “Come up with a complex sentence from two simple ones: “There is a threat of flooding” and “The Neva overflowed its banks,” the answer follows: “The Neva overflowed its banks because there was a threat of flooding.”

Commemorative plaques marking the water level during a particular flood are mounted on many St. Petersburg facades. St. Petersburg residents treat them quite jealously, not without reason considering them historical monuments. There is a legend in the city about one of these boards, which suddenly found itself at the level of the second floor, which in no way corresponded to the value of the water rise in centimeters indicated on the board itself. To the questions of the curious, the janitor happily explained: “Well, the board is historical, memorial, and the boys are constantly scratching it.”

There is also a memorial plaque in St. Petersburg that is common to all floods. It is located at the Nevsky Gate of the Peter and Paul Fortress, leading to the berths of the Commandant's pier. In St. Petersburg they call it: “Chronicle of Floods.” Another flood level indicator, the so-called “Neptune Scale,” is installed near the Blue Bridge.

However, let us return to the chronological logic of our story. Pushkin was not in St. Petersburg during the flood. Let us remember that he was in exile and returned to the capital only in 1826. With his characteristic temperamental curiosity, he eagerly listened to the memories of eyewitnesses. They talked about some unlucky official Yakovlev, who, just before the flood, was blithely walking along Senate Square. When the water began to rise, Yakovlev hurried home, but when he reached Lobanov-Rostovsky’s house, he saw with horror that there was no way to go further. Yakovlev allegedly climbed onto one of the lions, which “with raised paws, as if alive,” looked at the unfolding elements. There he “sat throughout the flood.”

Pushkin also knew another story about a recent flood. Its hero was the sailor Lukovkin, whose house on Gutuevsky Island, along with all his relatives, was washed away by water. And Vladimir Sollogub laughingly told Pushkin the well-known story about how, under the windows of the Winter Palace, a guard box, torn from its place, floated across the flooded square, along with the guard in it. Seeing the emperor standing at the window, the sentry seemed to stand guard. They talked about a coffin that surfaced in some flooded cemetery and, driven by a strong wave, floated to Palace Square, broke through a window frame on the lower floor of the Winter Palace and stopped only in the room of the emperor himself.

All this wonderful urban folklore, of course, was excellent material for creativity. It is easy to assume that the story about the flooded Palace Square could give birth to the first line of the introduction to the future poem: “On the shore of desert waves...”.

Let's make a small digression. The famous line itself could not become a kind of revelation for St. Petersburg residents. The legend about the vast swampy desert on the site of the future St. Petersburg was one of the most enduring St. Petersburg legends even before Pushkin. Pushkin simply brought it to aphoristic completeness. In fact, in the territory of the historical center of St. Petersburg alone, at the time of the founding of the city, there were about forty villages and hamlets, hamlets and fishing settlements, small estates and farms. Their names are well known: Kalinkino, Spasskoye, Odintsovo, Kukharevo, Volkovo, Kupchino, Maksimovo and many others. However, throughout the 18th century, St. Petersburg residents were flattered that their city was founded on an empty, disastrous, unfit for life place solely by the will of its great founder, Peter I. And after the appearance of Pushkin’s poem, they believed in this completely and irrevocably. To this day, many still remain in this confidence. A legend gave birth to a legend.

M. Yu. Vielgorsky

Yes, folklore was good material for a poem. But this is not yet a poem. The most important thing was missing - conflict. The wild, unbridled element, although it opposed man, was blind and deaf. What can a person oppose to her? She won't hear him.

Pushkin’s meeting with his old, albeit older, friend, the cheerful and witty Mikhail Vielgorsky, helped find the conflict. One of the most notable representatives of Pushkin’s Petersburg, “a most brilliant dilettante,” as almost all his contemporaries characterized him, was the son of the Polish envoy to Catherine’s court in St. Petersburg.

Under Paul I, Mikhail Vielgorsky was marked with a sign of the emperor's highest favor - together with his brother he was granted a Knight of the Order of Malta. Vielgorsky was widely known in the Masonic circles of St. Petersburg as the “Knight of the White Swan” and was “Grand Sub-Prefect, Commander, and in the absence of the Grand Prefect, the ruling chapter of the Phoenix.” Meetings of the Masonic brothers of the order took place in his house.

In addition to Masonic meetings, the Vielgorskys organized regular literary evenings. Gogol, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Pushkin, Glinka, Karl Bryullov and many other representatives of Russian culture of that time visited their salon. His house on the corner of Mikhailovskaya Square (now Arts Square) and Italianskaya Street in St. Petersburg was called “Noah’s Ark.” Many works of literature, according to legends, saw the light solely thanks to the mind, intuition and intelligence of Mikhail Yuryevich. They say that one day he discovered the manuscript of “Woe from Wit,” accidentally left by Griboyedov on the piano in his house. By that time, the author of the comedy had apparently not yet decided to make it public, much less publish it. And only thanks to Vielgorsky, who “spread the rumor about the famous comedy” throughout St. Petersburg, Griboyedov finally decided to publish it.

There is also a known legend that the mystical old Mason Mikhail Vielgorsky told Pushkin the story of the revived statue of Peter; the legend so struck the poet that it haunted him until the well-known autumn of 1833, when the poem was finally created in the solitude of Boldino "Bronze Horseman".

Pushkin knew well the history of the monument to the founder of St. Petersburg. It was opened on August 7, 1782 in the center of Senate Square, with a huge crowd of people, in the presence of the imperial family, the diplomatic corps, invited guests and the entire guard. This is the first monumental monument in Russia. Before this, no monuments in the modern sense of the word were created in Russia at all. The most important events in the history of the state were marked by the construction of churches. The memory of statesmen was also preserved. Temples were also erected in their honor.

The monument to Peter I was created by the French sculptor Etienne Falconet. The installation location was determined back in 1769 by the “stone master” Yu. M. Felten; it was then that he was transferred from the category of masters to the position of architect for the “Project of strengthening and decorating the banks of the Neva on both sides of the monument to Peter the Great.”

Meanwhile, there are numerous legends among the people that explain in their own way the choice of location for the monument. Here is one of them: “When there was a war with the Swedes,” says a northern legend, “Peter rode a horse. Once the Swedes caught our general and began to skin him alive. They reported this to the tsar, but he was hot-tempered, immediately galloped off on a horse, and forgot that the general was being skinned on the other side of the river, he needed to jump over the Neva. So, in order to make a more agile leap, he directed his horse towards this stone, which was now under the horse, and from the stone he thought to wave across the Neva. And he would have waved, but God would have saved him. As soon as the horse wanted to swing off the stone, a large snake suddenly appeared on the stone, as if it was waiting, wrapped itself around its hind legs in one second, squeezed its legs as if with pincers, stung the horse - and the horse did not move, and remained on its hind legs. This horse died from a bite that same day. Peter the Great ordered that the horse be stuffed as a souvenir, and then, when the monument was cast, the entire size was taken from the stuffed animal.”

And another legend on the same topic: “Peter fell ill, death is approaching. He got up in a fever, the Neva was making noise, and it seemed to him that the Swedes and Finns were coming to take St. Petersburg. He left the palace wearing only his shirt; the guards did not see him. He sat on his horse and wanted to jump into the water. And then the snake wrapped the horse’s legs like a noose. He lived there in a cave on the shore. He didn't let me jump, he saved me. I saw such a snake in Kuban. His head will be cut off, and his tail will be boiled - for lard, for ointment, and his skin - for sashes. He will tie any animal to a tree and can even wrap it around a rider and horse. So the monument was erected, how the serpent saved Peter.”

From the words of a certain Old Believer, the modern St. Petersburg writer Vladimir Bakhtin wrote down the legend of how Peter I jumped over the Neva twice on horseback. And every time before the jump he exclaimed: “Everything is God’s and mine!” And the third time he wanted to jump and said: “Everything is mine and God’s!” Either he misspoke, putting himself ahead of God, or pride won, and he became petrified with his hand raised.

In one of the northern versions of this legend there is no opposition between “mine” and “God”. There is simply self-confidence and boasting, for which Peter allegedly paid. He boasted that he would jump over “some wide river,” and was punished for his boasting - he turned to stone at the very time the horse’s front legs separated from the ground to jump.

In the version of the same legend there is one remarkable detail: Peter the Great “did not die, as all people die: he was petrified on a horse,” that is, he was punished “for his pride in placing himself above God.”

But here is a legend that has almost an official origin. One evening, the heir to the throne, accompanied by Prince Kurakin and two servants, walked through the streets of St. Petersburg. Suddenly a stranger appeared ahead, wrapped in a wide cloak. It seemed that he was waiting for Paul and his companions and, when they approached, walked alongside. Pavel shuddered and turned to Kurakin: “Someone is walking next to us.” However, he did not see anyone and tried to convince the crown prince of this. Suddenly the ghost spoke: “Paul! Poor Pavel! Poor prince! I am the one who takes part in you.” And he went ahead of the travelers, as if leading them. Then the stranger led them to the square near the Senate and pointed out the place for the future monument. “Paul, goodbye, you will see me here again.” Saying goodbye, he raised his hat, and Pavel saw Peter’s face with horror. Paul allegedly told his mother Empress Catherine II about this mystical meeting, and she decided on the location of the monument.

The horse on which Peter the Great is depicted received special attention in folklore. In northern legends, this magnificent horse is not a Persian breed, but a local one, Zaonezhsky. With some abbreviations, we present two legends.

“In Zaonezhye, a peasant has matured a stallion: hooves from a wicker plate-charusha, like a haystack! In the spring, before plowing, he let the horse go into the meadows, but he got lost. I was grieving, but what are you going to do? One day a man went to St. Petersburg to do carpentry. He stands, you know, on the bank of the Neva River, and sees: a man on a horse, like a mountain on a mountain. Who is this? Great Peter, who should be. The main thing is that he recognized the horse. “Karyushka, Karii,” he calls. And the horse came up and laid his head on the Kizhan’s shoulder. “Sir!” - He takes the horse by the bridle. “After all, in the presence of God and the Tsar, on a white day under the clear sun, I caught a thief.” - "Well! What was stolen from you?” - Peter is angry, thundering like spring thunder. Doesn't like thieves or drunkards. - “The horse on which your grace sits astride.” - “How can you prove it?” - “There is a noticeable notch on the hooves.” - “I didn’t take it away.” Servants by diligence. Sorry for the offense." “Of course, I have to plow, feed my family, and pay you taxes.” But you have a lot of worries too. Raise Russia. Own the horse!’ Didn’t Peter give eighty gold pieces for the horse? Or a hundred. Yes, “thank you” to boot. The man ran to Zaonezhye with the appendage. When we come to Leningrad, first of all we go to the square. There, where copper Peter sits on Karyushka, a peasant’s horse. It's our horse. Zaonezhsky! - We are looking for notches on the hoof. Must be".

And the second northern legend about the horse of Peter I: “Peter the Great was a great weight, he would have outweighed the three of us on the scales. The horses could not carry him: he would travel two miles on horseback, three on a horse - and even if he walked, the horse would get tired, stumble, and could not run at all. So the king ordered to get a horse that he could ride. It’s clear, everyone started looking, but will you clean it up soon? And in our province, in Zaonezhye, one peasant had such a horse that, perhaps, there has never been another like it and there will never be another: beautiful, tall, had hooves as big as a plate, a hefty horse, and he himself was humble. So some two people came, saw the horse and began to buy it and gave a good price, but didn’t give it back. It was winter, and in the spring the man let his horse loose, and the horse got lost. The man thought: the beast ate it or got stuck in the swamp. I regretted it, but what are you going to do, the horse won’t live forever. Two years have passed since then. Some gentleman was passing through this village on his way to Arkhangelsk and talking about the horse on which the Tsar rides. He found out about the horse and the man who had the horse thought that it was his horse and went to St. Petersburg, not just to take the horse away, but at least to look at it. I came to St. Petersburg, and St. Petersburg at that time was one hundred and seventy times smaller than the present St. Petersburg. He walks around St. Petersburg and waits for the Tsar to ride on horseback. Here comes the king, and on his horse. He knelt down in front of the horse and bent his face down to the ground. The king stopped. “Get up!” - the sovereign shouted in a loud voice. “What do you need?” The man stood up and submitted a petition. The king took the petition, immediately read it and said: “What did I steal from you?” - “This horse, Tsar-Sovereign, on which you are sitting.” “How can you prove that the horse is yours?” asked the king. - “There are signs of the Tsar-Sovereign, he is my twelve-cross, there are notches on his hooves.” The king ordered to look, and indeed, three large crosses were carved into the recesses in each hoof. The king sees that the horse was stolen and sold to him. He sent the man home, gave him eighty gold pieces for the horse and also gave him a German dress. So, in St. Petersburg there is a monument where Peter the Great is sitting on a horse, and the horse is on its hind legs, so the man has exactly the same horse.”

Monument to Peter I on the Senate (Petrovskaya) square B. Patersen. 1799

The appearance of the bronze horseman on the banks of the Neva once again stirred up the eternal struggle between the old and the new, the past century and the coming century. Probably among the Old Believers, an apocalyptic legend was born that the bronze horseman, rearing his horse on the edge of a wild rock and pointing into a bottomless abyss, is the horseman of the Apocalypse, and his horse is the pale horse that appeared after the opening of the fourth seal, the horseman “whose name is death; and hell followed him; and power was given to him over the fourth part of the earth - to kill with the sword, and with famine, and with pestilence, and with the beasts of the earth.” Everything is as in the Bible, in the fantastic visions of John the Theologian - in the Apocalypse, in visions that have received amazing confirmation. Everything matched. And the horse, sowing horror and panic, with iron hooves raised above the heads of the people, and the rider with the real features of a specific Antichrist, and the abyss - is it water? Earth? - but the abyss of hell is where his right hand points. Up to a quarter of the earth, the population of which, according to rumors, decreased fourfold during his reign. Falcone’s most interesting compositional discovery was the image of a snake, or “Kakimora,” as the people called it, which he included in the composition of the monument, crushed by the hoof of a horse’s hind leg. On the one hand, the snake, sculpted in bronze by the sculptor F. G. Gordeev, became an additional support point for the entire monument, on the other hand, it is a symbol of overcome internal and external obstacles that stood in the way of the transformation of Russia.

However, in folklore this author’s understanding of artistic intent has expanded significantly. In St. Petersburg, many considered the monument to Peter I to be a kind of mystical symbol. City clairvoyants claimed that “this good place on Senate Square is connected by an “umbilical cord” or “pillar” invisible to the ordinary eye, with the Heavenly Angel - the guardian of the city.” And many details of the monument themselves are not only symbolic, but also perform very specific protective functions. So, for example, under Senate Square, according to ancient beliefs, a giant snake lives, for the time being without showing any signs of life. But the old people believed that as soon as the snake moved, the city would end. Falcon allegedly knew about this too. That is why, folklore claims, he included an image of a serpent in the composition of the monument, as if declaring to the evil spirits for all future centuries: “Cheer me!”

At Peter the Great's

There are no one close

Only a horse and a snake,

That's his whole family.

The monument was treated differently. Not everyone immediately recognized him as great. What was considered a virtue in the 20th century was seen by many as a disadvantage in the 18th and even 19th centuries. And the pedestal was “wild,” and the arm was disproportionately long, and the snake supposedly personified the trampled and unhappy Russian people, and so on, and so on. Passions raged and controversy raged around the monument. Poems and poems, novels and ballets, artistic paintings and folk legends were created about him.

Judging by the memoirs of contemporaries, the monument to Peter inspired genuine horror. According to one of them, during the opening of the monument, the impression was as if “the emperor, right in front of those gathered, drove onto the surface of a huge stone.” A visiting foreigner recalled how in 1805 she suddenly saw “a giant galloping along a steep cliff on a huge horse.” - “Stop him!” - the amazed woman exclaimed in horror. According to one legend, during the liturgy in the Peter and Paul Cathedral on the occasion of the opening of the Bronze Horseman, when the Metropolitan, striking the tomb of Peter I with his staff, exclaimed: “Rise now, great monarch, and look at your kind invention,” the future Emperor Paul I was seriously afraid that my great-grandfather might actually come to life.

Until now, according to urban folklore, every time on the eve of major floods, bronze Peter comes to life again, slides off his wild rock and gallops around the city, warning of impending danger. This echoes another legend that sometimes the Bronze Horseman turns on his granite pedestal like a weather vane, indicating the direction of the wind of history.

Pushkin knew all this or could have known. But what Vielgorsky said became a revelation for him. This happened in 1812, during that dramatic summer when St. Petersburg was seriously threatened by the Napoleonic invasion. We have already told you that the French army initially intended to enter St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg they were seriously concerned about saving artistic and historical values. Among other things, Emperor Alexander I ordered the removal of the statue of Peter the Great to the Vologda province. Special flat-bottomed barges were prepared and a detailed plan for evacuating the monument was developed. State Secretary Molchanov was allocated money and specialists for this purpose.

At this very time, Vielgorsky said, a certain captain or major Baturin began to be haunted by the same mysterious dream. In a dream, he saw himself on Senate Square, next to the monument to Peter the Great. Suddenly Peter’s head turns, then the horseman rides off the cliff and heads through the streets of St. Petersburg to Kamenny Island, where Emperor Alexander I lived at that time. The bronze horseman rides into the courtyard of the Kamennoostrovsky Palace, from which a preoccupied sovereign comes out to meet him. “Young man, what have you brought my Russia to! - Peter the Great tells him, “But as long as I’m in place, my city has nothing to fear!” Then the rider turns back, and the ringing clatter of his horse’s bronze hooves on the pavement is heard again.

The major seeks a meeting with the emperor's personal friend, Prince Golitsyn, and conveys to him what he saw in his dream. Struck by his story, the prince retells the dream to the king, after which, according to legend, Alexander I cancels his decision to transport the monument. The statue of Peter remains in place, and, as was promised in Major Baturin’s dream, the boot of the Napoleonic soldier did not touch St. Petersburg soil.

One can only dream of such a plot development. Everything else remained a “matter of technology” and literary skill. Even the conflict, which was already increasingly clearly and acutely visible in the plot, could, if desired, be further aggravated.

And indeed, Pushkin seemed to agree to this. There is one little-known literary legend that Pushkin did not limit himself to the now well-known two, as many researchers believe, incomprehensible outside the context of the entire poem, half-lines put into the mouth of the unfortunate Eugene and addressed to the “ruler of half the world”: “Good, miraculous builder / Already you ! According to legend, the poor half-crazed official uttered a whole accusatory monologue addressed to the copper idol, which deprived him of not only his ordinary existence, but also his human appearance. They even named the number of verses of this passionate monologue, which the censorship allegedly mercilessly deleted. They said that there were thirty of them and that when Pushkin himself read the poem they made an “amazing impression.” True, even Valery Bryusov, carefully listening to this legend, noticed that “in Pushkin’s manuscripts nothing has been preserved anywhere except those words that are now read in the text of the story.” But who knows. As you know, folklore does not appear out of nowhere.

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From the book Works of Alexander Pushkin. Article eleven and last author Belinsky Vissarion Grigorievich Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is a great Russian poet. One of his many works is the poem “The Bronze Horseman,” in which the author talks about the problems that worried him during the creation of the work in 1833, for example, about the relationship between the state, government and the individual, and about the sometimes incompatibility of their interests. But “The Bronze Horseman” is not only a socio-philosophical poem, but also a historical one. After all, a special place in it is occupied by the poet’s reflections on the fate of Russia, on its historical development. What does the author tell us about Russian history, as he imagines it?

At the beginning of the poem, a picture of a deserted area is given, what was on the site of the future capital - St. Petersburg:

The river rushed; poor boat

He strove along it alone.

Along mossy, marshy banks

Blackened huts here and there,

Shelter of a wretched Chukhonian;

And the forest, unknown to the rays

In the fog of the hidden sun,

There was noise all around.

Against this background, Peter appears before us. He is “full of great thoughts,” thinking about taming the elements, about how he will build a city from “topi blat”* from where “we will threaten the Swede,” in which “all the flags will visit us.” Reflecting on these great achievements, the great sovereign does not notice either the “poor boat” or the “shelter of a wretched Chukhont.” This man does not care about the lives of unremarkable people, because before his eyes a picture of the future greatness of the northern capital opens. Peter mortgaged his city “to spite his arrogant neighbor,” destroying what was dear to “the Finnish fisherman, the sad stepson of nature.” And what are the joys and sorrows of some poor fisherman worth compared to the interests of the state? So Peter disrupts the measured flow of life that has been established in these places since time immemorial. The “miraculous builder” does not include the lives of ordinary people in his great plans. Next, a miraculous transformation takes place before the readers: instead of poor huts - “slender masses crowded with palaces and towers”, instead of a “poor boat” - “ships... from all over the earth”, instead of “mossy, swampy” shores - “dark green gardens” “... It was as if the labor, sacrifices, and struggle never happened. An incredible city, “full of beauty and wonder,” which, by human will, stood “on the banks of the Neva,” delights.

But the strong-willed pressure of Peter, who created the city, was not only a creative act, but also an act of violence. Petersburg was built on the bones of the people. Moreover, this city was built as a challenge to the elements of nature, since it was built on a place that was not very suitable for a large city, for living a large number of people, at the cost of unprecedented efforts and sacrifices. Even the geometrically correct layout of the new capital, based on strictly straight lines and right angles, was contrasted with the surrounding natural environment, expressing the triumph of reason over the elements of nature.

At the time when the action of the poem takes place, Peter’s human essence already becomes the property of history. All that remained was the copper Peter - an object of worship, a symbol of sovereignty, a “proud idol”, “an idol on a bronze horse”. And the violence that he committed, now, in the time of Eugene, returns in the form of a riot of elements, taking revenge not on his offender, but on his descendants - the innocent inhabitants of the city.

The creation of St. Petersburg is a kind of personification of all the activities of Peter I, his entire era. Everything he did was violent to one degree or another. The “Terrible Tsar” built a powerful state, but he created it on the bones and blood of people, neglecting them, their lives, their desires. But any violence entails retribution, and the patience of the people does not last forever. It is not for nothing that at the beginning of the second part the author gives the following comparison of the raging elements:

So villain

With his fierce gang

Having burst into the village, he breaks, cuts,

Destroys and robs; screams, gnashing,

Violence, swearing, anxiety, howling!..

This comparison is associated with popular revolt. After all, the country was already shaken by the uprising of Emelyan Pugachev. Isn't this an element that sweeps away everything in its path? In “The Bronze Horseman” we see that the elements of nature merge precisely with the rebellion of the people, but this is so far a protest of only one of its representatives - the little man Eugene. This rebellion was suppressed, as was the Pugachev uprising, but its image, like the image of the elements that runs through the entire poem, remains a warning for the powers that be, for the rulers of all times and peoples. The destruction in the city is enormous, and the number of victims is high. Nothing can withstand the elements of flooding. The Bronze Horseman himself stands, washed by muddy waves. He, too, is powerless to stop their onslaught. “Tsars cannot cope with God’s elements,” and even more so a copper idol. In a strong-willed, violent manner, Peter established a city among the wild nature, which will now forever be subject to attacks from the elements. And who knows, perhaps Eugene, so violently and casually destroyed, is a microscopic drop of the anger of the Russian people, a huge wave of which can sweep away the “idol with outstretched hand.” After all, the long and prosperous existence of a state that endlessly suppresses its subjects and neglects them in the name of its goals is impossible. On the contrary, the state must act for their benefit. After all, according to Pushkin, both the flood and the people’s revolt, “senseless and merciless,” are a manifestation of God’s wrath, which has fallen on the city so far in the form of a natural disaster, and in the future may result in a new Pugachevism: well, the element of a popular uprising , no less terrible than the flood element, which carries out its judgment without distinguishing between right and wrong.

Thus, Peter I changed the natural course of the historical development of Russia: from a backward semi-Asian country he made a European great power, he

Above the abyss

At the height, with an iron bridle

Raised Russia on its hind legs...

Our country is above this abyss to this day, although what Pushkin foresaw has already come true: a “senseless and merciless rebellion” already shook Russia in 1917. A great country above the abyss even now: the rulers, including modern ones, have not learned a lesson from history. What will happen? Will Russia fall into the abyss? Will he jump over the abyss? Or will it remain on its edge? I would like to hope for the best. In my opinion, this depends not only on the rulers, but also on the people themselves. After all, God's punishment in the form of an angry element, both natural and popular, was sent both to the powerful of this world and to the people for the fact that some turned into idols, and others into slaves. Pushkin equally hates both “wild lordship” and “skinny slavery,” which he speaks about not only in the poem “The Bronze Horseman,” but in all his civil lyrics.

The monument to Peter received the nickname “Bronze Horseman” thanks to Pushkin’s poem of the same name about St. Petersburg, which tells about the terrible flood of 1824. The founder of the city, Peter I, observes the events that take place in his domain.

Thanks to Pushkin’s poems, the legend is widely known that the Bronze Horseman travels around the city at night and returns to his place in the morning. Although this legend appeared earlier in urban folklore.

Pushkin sent the poem to Emperor Nicholas I for censorship, but the tsar was busy with state affairs and sent the poem to Benckendorff’s office for review without reading it. The poet's ill-wishers tried to prevent The Bronze Horseman from being published. So notes the researcher and writer of the Silver Age V.Ya. Bryusov, whom his contemporaries called a “walking encyclopedia.”

Pushkin wrote to friends:
“The Bronze Horseman was not allowed through the censorship. This is a loss to me."
“The Bronze Horseman is not missed - losses and troubles.”
“You ask about the Bronze Horseman, about Pugachev and about Peter. The first one will not be printed."
The poem was published only in 1837, the year of Pushkin’s death.

Pushkin's poem reflects the meeting of a simple city dweller Eugene with the Bronze Horseman. A townsman was distraught with grief; his bride died in a flood. Passing by the monument, a townsman blames Peter for his grief. Then he is overtaken by a vision that the Bronze Horseman is chasing him.
And its area is empty
He runs and hears behind him -
It's like thunder roaring -
Heavy ringing galloping
Along the shaken pavement.
And, illuminated by the pale moon,
Stretching out your hand on high,
The Bronze Horseman rushes after him
On a loud galloping horse;
And all night long the poor madman,
Wherever you turn your feet,
Behind him is the Bronze Horseman everywhere
He galloped with a heavy stomp.

Legends that the ghost of Peter wanders around the city appeared long before Pushkin. One day, the future Emperor Paul I was walking around St. Petersburg at dusk, accompanied by Prince Kurakin. A mysterious stranger approached him and said, “Paul! Poor Pavel! I am the one who takes part in you.” Then he added, “You’ll see me here again.” The stranger raised his hat, and Pavel saw Peter’s face. Prince Kurakin did not see the ghost and was surprised by Pavel’s sudden fear and inexplicable excitement.

The ghost’s words came true; at this place, Catherine II, Paul’s mother, ordered the installation of the Bronze Horseman.
It was said that the ghost of Peter visited Paul in his Mikhailovsky Castle on the eve of his death.

Flood in St. Petersburg

Pushkin vividly described the tragedy of the flood.
But the strength of the winds from the bay
Blocked Neva
She walked back, angry, seething,
And flooded the islands
The weather became more ferocious
The Neva swelled and roared,
A cauldron bubbling and swirling,
And suddenly, like a wild beast,
She rushed towards the city. In front of her
Everything ran, everything around
Suddenly it was empty - suddenly there was water
Flowed into underground cellars,
Channels poured into the gratings,
And Petropol emerged like a newt,
Waist-deep in water.
Siege! attack! evil waves,
Like thieves, they climb into windows. Chelny
From the run the windows are smashed by the stern.
Trays under a wet veil,
Wrecks of huts, logs, roofs,
Stock trade goods,
The belongings of pale poverty,
Bridges demolished by thunderstorms,

Coffins from a washed-out cemetery
Floating through the streets!
People
He sees God's wrath and awaits execution.
Alas! everything perishes: shelter and food!
Where will I get it?

Gradually the city is returning to normal life. By the way, the everyday bustle of the city has not changed since then.
...Everything returned to the same order.
The streets are already free
With your cold insensibility
People were walking. Official people
Leaving my night shelter,
I went to work. Brave trader,
Not discouraged, I opened
Neva robbed basement,
Collecting your loss is important
Place it on the nearest one. From the yards
They brought boats.
Count Khvostov,
Poet beloved by heaven
Already sang in immortal verses
The misfortune of the Neva banks...

Drawing by Pushkin

The sculptor Falconet thought for a long time about the ideas for the monument; one day, he dozed off in the Summer Garden at dusk. Peter I came to the sculptor and began asking questions; the emperor was satisfied with the answers and approved Falconet’s desire to create a monument.

Sculptor Falcone

“My monument will be simple... I will limit myself only to the statue of this hero, whom I do not interpret either as a great commander or as a winner, although he, of course, was both. Much higher is the personality of the creator and legislator..."- sculptor Falconet spoke about the idea of ​​the monument.

Peter's head was made by Falcone's student, Marie Anne Collot. Empress Catherine liked the artist’s works, and Kollo was accepted into the Academy of Arts long before the famous head of Peter was made.
When sculpting the head of the monument, Collo used the emperor's death mask. Catherine approved the artist’s work and assigned her a salary of 10,000 rubles. Falcone called the student his co-author in the work on the monument. In 1788, Falcone received two medals for his work - gold and silver. He gave the silver medal to Kollo.

Marie Anne Collot, who sculpted Peter's head for the monument

Collot married the teacher's son, Pierre Etienne, but the marriage did not work out and the couple separated. The artist filed a complaint against her husband; he extorted money from her to pay off gambling debts and one day, having been refused, hit her.
She remained grateful to teacher Falcone all her life when he was left paralyzed after a stroke; Collo cared for him for 8 years until his death.

Inscription on the monument “Petro primo Catharina secunda” - “Catherine the Second to Peter the Great”. The ambitious empress indicated that she was second after Peter, the successor to his great deeds.

The Thunder Stone on which the statue stands is also associated with the legend of Peter. According to legend, Tsar Peter climbed onto the thunder stone when he looked at the Neva, thinking about the construction of the city.

There is also a version that the ancient Magi considered the thunder stone sacred and performed cult ceremonies on it.

On the shore of desert waves
He stood there, full of great thoughts,
And he looked into the distance. Wide before him
The river rushed; poor boat
He strove along it alone.
Along mossy, marshy banks
Blackened huts here and there,
Shelter of a wretched Chukhonian;
And the forest, unknown to the rays
In the fog of the hidden sun,
There was noise all around.

And he thought:
From here we will threaten the Swede,
The city will be founded here
To spite an arrogant neighbor.
Nature destined us here
Open a window to Europe,
Stand with a firm foot by the sea.
Here on new waves
All the flags will visit us,
And we’ll record it in the open air.

A hundred years have passed, and the young city,
There is beauty and wonder in full countries,
From the darkness of the forests, from the swamps of blat
He ascended magnificently and proudly.

The townspeople tried to get hold of the thunderstone fragments that remained after processing. “Many hunters, for the sake of a memorable identification of this stone, ordered to make various cufflinks, knobs, and the like from its fragments.”
After Falconet returned to France, this fashion appeared in Europe. The sculptor brought home the remains of the thunder stone, from which jewelers made souvenirs and jewelry.

As usual, the sculptor chosen by the empress had many envious people. Detractors accused the sculptor of embezzling imperial money. The offended master left St. Petersburg in 1778, without waiting for the opening of the monument, which was scheduled for 1782 - the anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the reign of Catherine II.

Grand opening of the monument

Superstitious Old Believers were afraid of the image of the Bronze Horseman, calling him “Horseman of the Apocalypse.” The Old Believers saw in him the personification of the prophecy about the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse - “whose name is death; and hell followed him; and power was given to him over the fourth part of the earth - to kill with the sword, and with famine, and with pestilence, and with the beasts of the earth.”

One of the most famous legends of the Bronze Horseman is “The Dream of Major Baturin.” There was a war with Napoleon - 1812. The Emperor of France loved to take monuments of defeated cities to Paris as trophies. He stated that he intended to take the monument to Peter to Paris. Alexander I, fearing the capture of the capital, ordered the monument to be removed from the city.

Soon the tsar was told about the dream of a certain Major Baturin, who dreamed of Peter I. The horseman got off the granite pedestal and galloped to the palace of Alexander I.
“Young man, what have you brought my Russia to! But as long as I’m in place, my city has nothing to fear,” he said and galloped off.
Having learned about this dream, Alexander I decided to leave the monument in place. Napoleon's army did not reach St. Petersburg.

According to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, the human soul sometimes visits our world and inhabits its image. According to this theory, Peter's soul inhabits the statue and looks over his city, protecting it from enemies.

Bronze Horseman at Siege

The legend of the horseman-defender was remembered during the years of the siege. Peter the Great is the patron of the city; while he is in place, the enemy will not set foot on the city pavement. The city of Peter was not captured. Although at one time the philosopher Diderot (a contemporary of Catherine II) called St. Petersburg “the heart in the little finger,” considering the city especially vulnerable to the enemy.

By the way, the anthem of St. Petersburg is a fragment of the ballet by Reinhold Gliere based on the poem “The Bronze Horseman”. Pushkin's Bronze Horseman turned out to be associated with the official symbols of the city.

Sovereign city, rise above the Neva,
Like a wondrous temple, you are open to hearts!
Shine for centuries with living beauty,
The Bronze Horseman guards your breath.

The Bronze Horseman is one of the few surviving monuments to Peter the Great.

Many monuments were demolished as having “no artistic value.” For example, the monument is the king-carpenter, a copy of which is located in Holland in the city of Saardam.

The authors of Soviet books argued that the city does not need such monuments:
"...Peter, a Saardam carpenter, was working with an ax on the construction of a boat on the other side of the Admiralty, at its western river gate. It was a trinket monument, more of a table figurine in nature than a monument. In the twenties he also disappeared from here."
(Uspensky L.V. Notes of an old Petersburger, 1970)

The Dutch cast a copy of the lost monument and presented it to St. Petersburg in 1996.

Monument to the Tsar Carpenter, restored by the Dutch

"This monument was presented to the city of St. Petersburg by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Unveiled on September 7, 1996 by His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange."

Another “non-artistic” monument - Peter saving drowning people in a flood - was also demolished.

Pavel Evseevich Spivakovsky- Candidate of Philological Sciences, 2004-2011. - Associate Professor of the Department of Russian Literature of the State Institute of Russian Language named after. A.S. Pushkin, since 2011 - Associate Professor of the Department of History of Russian Literature of the 20th Century, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. In the 2012/2013 academic year, Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

So, we are starting a short series of five lectures called “Reality as an Illusion.” Where does this name come from? The fact is that, from the point of view of modern humanitarian science, the phenomenon of reality itself is problematized: what in the 19th century was taken for granted (for the most part this was associated with widespread ideas that there is a certain “only true” positivistically perceived reality, and all other ideas are inadequate to one degree or another), is now being called into question...

Not everyone, of course, shared this kind of views before, but, in general, they still prevailed. So, in the 20th century, serious doubts began to arise on this score. For example, Roman Jakobson in his article “On Artistic Realism” questions such a criterion as life-likeness.

Previously, it was believed that life-likeness was a completely sufficient argument in order to recognize a work as “realistic”. But it turns out that people’s ideas about life, about “reality” are extremely different, and there is simply no common understanding of this same life-likeness. This means that what is either considered to be reality, or someone perceives as reality, is more reasonable to perceive as a problem. It’s not that there is no reality at all, but it’s more likely that there is no reality that is the same for everyone. And therefore it takes a long and difficult time to deal with it.

And in this regard, it is interesting to look not only at modern literary texts, but also at the literature of the 19th century. Suddenly it turns out that there are many illusions there too, that everything is very complicated there and is often not at all what it seems. And in this regard, it makes sense to think about Pushkin’s famous poem “The Bronze Horseman”.

The text of the poem was mainly written by Boldinskaya in the fall of 1833; later Pushkin tried to alter something, but there were few alterations, and therefore the text of 1833 is still mostly in use, although some clarifications can be found in later amendments. But, in general, this is not our topic.

So, “The Bronze Horseman”. The poem begins with the words:

On the shore of desert waves
He stood, full of great thoughts,
And he looked into the distance.

In most editions of this poem the pronoun " He" is written with a lowercase letter and is highlighted in italics, but if we turn to a textologically more carefully prepared edition of the poem in the series "Literary Monuments", we will see that in Pushkin's poem the pronoun "He" is given twice, without any italics and with a capital letter. That is, the way it is traditional to write about God. Naturally, we are talking about Peter I here, and this writing is very significant for the artistic concept of the entire poem.

The fact is that Peter I, as he is presented in this work, lays claim to the role of an earthly god with all the ensuing unpleasant consequences. Actually, we can say (and in this it makes sense to agree with Valentin Nepomnyashchy) that “The Bronze Horseman” actually begins with how Pushkin’s poem “Anchar” ends.

In “Anchar” we see two people: “A man / Sent a man to Anchar with an imperious look.” What is this talking about? The fact that they are both equally human, they are equal in the face of the author, and, in general, in the face of God. Moreover, one of them is an invincible ruler with almost undivided power, and the other is a poor slave. A poor slave brings a poisoned tree, “and the prince imbued his obedient arrows with this poison / And with them he sent death / To his neighbors in foreign lands.” True, in some publications, instead of “prince,” they try their best to print “tsar,” although when Pushkin sent the poem to the printing house, and there, instead of “prince,” they mistakenly typed “tsar,” the author sharply protested. It would seem, indeed, logically, there should be a “king” there: he has such great power... Most likely, that prince was needed in order to create an association with the prince of this world. That is, before us is precisely a person, and not a demon at all, but this person actually serves the forces of the prince of this world.

So, before us is an “invincible ruler”, who in “Anchar” also acts as a contender for the role of earthly god, but this man has a problem: his neighbors are very disturbing to him. It is “to the neighbors” that he sends out his poison, and within the framework of Pushkin’s artistic world this poison is incredibly strong, and therefore it poisons everything around. In fact, in the poem “Anchar” we find ourselves in a poisoned world, where it is impossible to be: before us is a kind of ontological dead end, caused by the man-divine claims of the prince.

So, let's return to the text of The Bronze Horseman. The landscape that unfolds before Peter is miserable, but peaceful, calm:

Wide before him

The river rushed; poor boat

He strove along it alone.

Along mossy, marshy banks

Blackened huts here and there,

Shelter of a wretched Chukhonian;

And the forest, unknown to the rays

In the fog of the hidden sun

There was noise all around.

Nothing particularly scary happens here, the picture is quite balanced. And now the will of the emperor bursts into this world:

And He thought:

From here we will threaten the Swede,

The city will be founded here

To spite an arrogant neighbor.

“For evil,” that’s exactly how Pushkin writes, separately. At this moment, an artistic myth about St. Petersburg arises, which was built “out of evil,” and this will have the most serious consequences.

Nature destined us here

Open a window to Europe,

Stand with a firm foot by the sea.

Here on new waves

All the flags will visit us,

And we’ll record it in the open air.

Nature... An interesting question: why, in fact, does Peter refer to nature? It would seem that at the level of manifestation he obeys the forces of nature. Yes, but he somehow strangely obeys her, because in the text of the poem we see that it is nature that is severely wounded by his intervention, and so much so that it takes revenge even 100 years after the events described. Therefore, it cannot be said that Peter is subject to the forces of nature. This is simply not true.

Then why is he saying this? Knowing Pushkin’s views and his attitude towards deism, which was extremely popular in his time, we can say with confidence that here we have before us an attempt to build a deist picture of the world. Deism is a philosophical doctrine according to which God created the world, and then does not interfere with anything, and everything develops according to natural law. That is, in fact, it turns out that for a person, de facto, it makes no difference whether God exists or He does not exist. If God doesn’t interfere in anything anyway and will never interfere, then what difference does it make?

Pushkin very sharply did not accept this anti-Christian teaching, largely popularized by French enlighteners (for example, Voltaire was a deist). So, in 1830, he wrote the poem “To the Nobleman,” describing in it how Russian travelers became acquainted with the ideology of the French enlighteners, and they taught them either atheism or deism:

You came to Ferney - and the cynic turned gray,

The leader of brains and fashion is sly and brave

[a very negative characteristic, I must say],

Loving your dominion in the North,

<…>

The study was done for a time, your idol:

You were secluded. For your harsh feast

Now a devotee of providence, now a skeptic, now an atheist,

Diderot sat down on his shaky tripod

[we are talking about Denis Diderot, who wavered in his views],

He threw his wig and closed his eyes in delight.

And he preached. And modestly you listened

Over a slow cup of atheus or deist,

Like a curious Scythian to an Athenian sophist.

The deist-atheist teaching was perceived extremely naively and completely uncritically, because at that time there was no decent education in Russia.

As for Peter, when he places faceless nature in the place of God, he actually puts himself above everyone else. You don’t have to think about anyone, don’t think about it, and do whatever you want: this is a very convenient, essentially atheistic model of the world.

It is also significant that Pushkin is not inventing anything here: Boris Uspensky has a wonderful article “The Tsar and God,” which talks about Peter I’s attempts to present himself as some kind of earthly deity. What can I say, Feofan Prokopovich, an associate of Peter I, in his work “On the Glory and Honor of the Tsar” calls the Tsar Christ and God. Just... Feofan Prokopovich was, of course, a very subtle person, he knew how to say so as not to formally turn out to be a heretic and at the same time to flatter the tsar as much as possible.

But why Christ? Χριστός in Greek is “anointed”, the king is God’s anointed, therefore, why not use this word?..

Or about the word “god”. Let us remember Psalm 81: “I said: you are gods and sons of the Most High, all of you” (Ps 82:6). This means, of course, not gods in the literal sense, but people created by God, like sons of God. At the same time, it seems that it is possible to formally say everything that Feofan Prokopovich claimed. Although, of course, we are faced with not just papocaesarism, but also an undisguised attempt to deify the emperor.

And so it was: in particular, during the Easter service, Peter took away the right of the patriarch to depict Christ and depicted Him himself, trying to symbolically emphasize that he had the right to act as an earthly deity...

And this is very serious, this is what lays something dark and terrible in the very basis of Peter’s activities. The point is not about Westernization as such; Westernization of Russia, of course, was needed, but under Peter it was carried out in a rather wild way. If it were gentle and gradual, it would be welcome, it would be wonderful. As, however, this was done in the 17th century. Under Peter, everything changed extremely radically. In fact, traditional ancient Russian culture was banned, and “something Dutch” was initially supposed to take its place. In such cases, I tell students: “Imagine that tomorrow the president, let’s say Putin, will tell us: from today, Russian culture is completely prohibited, and instead there will be Chinese culture. Everyone should study the Chinese language, Chinese philosophy, Chinese literature and speak Chinese.” The same thing happened with the absolutely incomprehensible Dutch culture.

“And we’ll lock it in the open.” The word “feast” in Pushkin is also quite ambiguous. For example, three years before The Bronze Horseman, in 1830, he wrote Little Tragedies, which are permeated by the motif of a disastrous feast. Naturally, “A feast during the plague” - it’s clear what kind of feast there is. The feast of Mozart and Salieri is also clear: the one at which Mozart will be poisoned. “The Stone Guest” is a feast between Don Guan and Donna Anna, during which the hero dies. Well, in “The Miserly Knight” the baron opens his chests and says that in this way he arranges a feast for himself. In a word, a feast is a rather ambivalent phenomenon.

So, something very bad is being laid into the very foundation of St. Petersburg. But this does not mean that a beautiful city is not being created. It is being created...

A hundred years have passed, and the young city,

There is beauty and wonder in full countries,

From the darkness of the forests, from the swamps of blat

Ascended magnificently, proudly<…>.

“Pompous” and “proud” in Pushkin’s language are, it must be said, not at all positive characteristics. “Humble” is undoubtedly closer to the mature Pushkin. Even in the early poem “To the Sea,” a flock of beautifully equipped ships sinks, but the “humble sail of fishermen” does not touch the sea. So “magnificent” and “proud” is something very suspicious. Despite the fact that he himself, of course, loves this great city very much...

Where was the Finnish fisherman before?

Nature's sad stepson

Alone on the low banks

Thrown into unknown waters

Your old net, now there

Along busy shores

Slender communities crowd together

Palaces and towers; ships

A crowd from all over the world

They strive for rich marinas;

The Neva is dressed in granite;

Bridges hung over the waters;

Dark green gardens

Islands covered her,

And in front of the younger capital

Old Moscow has faded,

Like before a new queen

Porphyry widow.

I love you, Petra's creation,

I love your strict, slender appearance,

Neva sovereign current,

Its coastal granite<…>.

Yes, there is no doubt that Pushkin loves this city. But here, too, if you look closely, there is some strange ambiguity. The fact is that five years before The Bronze Horseman, in 1828, Pushkin wrote a poem

The city is lush, the city is poor,

Spirit of bondage, slender appearance,

The vault of heaven is green and pale,

Boredom, cold and granite -

Still, I feel a little sorry for you,

Because here sometimes

A little leg walks

A golden curl curls.

Here even the rhymes are similar: “a strict, slender appearance”, “its coastal granite” - that is, in the poem the assessment is rather negative, but in the poem it seems to be rather positive. But at the same time, Pushkin “dissolves” the poem of 1828 in the text of the poem.

I love your cruel winter

Still air and frost,

Sleigh running along the wide Neva,

Girls' faces are brighter than roses.

It's cold. Instead of a small leg and a curl, we see faces, but in general the figurative system is almost the same. The emphasis in this case is rather on the positive aspects, which, undoubtedly, also exist. The problem, however, is that they are not the only ones.

I love the warlike liveliness

Amusing Fields of Mars,

Infantry troops and horses

Uniform beauty

In their harmoniously unsteady system

The shreds of these victorious banners,

The shine of these copper caps,

Through those shot through in battle.

Pushkin also loves this Petersburg. In general, he was to a large extent an imperialist. As Georgy Fedotov, “the singer of empire and freedom,” wonderfully said about him. Pushkin felt a contradiction between one and the other. Before us is an official, powerful imperial city, and Pushkin felt that it was putting pressure, in particular, on himself: “A lush city, a poor city...”, of course, this is exactly what he’s talking about. At the same time, joy over imperial victories was also characteristic of Pushkin: this is “Poltava”, and “Borodin Anniversary”, and even in the early “Prisoner of the Caucasus”: “Humble yourself, Caucasus: Ermolov is coming!” All this, of course, also happened, but at the same time Pushkin feels that there is something terrible and overwhelming in imperial greatness. “Slender communities” also embody something dangerous.

Neva in The Bronze Horseman is depicted as a living creature.

<…>breaking your blue ice,

The Neva carries him to the seas

And, sensing the days of spring, he rejoices.

Show off, city Petrov, and stand

Unshakable like Russia,

May he make peace with you

And the defeated element;

Enmity and ancient captivity

Let the Finnish waves forget

And they will not be vain malice

Disturb Peter's eternal sleep!

So, ancient enmity and ancient captivity. This is how this symbol appears in the poem. Looking ahead, we can say that Pushkin associates the image of the Neva waves with the elements of popular rebellion, with something like Pugachevism. And the author was very interested in her, looked at her very seriously. He saw this as a danger.

So, if we take what has been said literally, then the Finnish waves, who were dressed in granite, have lost their freedom and want to take revenge, they are rebelling against the slavery to which they were doomed. If we recall the historical context, it is worth recalling that Peter I introduced human trafficking (such a small trifle). In addition, Peter’s cultural revolution itself (and I think that Klyuchevsky is right when he is inclined to believe that Peter was not a reformer, but a revolutionary) gave rise to a very great social danger. The fact is that before that there was only one, integral ancient Russian culture. Suppose a boyar, who sat in the Boyar Duma, and the simplest serf - they, in principle, were carriers of the same culture. There could be more of it, there could be less of it, but the culture by its nature was united. Peter focused all his “reforms” only on the educated society; he did not touch the peasants at all. Therefore, peasant culture after Peter remained almost unchanged (besides, it is generally super-traditionalist), and educated society began to speak foreign languages ​​and focus on European models. And this is wonderful, it gave birth to the Russian culture that we all know and love. The only problem is that representatives of Russian culture of the Western type and traditional peasant culture have almost ceased to understand each other. They began to speak literally and figuratively different languages.

At the beginning of the 19th century, nobles most often spoke French. But even if they spoke Russian... Pushkin has a very interesting article “Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg”, this is a very sharp criticism of Radishchev, and there the author says: “They once asked an old peasant woman whether she married her husband out of passion [at Pushkin exactly like that, separately]? “Out of passion,” answered the old woman, “I became stubborn, but the headman threatened to whip me.” Such passions are ordinary,” notes Pushkin. In general, they we talked, and, it seems, in the same language. But at the same time, everyone had something different in mind, and they completely did not understand each other.

In other words, the illusion of communication arises, but communication as such did not exist and is not expected. And this is an extremely dangerous situation: within the framework of one country, seemingly one religion, one people, two cultures arise, the representatives of which almost do not understand each other. Pushkin thought a lot about this and really wanted to connect these cultures. In his opinion, this was possible among the Russian provincial nobility: only in the village these two cultures meet, only there can one understand each other. This is Tatyana Larina, and “The Young Lady-Peasant”, these are the Grinevs and Mironovs...

But one way or another, the separation of cultures occurred. And this, in turn, was fraught with a powerful social explosion, because if the peasants do not understand the nobles, then it is very easy to attribute the most terrible things to them, and this is a reason for unrest, for a riot, senseless and merciless.

In fact, it turns out that with his cultural revolution, Peter is planting a bomb in Russia, which will most likely explode sooner or later. This happened in 1917, and Pushkin was one of the first to seriously think about it. He is very concerned about this issue, he acutely senses these dangers, feels that something truly terrible is approaching.

For example, in the poem “It was time: our holiday is young...” he describes the past, writes enthusiastically about Alexander I, whom he previously did not like very much, wrote very angry epigrams about him, but then, over time, he appreciated his largely liberal reforms and began to treat him incomparably better. And then

<…>a new king, stern and powerful

At the turn of Europe he became cheerful,

And new clouds came over the earth,

And a hurricane of them

We look into the future and feel that something terrible is coming. Late Pushkin is generally full of gloomy forebodings. In particular, this is manifested in “The Bronze Horseman”.

It was a terrible time

The memory of her is fresh...

About her, my friends, for you

I'll start my story.

My story will be sad.

Pushkin addresses his friends - why? Yes, in general, because there is very little hope for understanding. At the end of Onegin, he thinks about what kind of readers expect his work. Those looking for grammatical errors? Or those who are looking for material for a magazine controversy? There are others, but they are very few.

Or the poem “To the Poet”: “Poet! do not value people’s love...” Pushkin, especially the late Pushkin, writes very complexly: the simplicity of his poetics is deceptive. And in 1830, he was faced with a choice: either to please the public, who do not understand him, who say that “Onegin” lacks action, etc., or to write with the expectation that descendants will understand, but this is very difficult psychologically for the writer. Yes, he chooses the second, but this does not add optimism at all.

Over darkened Petrograd

November breathed the autumn chill.

Splashing with a noisy wave

To the edges of your slender fence,

Neva was tossing around like a sick person

Restless in my bed.

Before us is the Neva again: with the help of comparison, she is depicted as a living being, this line continues.

At that time from the guests home

Young Evgeniy came...

We will be our hero

Call by this name. It

Sounds nice; been with him for a long time

My pen is also friendly.

We are, of course, talking about Eugene Onegin. Yuri Lotman writes that Pushkin’s choice of the name “Eugene” is associated with literary tradition. This is Alexander Izmailov’s novel “Evgeny, or the Disastrous Consequences of Bad Education and Community,” where a hero named Evgeny Negodyaev is depicted. Or “Satires” by Cantemir. In both cases, Eugene is a young man of a noble family, unworthy of his noble ancestors; he is significantly worse than them for one reason or another.

We don't need his nickname,

Although in times gone by

Perhaps it shone

And under the pen of Karamzin

In native legends it sounded;

But now with light and rumor

It's forgotten.

So, the essential things are being said here. Evgeniy is a man of a very noble family, and in Pushkin’s era this is by no means a trifle. By the middle of the 19th century, noble origin will gradually lose its weight, but for now it is extremely important. However, it is not the formal affiliation with the nobility that is important. So, Griboyedov’s Molchalin, of course, received the nobility, but this does not mean anything, they did not care about it. Of course, everyone perceives him as a commoner, and, of course, Chatsky despises him primarily for this, like the other commoners who are mentioned there, in particular from Repetilov’s circle. This is a completely typical position for a nobleman of that time.

And vice versa, if even such a poor person as Eugene belongs to a noble family, this means that he can be received in the best houses. This means that, in principle, it should be taken very seriously. The hero of the poem has such an opportunity, he does not use it, but Eugene’s belonging to a noble family here, in the artistic construction of the poem, is extremely important.

On the other hand, the hero leads the life of a little person.

Our hero

Lives in Kolomna; serves somewhere

He shies away from the nobles and does not bother

Not about deceased relatives,

Not about forgotten antiquities.

It seems that this is all he wants. He has a fiancee, Parasha, he thinks about her:

“Perhaps a year or two will pass -

I’ll get a place, Parashe

I will entrust our family

And raising children...

And we will live, and so on until the grave

We'll both get there hand in hand

And our grandchildren will bury us..."

These are the thoughts of a purely private person, the psychology of a petty official.

It’s interesting that in Pushkin’s draft version there was:

You can get married - I'll arrange it

A humble corner for yourself

And in it I will calm Parasha -

Friend - kindergarten - cabbage soup pot -

Yes, he is big - why should I care?

« Yes, there's a pot of cabbage soup, it's a big one“, - I think you remember: these are the words of the author in Onegin’s Travels, about himself. Let this be said as a joke, but there is some kind of echo here.

And yet Evgeniy is very far from the author here. Eugene's immediate literary predecessor was Ivan Yezersky from the unfinished poem "Yezersky". In a sense, in style, this is a transitional work from “Eugene Onegin” to “The Bronze Horseman”. And there Pushkin complains that

From the bar we climb into tiers étât

[third estate],

That our grandchildren will be poor,

And thank us for that

It seems no one will say".

This is a purely noble position, which was very characteristic of Pushkin; he defended the exceptional importance of the noble class and really did not want its representatives to lose the memory of their origin.

And it seems that Evgeniy is the “directly opposite” image. He has the psychology of a petty official. Well, what is a little man? This is a literary character whose psychology and behavior are determined by his extremely low social status. And it seems that everything is almost like this. Almost, but not quite.

What was he thinking about? About,

That he was poor, that he worked hard

He had to deliver to himself

Both independence and honor<…>.

And here independence and honor- these are already categories of the psychology of a nobleman, something that is unusual for a small person. But for now, in the actant that we observe here, this seems to be unimportant, because the beginning associated with the little man dominates, and everything else is forgotten.

Or almost forgotten.

A new day is coming.

Terrible day!

Neva all night

Longing for the sea against the storm,

Without overcoming their violent foolishness...

And she was unable to argue...

In the morning over its banks

There were crowds of people crowded together,

Admiring the splashes, mountains

And the foam of angry waters.

But the strength of the winds from the bay

Blocked Neva

She walked back, angry, seething,

And flooded the islands...

The weather became more ferocious

The Neva swelled and roared,

A cauldron bubbling and swirling,

And suddenly, like a wild beast,

She rushed towards the city. In front of her

Everything ran, everything around

Suddenly it was empty - suddenly there was water

Flowed into underground cellars,

Channels poured into the gratings,

And Petropol surfaced like Triton,

Waist-deep in water.

Siege! attack! evil waves,

Like thieves, they climb into windows.

Look at the description. "Siege! attack!" - obviously, this is similar to the description of the storming of the Belogorsk fortress in The Captain's Daughter. “Like thieves climbing through windows,” that is, water does not just destroy something, it is the actions of a criminal and a robber.

Chelny

From the run the windows are smashed by the stern.

Trays under a wet veil,

Wrecks of huts, logs, roofs,

Stock trade goods,

The belongings of pale poverty,

Bridges demolished by thunderstorms,

Coffins from a washed-out cemetery

Floating through the streets!

On the one hand, Pushkin sought to describe the flood as accurately as possible, he emphasizes this in his comments. This externally perceived reality. On the other hand, all the time a plot is unfolding before us, created with the help of metaphors and comparisons, a plot associated with the elements of popular rebellion. Moreover, the comparisons “line up in one line” and thus through one image, through one focalization we can see a completely different one. This is an absolutely stunning literary device that would do credit to a modern writer. You can’t say at all that this is such a 19th century...

People

He sees God's wrath and awaits execution.

Alas! everything perishes: shelter and food!

Where will I get it?

The people see in what happened a manifestation of God’s wrath, that is, it is not the element of the Neva waves itself that is something of God, of course, this is not so, but the fact that God allows this to happen turns out to be significant, and in this the people see a manifestation of God’s wrath. Why not? Perhaps the people are right...

In that terrible year

The late Tsar was still in Russia

He ruled with glory. To the balcony

Sad, confused, he went out

And he said: “With God's element

Kings cannot control.”

This place is extremely important because it is here that the position of Alexander I is actually opposed to the position of Peter. If Peter does not want to see anything above him except the faceless forces of nature, and in fact tramples on nature, then Alexander clearly sees God’s will above him and believes that it is obviously higher than the will of the king. Humbly admits this. And when he says this, the excitement subsides.

He sat down

And in the Duma with sorrowful eyes

I looked at the evil disaster.

There were stacks of lakes,

And in them there are wide rivers

The streets poured in. Castle

It seemed like a sad island.

The king said - from end to end,

Along nearby streets and distant ones

On a dangerous journey through stormy waters

The generals set off

To save and overcome with fear

And there are drowning people at home.

So, if we take what is depicted literally, then we have a documentary reproduction of what happened in 1824; Pushkin writes in a special note that generals were sent. It's clear why. Since there is chaos and confusion on the streets as a result of the flood, there can be theft and anything else. We need an army to restore order so that there are no troubles.

Yes, but on another level, where the elements of popular rebellion are depicted, generals are also needed there... As you know, Pugachevism was suppressed, in particular, by Suvorov himself.

Then, on Petrova Square,

Where a new house has risen in the corner,

Where above the elevated porch

With a raised paw, as if alive,

There are two guard lions standing<…>.

A specific house is described here, and now Pushkin scholars are arguing about which of the lions Eugene was sitting on.

Riding a marble beast,

Without a hat, hands clasped in a cross,

Sat motionless, terribly pale

Eugene.

So, he sits astride a lion “without a hat, his hands clasped in a cross” - just below it says that the wind “suddenly tore his hat off.” For Pushkin's contemporaries, the literary reference was completely obvious. Here you can simply quote “Eugene Onegin”, a description of the main character’s office:

And a post with a cast iron doll

Under a hat, with a cloudy brow,

With hands clenched in a cross.

In Pushkin’s era, there was no need to explain who he was; everyone recognized Napoleon immediately. Almost all the romantic poets wrote about him, and often pointedly kept silent about whom they were talking about. He was already recognized by these mythologized features.

What does the figure of Napoleon mean here? Onegin says:

Having destroyed all prejudices,

We respect everyone as zeros,

And in units - yourself.

We all look at Napoleons;

There are millions of two-legged creatures

For us there is only one weapon<…>.

The mature Pushkin was characterized by a rather negative attitude towards the figure of Napoleon, as the embodiment of an atheistic-deist axiology. It is in this regard that Napoleon turns out to be a negative figure, although Pushkin admires him as a genius, and despite the very harsh characteristics of Peter in The Bronze Horseman. The late Pushkin writes “The Feast of Peter the Great,” where he admires how the tsar makes peace with his subject. That is, the attitude to the person and attitude to activities The poet fundamentally shares the emperor.

Here he brings Eugene closer to Napoleon. Firstly, Eugene is on the verge of rebellion, and Napoleon is a usurper, a man who seized power. And here it is especially significant that Eugene is a noble nobleman. In general, the logic of Eugene’s rebellion is connected with the logic of noble disobedience to authority. There is a dispute over which island Eugene was buried on. So, Akhmatova believed that this was Goloday Island, on which the bodies of five executed Decembrists were buried. There are different opinions on this matter. Personally, I am more inclined to join the point of view of Yuri Borev, who says that, regardless of which island is depicted in the poem, the artistic logic of the work points to the Decembrist theme, which Pushkin was forced to hide very carefully, because the slightest mention of it was prohibited.

In addition, Eugene riding a lion resembles the Bronze Horseman himself: he is also a kind of horseman...

But Evgeniy is not yet rebelling.

His desperate glances

Pointed to the edge

They were motionless. Like mountains

From the indignant depths

The waves rose there and got angry,

There the storm howled, there they rushed

Debris... God, God! there -

Alas! close to the waves,

Almost at the very bay -

The fence is unpainted, but the willow

And a dilapidated house: there it is,

Widow and daughter, his Parasha,

His dream... Or in a dream

Does he see this? or all ours

And life is nothing like an empty dream,

The mockery of heaven over earth?

We have the point of view of the hero of the poem, and we see that before he rebels against Peter, Eugene rebels against God.

And he seems to be bewitched

As if chained to marble,

Can't get off! Around him

Water and nothing else!

And with my back turned to him,

In the unshakable heights,

Above the indignant Neva

Stands with outstretched hand

Idol on a bronze horse.

The poem was not published during Pushkin’s lifetime: it was too clearly an anti-Petrine work. After his death, censorship corrections were introduced by V.A. Zhukovsky, and here instead of the word “idol” the word “giant” appears. Obviously, the word “idol” is associated with a pagan idol: “You shall not make for yourself an graven image” (Deut. 5:8). In this case, it turns out that Peter creates an idol out of himself...

But now, having had enough of destruction

And tired of insolent violence,

The Neva was drawn back,

Admiring your indignation

And leaving with carelessness

Your prey. So villain

With his fierce gang

Having burst into the village, he breaks, cuts,

Destroys and robs; screams, gnashing,

Violence, swearing, anxiety, howling!..

And, burdened with robbery,

Afraid of the chase, tired,

The robbers are hurrying home,

Dropping prey on the way.

The image of the elements of popular revolt continues again. All these characteristics of the water element - villain, robbers - all these words were mentioned when talking about the Pugachevites. And here we see a continuation of the same plot. In fact, one can imagine (but in Pushkin’s era it was impossible) like film stills, when through one image a translucent another shines through: through one plot we see a completely different one.

Further. Eugene, at the risk of his life, hires a ferryman and sails on a boat through the raging waves in order to find the house of his bride. He sees that everything there is destroyed, everything is terrible, the house was demolished, dead bodies are lying around.

Eugene

Headlong, not remembering anything,

Exhausted from torment,

Runs to where he is waiting

Fate with unknown news,

Like with a sealed letter.

The time will come when he will receive this terrible letter.

Evgeniy is going crazy:

And suddenly hitting his forehead with his hand,

I started laughing.

<…>

Morning ray

Because of the tired, pale clouds

Flashed over the quiet capital,

And I haven’t found any traces

Yesterday's troubles; purple

The evil was already covered up.

Everything returned to the same order.

The streets are already free

With your cold insensibility

People were walking.

The description of the city is distinctly ominous. Yes, Pushkin loves it, yes, this city is beautiful, but at the same time it is monstrous.

As you know, what is commonly called the St. Petersburg text begins with The Bronze Horseman. This is a complex of myths in which St. Petersburg is conceptualized as a mystical, ominous city, gradually destroying all living things.

Here's an interesting detail:

Brave trader,

Not discouraged, I opened

Neva robbed basement<…>.

Look, if the Neva simply flooded this basement, its contents would simply be ruined. But he robbed, that is, we have before us an image of people’s actions. These are the features of the second plot that hides behind appearance of reality, which, however, is also present, it is even significant in its own way, but only this, that other much more significant.

Count Khvostov,

Poet beloved by heaven

Already sang in immortal verses

The misfortune of the Neva banks.

Count Khvostov is the epigone of classicism, the kindest man, rich, who published his works in his own printing house. Romantics made fun of him because the way he wrote looked like an absurd anachronism. Pushkin also laughs in the poem “You and I”:

You are rich, I am very poor;

You are a prose writer, I am a poet;

<…>

Aphedron, you're so fat

You wipe with calico;

I'm a sinful hole

I don't indulge in children's fashion

And Khvostov’s harsh ode,

Even though I wince, I struggle.

This is hooliganism, of course: it’s inconvenient to rub, because Khvostov’s paper is good, thick...

Here our epigone is depicted, it would seem, from a very, very positive perspective: before us is a kind of poetic quick response service. An event has just happened, and he is already singing about it, and in completely immortal verses...

But my poor, poor Evgeniy...

Alas! His confused mind

Against terrible shocks

I couldn't resist. Rebellious noise

The Neva and the winds were heard

In his ears.

It turns out that Eugene’s rebellion is provoked, in particular, by a popular revolt. Approximately this situation is depicted by Pushkin in Dubrovsky. First, the peasants want to rebel, and at the same time the nobles also want to rebel.

He was tormented by some kind of dream.

A week passed, a month - he

He did not return to his home.

Eugene leads the lifestyle of a homeless tramp; he, it would seem, does not at all look like a rebellious nobleman.

He'll be out soon

Became alien. I wandered on foot all day,

And he slept on the pier; ate

A piece served into the window.

His clothes are shabby

It tore and smoldered. Angry children

They threw stones after him.

Often coachman's whips

He was whipped because

That he didn't understand the roads

Never again; it seemed he

Didn't notice. He's stunned

Was the noise of internal anxiety.

And so he is his unhappy age

Dragged, neither beast nor man,

Neither this nor that, nor the inhabitant of the world,

Not a dead ghost...

So, what's going on with Eugene? He completely falls out of the social system, dependence on which was previously so important for him. What makes a little person different? Extremely high dependence on his low social position, on his superiors, on the social pyramid that is above him. And now above Evgeniy has nothing. Yes, he leads the most miserable, most wretched life, that’s all, but there is no longer any authority over him. And therefore, we can no longer assume that we have a small person in front of us. The little man disappears, and only the rebellious nobleman remains.

Grim Shaft

Splashed on the pier, grumbling fines

And hitting the smooth steps,

Like a petitioner at the door

Judges who don't listen to him.

Look: the same plot continues again. The popular revolt was crushed, and now petitioners, relatives of those who took part in the uprising, are walking around and asking for their relatives: “He is not guilty, forgive him, he was stupid...” This plot consistently continues all the time.

Evgeny jumped up; remembered vividly

He is a past horror; hastily

He got up; went wandering, and suddenly

Stopped and around

He quietly began to move his eyes

With wild fear on your face.

He found himself under the pillars

Big house. On the porch

With a raised paw, as if alive,

The lions stood guard,

And right in the dark heights

Above the fenced rock

Idol with outstretched hand

Sat on a bronze horse.

"In the Dark Heights": darkness above…

Evgeny shuddered. cleared up

The thoughts in it are scary. He found out

And the place where the flood played,

Where the waves of predators crowded,

Rioting angrily around him,

And Lviv, and the square, and Togo

[“Togo” again with a capital letter: our earthly deity is like this...],

Who stood motionless

In the darkness with a copper head,

The one whose will is fatal

The city was founded under the sea...

“Under the sea” - what does it mean? Firstly, this is due to the fact that St. Petersburg was built below sea level: the most unfavorable place in terms of geographical conditions was chosen. It's swampy and will flood. In general, “we are destined by nature to be here...”. Granite banks were necessary, gradually this granite was built higher and higher, and yet St. Petersburg periodically floods.

But there is something else here.

The 23rd Psalm, well known in Pushkin’s era, since it is included in the rule read before Communion: “The earth is the Lord’s and what fills it, the universe and everything that lives in it, for He founded it on the seas and established it on the rivers” (Ps 23 : 1–2). God founded the earth on seas and on rivers, and the self-proclaimed earthly god does the exact opposite. This is such a demiurge, even great in his own way, but what he does is initially with a wormhole...

He is terrible in the surrounding darkness!

[this is the center of darkness again]

What a thought on the brow!

What power is hidden in it!

And what fire there is in this horse!

Where are you galloping, proud horse?

And where will you put your hooves?

O mighty lord of fate!

Aren't you above the abyss?

At the height, with an iron bridle

Raised Russia on its hind legs?

He raised Russia on its hind legs over the abyss, keeping it from falling. It’s good, of course, that he kept it, but the question only arises: who brought her to the abyss?

Around the foot of the idol

[this word “idol” is repeated again - a pagan idol]

The poor madman walked around

And brought wild glances

On the faces of the ruler of half the world.

For now, let’s remember this line about “the ruler of half the world.”

His chest felt tight. Chelo

It lay down on the cold grate

[it is clear that it is associated with a feeling of lack of freedom],

My eyes became foggy,

A fire ran through my heart,

Blood boiled. He became gloomy

Before the proud idol<…>.

An idol is a soulless idol. And in the censored version, Zhukovsky says simply wonderful: “Before the marvelous Russian giant,” which, by the way, caused Belinsky to be wildly delighted and gave rise to a magnificent interpretation of the poem, supposedly telling about the conflict between the individual and the state. Allegedly, Peter I embodies state necessity, and Eugene is a person who suffers. But still, state necessity is more important... So, based on the censored text, a very strange interpretation arose, which, alas, is still alive today.

And, clenching my teeth, clenching my fingers,

As if possessed by black power,

“Welcome, miraculous builder! -

He whispered, trembling angrily, -

Already for you!..”

The word “good” in the mouth of Eugene is a clever antithesis to the words “for evil” at the beginning of the poem, which we hear from the lips of Peter. This is “good” in which there is not a drop of good: the evil generated by Peter, in turn, gives rise to reciprocal evil on the part of Eugene, whose rebellion Pushkin, of course, does not sympathize with. The description here is quite negative: “As if overcome by black power,” “trembling angrily.”

Pushkin did not approve of the noble rebellion. He ideologically disagreed with the Decembrists even during the writing of “Boris Godunov” in 1824–1825, this is manifested already in the poem “October 19” of 1825, where a lyrical subject psychologically very close to the author raises a toast to the Tsar, which is extremely unlikely from a pro-Decembrist-oriented person. In fact, from that time on, Pushkin became a monarchist, albeit with complex reservations. But at the same time he becomes a very unorthodox monarchist, inclined to criticize a lot - a monarchist who often irritates the tsar himself. At some point, Pushkin was even going to go over to the opposition... Everything was very complicated there.

But in general, Pushkin’s political orientations were rather monarchical: he did not like democracy, and, reading Tocqueville, he perceived his book about democracy in America with horror. In no case did Pushkin want anything like this for Russia. However, in a predominantly peasant country there could be no democracy, and in this sense the poet was situationally right. Democracy arises in countries where the majority of the population lives in cities, where there is a powerful middle class, this implies a completely different situation. In Russia at that time, nothing like this was even planned, and therefore Pushkin did not approve of the Decembrist rebellion. Another thing is that he very much supported the Decembrists as his friends. Moreover, he felt guilty that they had suffered very seriously, while he, who had shared their ideas for several years, suffered almost no harm at all. So the relationship was not easy.

Pushkin considered it right to be friends with both the Tsar and the Decembrists. And when the poet was accused of flattery to the king, he gave an angry rebuke to this - the poem “To Friends.” Pushkin, of course, was not a flatterer; he had his own difficult position, which many did not accept, but it was what it was.

And suddenly headlong

He started to run. It seemed

He is like a formidable king,

Instantly ignited with anger,

The face quietly turned...

The Bronze Horseman's head turns. Obviously, this looks like a scene from The Stone Guest.

And its area is empty

He runs and hears behind him -

It's like thunder roaring -

Heavy ringing galloping

Along the shaken pavement.

And, illuminated by the pale moon,

Stretching out your hand on high,

The Bronze Horseman rushes after him

On a loud galloping horse.

"Illuminated by the pale moon." Here we see a very interesting technique, generally characteristic of Pushkin. Pushkin was not very fond of frontal, straightforward references, especially since censorship was also not very conducive to this kind of love. And yet, when reading this text, an association naturally arises with the famous fragment of the “Apocalypse”: “I looked, and behold, a pale horse and a rider on it, whose name was “death”; and hell followed him; and he was given authority over the fourth part of the earth<…>"(Rev 6:8). In Pushkin, Peter is hyperbolically called “the ruler of half the world.”

“Pale horse” is a very controversial question as to how to correctly translate this word. In Greek (more precisely, in Koine, the popular simplified version of the Greek language in which the New Testament is written) it is “χλωρός” (can be understood as “pale”, or “pale green”, there are other options). Pushkin's pale it turns out the moon, the reference here is demonstratively not direct. By the way, in the poem “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands...” we see something similar. “He ascended higher with the head of the rebellious / Alexandrian pillar.” Alexandrian is from the word Alexandria, and not from the word Alexander. Back in 1937, Henri Gregoire drew attention to this. The Pillar of Alexandria is, formally speaking, the Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. It is also worth considering that Pushkin’s poem refers us to Derzhavin and Horace. However, on the other hand, as Oleg Proskurin convincingly showed, the word “pillar” in the Pushkin era and by Pushkin himself was used precisely in the meaning of a pillar, and not a pyramid, although, in principle, such a meaning was possible. And yet Alexandrian. Proskurin, in particular, says that Alexandrian motifs may also be present here, yes, but in any case, we have an indirect reference that works in such a way that on the external level this is the Faros lighthouse, but one cannot remember the structure, which was not called “Alexandrian Pillar”, but “Alexander’s Pillar”, was impossible. It was impossible not to see this hidden reference.

These kind of indirect textual parallels are, in principle, characteristic of Pushkin, and, most likely, the same thing happened with the island of Goloday. Moreover, in the prose oral passage “A Secluded House on Vasilievsky” Pushkin gives a topographical description of Goloday, without calling him by name: he was clearly interested in this place.

So the Bronze Horseman pursues the rebellious nobleman, and then the riot is put down.

And from the time when it happened

He should go to that square,

His face showed

Confusion. To your heart

He hastily pressed his hand,

As if subduing him with torment,

A worn out cap,

Didn’t raise embarrassed eyes

And he walked aside.

In Pushkin’s draft, instead of “cap” there is “kalpak” - not with an “o”, but with an “a”. The kalpak evokes associations with the holy fool’s cap, so perhaps there is a more meaningful option hidden here.

And then on the “small island” we see the deceased Eugene.

So, what is the meaning of what is revealed to us? In fact, we have before us a combination, the superposition of two revolts on top of each other - the common people-peasant and, albeit disguised, but still noble. Why is this so? Pushkin does not approve of either rebellion. He describes them rather with horror. The poet is full of gloomy forebodings, and, apparently, we are talking primarily about the fact that if these two revolts coincide, then Russia may not be able to resist. As a matter of fact, this is what will happen during the revolution.

There is another symbolism here. The flood of 1824, which is described here, occurred on November 7, although according to the old style. Pushkin, of course, could not understand this ontological symbolism.

But in general, what happened happened. Thank you.

Video: Victor Aromshtam

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