DAVID M. BETHEA

The Role of the Eques in Puškin’s Bronze Horseman

After Belinskij, Valerij Brjusov was one of the first to see an emerging shape to scholarship on Puškin’s Mednyj vsadnik (Bronze Horseman).¹ He outlined three dominant tensions responsible for the ideological meaning of the work: collective versus individual will, paganism versus Christianity, and rebellion versus despotism (Brjusov 1909 III: 456-57). These tensions, which subsequent generations of readers have tended to resolve by accenting one or the other member of the opposing pairs, correspond roughly to interpretations on the “social,” “religious,” and “political” levels. Of the three levels, it is the religious that has for obvious reasons received short shrift in this century, especially since 1917. With the exception of Merežkovskij, who is cited by Brjusov, there has been little effort to locate the poèma within the broader context of metaphysical concerns characterizing the poet’s last years. That is to say, the growing sophistication of Puškin’s “historical consciousness” did not necessarily, as the scholarly record seems to indicate, exclude the possibility of some form of religious conviction.² Soviet scholars especially have remained content to look past compelling internal evidence in his later works and to leave him in the role of irreverent Voltairian, a role he had by the mid-thirties long since outgrown. This oversight is even more striking when one takes into account the fact that it is precisely the metaphysical/religious implications of the work that were most significant to the Symbolists writing on the eve of the October Revolution.³ Not all of these implications, as I shall argue in this essay, were read into the work by a generation of impressionable mystics looking for signs and symbols out of the past to predict the imminent future. Some were surely planted there by Puškin himself.

The purpose of the present study is to focus attention on one image, that of the eques, within the complex of potential religious/historical meanings that the later Puškin would have imputed to the confrontation between the Bronze Horseman and Evgenij. After establishing a context by examining the dual traditions of European statuary and Russian heraldry on which Puškin drew for his presentation of the “duel” between the Bronze Horseman and Evgenij, I will turn to the internal evidence offered by the poem and attempt a reinterpretation of its symbolic structure.

THE TRADITION OF EUROPEAN STATUARY

Imperially, the steed set the ruler or the aristocratic knight (eques) apart from the common man.⁴ If the ancient Egyptians discerned something undignified about seating their ruler on horseback and thus preferred the chariot, the Greeks had no such scruples and in fact placed great emphasis on horsemanship. One aspect of Alexander’s “greatness” that has come down to us was his prowess on horseback (it was said that his horse Bucephalus would accept no other rider), including his discomfiting of Darius from his chariot as depicted in a famous mosaic. Thereafter, the steed continued to acquire symbolic meaning, becoming the attribute not simply of the eques but, especially during the Roman Empire, of the emperor as well: witness the famous equestrian of Marcus Aurelius that was first erected on the Capitol as a symbol of his majesty and authority and that was later preserved during the Christian era only because it was rechristened “Constantine” (thus linking the notion of papacy to empire) and moved to the Lateran. After a hiatus of almost a millennium, the equestrian reemerged in the monuments of Donatello, Verrochio, Bologna, Mochi, and Bernini, and in the sketches of Leonardo. Most intriguing about the Renaissance treatment is the fact that the concetto (the conceit or “spark” for the entire project) for the Reiterstandbild underwent gradual change: the horse and rider were slowly separated as part of an ensemble decorating a ducal tomb (e.g., that of Congrande [1330] in Verona); the eques now no longer had to be a sovereign, but could be a mere condottiere, or captain of mercenary forces (e.g., Donatello’s Gattamelata [1448-50] in Padua); and the steed became more animated and full of latent power until the point where, in Leonardo’s sketches and especially in Bernini’s sculpture of Constantine the Great (1654-70), it finally reared up on its hind legs.⁵ Bernini’s equestrian occupies such a prominent place in this genealogy because it is located on the Scala Regia (the main landing of the Vatican), thereby becoming the first image of papal authority that a visitor encounters, and because Constantine is presented at that moment of revelation—the “moving stasis” of the rearing horse captures this concetto perfectly—when he sees the cross in the sky and prepares himself to conquer in its name. And it is this first completed statue of a horse reared on its hind legs which would become, significantly, the model for the Louis XIV equestrian at Versailles, which in turn would influence Falconet as he worked on the Bronze Horseman for Catherine (Janson 1974: 159-87).

Bernini had originally wanted to show Louis XIV on a rocky summit, “in full possession of that Glory which . . . has become synonymous with his name” (Janson 1974: 166-67), an idea which Catherine and her advisers felt was justifiably transposable to the Russian context. Moreover, the snake being trampled underfoot was an allegorization of defeated envy (see Kaganovic 1975: 86-92). But the Russian time-space in which this allegory was erected soon altered its meaning. The tsar as Marcus Aurelius or Marcus Curtius did not arguably mean much to the Russians, but, as shall be pointed out in what follows, the tsar as Christ-like St. George slaying the serpent (pagan forces) of history did. Long before this, in the late sixteenth century, foreigners visiting the court of Ivan the Terrible’s son Fedor Ivanovič mentioned the existence of “a golden medal portraying St. George mounted on a horse,” which was worn on the sleeve or hat of the recipient as a sign of “the highest honor that can be bestowed for any service whatsoever.”⁶ In any event, the apocalyptic connotation of the horse and rider is very much in evidence on one of the extant flags of Ivan the Terrible, where we find Jesus Christ, mounted on a white charger, surrounded by twenty-seven angels on horseback, and escorted in front by the archangel Michael on his winged steed. The official order of St. George—of which Puškin was well aware (see below)—the most popular of all Russian military medals and the only tsarist decoration to migrate (in altered form, of course) into Soviet times, was instituted in 1769, that is, some thirteen years before the unveiling of Falconet’s statue on Senate Square in Petersburg. So while Peter and his followers had endeavored to secularize the imperial iconography,⁷ the religious/ mythic link between St. George and the Moscow horseman continued well into Puškin’s time and beyond to have a secret life of its own—even perhaps in Falconet’s borrowed concetto.⁸ It is conceivable that, to those who saw Russia’s historical mission in terms of an apocalyptic confrontation between Moscow, the Third Rome, and St. Petersburg, the Western city of the Antichrist, the transpositions in Falconet’s kumir (pagan “idol”—see below) were particularly ominous: the Moscow horseman had moved to the city of Peter, St. George had traded his lance for an arm pointed imperiously into Russia’s future, and the serpent impaled by the lance had become a snake trampled underfoot by the tsar’s steed.

Whether its rider was Christ or Antichrist, bearer of light or bearer of darkness, the majestic steed became the symbol of Russia raised on her haunches between the old and the new. Lednicki has argued that Peter’s steed is not in actuality caught in a full standing position (na dyby), but “is galloping smoothly,” with “the seat of the rider . . . relaxed and comfortable” (1955: 35-36). This may be true to the foreign observer, but the fact that Puškin chose in the climax of his poem to underscore the raising up of Russia into a stance of fatal equipoise (“Ne tak li ty nad samoj bezdnoj, / Na vysote, uzdoj železnoj / Rossiju podnjal na dyby?” [Was it not thus, aloft hard by the abyss, / that with curb of iron / you reared up Russia?⁹] [PSS V: 147]) means that he at least saw horse and rider engaged in more than unimpeded forward progress. If writers such as Puškin did not, for reasons of artistic temperament or historiosophical conviction, choose to make the connection between the monument and the apocalyptic end of Russian history (that connection would be seen to later), the reason was not for any lack of eschatological tradition.¹⁰ As Falconet’s correspondence with Catherine, Diderot, and others indicates, the tension between what the “enlighteners” (particularly Beckij, the official administrator of the project) felt the statue should do to legitimize their position and what the sculptor felt were the unique artistic injunctions guiding him was real (Levitine 1972: 54-57). The “antiquomaniacs” within the court wanted a statue in the manner of the Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline because such a piece would presumably confer on Peter’s project to change Russia—make it new—a classical authority, a bloodline in the old. However, the Marcus Aurelius had none of the modern dynamism that Falconet had inherited from Bernini and the latter’s ill-fated equestrian of Louis XIV. It was simply “the image of a triumphant horseman mounted on a powerful steed, majestically advancing at a walking pace on the flat surface of a geometrically shaped pedestal”; the horse itself, according to Falconet, was unsightly not only because of “its bovine head, its thick ugly neck, and, in general, its unpleasant proportions, but . . . also . . . because of its anatomical inadequacies and its unrealistic movement—a real horse, for instance, would never lift its foreleg to a horizontal position” (my emphasis; Levitine 1972: 54, 56). Moreover, these views were apparently shared by some of Puškin’s colleagues. Batjuškov, for example, remarked in his Progulki v Akademiju Xudožestv (Strolls in the Academy of Arts) that there is something ponderous and “unpleasant” about the copy of the Marcus Aurelius found in the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, whereas “modern artists are much more successful with horses. We have before our eyes the work of Falconet, this marvelous horse, living, flaming, graceful, and so boldly stanced...” (my emphasis; cited in Lednicki 1955: 34).¹¹

Falconet gradually came to agree with Voltaire’s view, as it was to be enunciated in the latter’s projected Histoire de I’Empire Russe sous Pierre le Grand, that Peter’s greatest role was that of reformer and legislator (as opposed to conqueror), ally of the philosophes. The outstretched hand of the tsar was not meant to be that of the victor at Poltava, but a main protectrice (Lednicki 1955: 33). Indeed, Falconet confirmed his debt to Voltaire in a twice-published (1770 and 1781) letter to Diderot. Yet, to reiterate, in the Russian context there was little tradition of Western “reform” and incremental change.¹² What the term actually meant to those native Russians who wore hair shirts beneath the Western dress forced on them by their tsar was revolution. Thus Peter could be, and indeed was, viewed by the enlighteners as a secular St. George stamping out ignorance and obscurantism so that Russia could leap into a better future or by the sectarians as a man-god who had betrayed his role as tsar to become emperor and hence Antichrist. Regardless, however, of one’s a priori beliefs about the direction of Russian history, Peter on horseback came to signify a radical and total shift in time-space relations, the visual equivalent of his new calendar. That this tradition was later undermined by other equestrians,¹³ notably Paolo Trubeckoj’s satiric monument to Alexander III in which Peter’s spirited charger comes to resemble a hippopotamus, should not be seen to challenge seriously the remarkable potency of Falconet’s work or Puškin’s poetic deployment of it.

It is also worth recalling that the Western tradition of equestrian statuary takes its roots from the notion of controlling, of “reining” and “reigning,” a wild and passionate “body politic” (Watson 1983: 275-79; see also Giamatti 1976 and Rowland 1965-66). This, after all, is the notion of noble horsemanship from which, etymologically and culturally, the chivalric tradition grew. He who could control his own steed and unhorse his opponent was the ideal knight, and victory in combat was all the evidence needed to establish one’s nobility and chosen status. Hence in Western literature as in statuary it was essential to keep distinct the notions of horseman and horse, rider and ridden. In Russia, however, where a tsar such as Peter was associated by a significant segment of the population, including Puškin, with what was new and revolutionary and the people with what was old and orthodox, this Western formula could not be so easily transplanted.¹⁴ If Catherine and her German “enlighteners” could insist on viewing Falconet’s work as an expression of Peter’s proud design to control the elements (and, by implication, the wild force of the people), then those of another generation could also see the tsar as that figure who, turning Russia westward and upsetting the status quo, unleashed rather than reined in the passions of his people. Mickiewicz apparently had this more ominous interpretation in mind when he wrote in Pomnik Piotra Wielkiego (Monument to Peter the Great) that “Car Piotr wypuszczal rumakowi wodze, / Widać, ze lecial tratujac po drodze; / Od razu wskoczyl az na sam brzeg skaly [His charger’s reins Tsar Peter has released [my emphasis—DMB]; / He has been flying down the road, perchance, / And here the precipice checks his advance” (Mickiewicz 1944: 350; cited in Lednicki 1955: 29).

Puškin himself seems to have been well aware of the tradition of the eques, of the favored one who rose above the people and who signified that status with a steed. In an early poem entitled “K Liciniju” (To Licinius, 1815), he describes how the haughty and insouciant Vetulius rides into the crowd on his chariot:

Vetulius’s “elevation” above the hoi polloi, though Puškin’s sarcasm suggests that it is unearned, is both physical (he reclines from his position “above” while the crowd bends its back in an obsequious bow from “below”) and social/political (the crown of laurels¹⁵ and the shining purple of the ruling class). His Caesar-like hubris is underscored in his relationship with the people, who look up to him as though receiving “the blessing of a wondrous god.”¹⁶

But all this flattery and adulation is, to the freedom-loving young Puskin, unhealthy and corrupting. Following the archetypal course laid out by Phaeton, the chariot and driver that rise above the common man can, and inevitably do, fall:

This notion of the steed of state racing out of control with “disastrous” (lit. falling “from the stars”) consequences for all concerned will be addressed again in Bronze Horseman. There, however, the argument will be almost entirely implicit, since on the most obvious level Puškin is polemicizing with Mickiewicz and the latter’s image, largely sarcastic and Russophobic, of the “charger’s reins” that “Tsar Peter has released.” Puškin’s Peter reins in his steed nad samoj bezdnoj (at/above the very abyss), but he does so in a question which the climax of his poem begs rather than resolves. Finally, Puškin seems to have been genuinely intrigued by the image of equinedriven doom, returning to it in works as different as “Pesn’ о veščem Olege” (Song of the Prophetic Oleg, 1822) and “Besy” (The Devils, 1830).

THE RUSSIAN HERALDIC TRADITION

Falconet’s Bronze Horseman was a statue created by a foreigner to honor Peter’s proud design “v Evropu prorubit’ okno” (to hack a window through to Europe). As Jakobson has pointed out, however, the repeated use of the word kumir (idol) by Puškin to describe the monument had, “in a world of Orthodox customs . . . saturated with the symbolism of the Eastern Church,” an “undeniably pagan association” (1975: 40). Nicholas clearly felt the potential for this sort of “magnetized” reading: in his role as censor, for example, he consistently crossed out the lines of the poem where the word appeared. In other words, as far as the tsar was concerned, there was something unseemly and even irreverent in Puškin’s apparent attempt to telescope the notions of Petrine reform and pagan idolatry. The linkage raised the very issue that had vexed Russia from the time of the Great Schism—Peter was seen as the Antichrist by the Old Believers precisely because he had placed himself above God, had become a zemnoj bog (earthly god),¹⁹ rather than God’s chosen representative:

Interpreters as varied in orientation as Merežkovskij, Brjusov, Xodasevič, Mirskij, and Jakobson have noted the “pagan” elements in The Bronze Horseman; no one, however, has adequately focused attention on what, metaphysically speaking, that pagan element is opposed to. The Bronze Horseman, after all, centers on the duel between Peter and Evgenij. Is Evgenij simply the hapless victim, the pharmakos,²⁰ or do his background and field of action enter into a value system that is more than political and that, in terms of the poem, makes the old-new, MoscowPetersburg, orthodox-pagan oppositions more understandable? To answer this question we need to investigate Puškin’s views on the Russian heraldic tradition, for it is this tradition, as I hope to demonstrate, with which the poet “armed” his hero in the latter’s confrontation with the mounted “idol.”

To recapitulate for a moment, the tradition of European statuary, although ancient and “classical” in origin, was in the context of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Russia something “new,” since in this case it served to eulogize the Petrine reforms and all their “diabolical” ramifications. (Recall that invariably Avvakum and his followers were on the side of the old belief against the new. “On Russian soil, sculpture was closely associated with whatever was unchristian, even antichristian, in the spirit of the Petersburg tsardom” [Jakobson 1975: 40].) Against the relative “newness” of the kumir na bronzovom kone (idol on a bronze steed) Puskin juxtaposes several related cultural themes—“old” Moscow (and thus the Russian state before Peter), the “old” nobility (with lineages that antedate by centuries Peter’s “meritorious” nobility), and “old” coats of arms, that is, the necessary proof of the antiquity of one’s nobility.

Whenever Puškin mentions gerb (coat of arms) in his writings,²¹ he invariably places the word within a certain “semantic field.” For example, in “Poslanie Del’vigu” (Epistle to Del’vig, 1827) we find:

Here the “coat of arms,” the “tomb” (grobnica), and “feudal” (feodal’nyj) are joined grammatically in one phrase and semantically in one meaning unit—the “old,” “ancient,” “dead.” This same semantic complex, which is repeated a little later in “Epistle to Del’vig” (PSS III: 71), was also anticipated in Baxčisarajskij fontan (Baxčisaraj Fountain, 1824):

The parallels between these verse passages are striking: all three (PSS III: 71 is not cited) contain etymologically related “houses for the dead” ( grobvs. grobnica) and single out the accouterments of knighthood (gerb, korona) in that context; the latter two (PSS III: 71 and IV: 161) employ the high-style verb “to sleep the sleep of the dead” (počit’) in an instrumental construction involving son²² and make explicit reference to the high-born status of the deceased (vysokorodnyj baron vs. knjažeskij gerb).

The connotations associated with gerb do not in themselves tell us a great deal. After all, one would expect a reference to a family coat-of-arms, if the latter were genuine, to conjure up images of ancient noble origins and medieval quests. The fact that these same semantic invariants entered into Puškin’s polemic with Bulgarin and the “new” men of letters of the 1830s is, on the other hand, telling. Puškin was extremely proud of his sixhundred-year-old noble ancestry, and yet he also acknowledged that the mere presence of a pedigree did not guarantee the artistic merit of his or anyone else’s work: “No one holds in higher esteem the true hereditary nobility—whose existence is so important in a governmental sense—than our [society]. But in the peaceful republic of learning what do we care for coats-of-arms and dusty documents [kakoe nam delo do gerbov i pyl’nyx gramot]?” (“Otryvok iz literaturnyx letopisej” [Excerpt from Literary Chronicles] [1829]; PSS XI: 80).

And yet, as Puškin said soon thereafter in direct reference to Bulgarin’s underhanded attempt to blacken his family name on his mother’s side (the anecdote about Puškin’s great-grandfather Gannibal being bought by a drunken skipper for a bottle of rum), the obverse is also untrue: the absence of pedigree or, what is worse, the conferral of a recently contrived pedigree based on “meritorious service” does not guarantee a work’s high quality or, for that matter, a writer’s high-mindedness.

Here, in a passage edged with heavy sarcasm, we find the same terms of the already familiar semantic field (feodal’nye barony, gerby i gramoty, etc.), but they are undercut by the surrounding context of modifiers: the slightly archaic or official sounding sii (these) together with the “unknown” knights who are “proudly demanding” documentary evidence of high birth. The irony, however, is double-edged; the sarcastic voice of the Bulgarin camp, which is clearly aimed at Puškin (note the references to “petty bourgeois” and “six-hundred-year-old documents”), is turned on itself when one realizes that the new documents attesting to one’s place in a nobility of merit are also no safeguard against “bad prose” or “mediocre verse.” This, of course, is the “awful ‘Eat it yourself!’ ” the indecent remark (an English equivalent would be something like “You’re one too!”) with the added connotation of hoisting oneself on one’s petard, of which Puškin speaks. That he has Bulgarin and his group in mind is confirmed a few sentences later with the reference to figljarstvo (i.e., activities appropriate to Figljarin) and with the recounting of the anecdote about the bottle of rum on the next page (PSS XI: 152-53; cf. “Moja rodoslovnaja” [My Genealogy] PSS III: 263).

Before proceeding to the text of Bronze Horseman, I would like to suggest more specifically how the notions of coat-of-arms and heraldry (geral’dika) might enter into the text and context of Puškin’s narrative poem. Coats-of-arms must by definition represent something, usually a symbol or series of symbols which tell in telegraphic form a narrative mythos associated with a given family, town, or state. Historically, Russia had no medieval chivalric tradition; her coats-of-arms derived primarily from ancient emblems amd figures found on seals, coins, and battle standards (Speransov 1974: 8). The Puškin family possessed coats-of-arms on both the paternal and the maternal sides. However, Puškin’s quarrel with the new men of letters was not simply a family affair. Rather it had to do with changes in the status of the old nobility that went back to the Petrine reforms. Likewise, Evgenij’s duel with the Bronze Horseman is not only over his personal right to domestic happiness and to the “little place” (mestečko) he plans to create with Paraša. It is such larger issues as old vs. new, Moscow vs. Petersburg, hereditary nobility (stolbovoe dvorjanstvo) vs. “tiers-état,” and ultimately orthodox vs. pagan, that, I shall argue in a moment, Puškin wishes to raise by building into his poem allusions to Russia’s heraldic tradition.

Let us make discussion more concrete by citing two important stanzas from “Rodoslovnaja moego geroja” (Genealogy of My Hero, pub. 1836). This “excerpt from a satirical poem” was the only part of the unfinished Ezerskij (written in late 1832 and early 1833) which Puškin later reworked and saw into print. Puškin took drafts of Ezerskij with him to Boldino in 1833, and it is clear that Ezerskij, if not actually part of Bronze Horseman as Annenkov once asserted, entered into the poet’s thinking as he conceived his poem (see Puškin [Izmajlov] 1978: 165-83). Annenkov, for example, who had good critical intuition, was convinced enough by the textual parallels between “Genealogy” and Bronze Horseman that he felt justified in claiming that “both the excerpt and the poem were conceived together” (1984 I: 381-86). But the primary reason that Ezerskij and “Genealogy” are essential for the present study is that they are both much more specific about the hero’s origins—and at the same time much more autobiographical—than Puškin was willing to be in Bronze Horseman.

The sixth stanza of “Genealogy” raises a number of themes already familiar to readers of “Rebuttal of Criticisms.”²³ The speaker takes pride in the fact that, though ridiculed by “colleagues” for his aristocratic pretensions, he is in reality a “petty bourgeois” (meščanin), one who has to earn his own way, and in this sense a true “democrat” (PSS III: 427). Here too we find the love for antiquity which the poet associates with the world of his Muscovite grandmother and her oral history of kinfolk. But that world is passing, and one can now climb from the old nobility into the tiers-état through sobstvennye zaslugi, the “personal merits” demonstrated by active and loyal service to the state. It is immediately after this, in stanza seven, that Puškin introduces the motif of heraldry which, I suggest, has a direct bearing on a central passage of Bronze Horseman:

The Onegin stanza (which Puškin did not use in Bronze Horseman) is an ideal formal vehicle for leading up to the “punch line” about the “heraldic lion” and the “hoof” of the “democratic ass.” The old Moscow families (the Požarskijs) have fallen out of sight and prominence, to be pilloried by Figljarin; the current nobleman cannot distinguish the real documents and charters of the tsars (including, presumably, their gerby) from a pile of old calendars; and the terem (tower-chamber), which was such a prominent institution within high-born families before Peter, seems now, in the wake of Catherine, both linguistically and socially obsolete.²⁴

Yet all of these juxtapositions (Požarskij-Figljarin, historical documents-calendars, etc.), which serve collectively to point up the fall of old Moscow and the rise of new Petersburg, are in a sense secondary to the final confrontation between the lion and the ass. Puškin implies such a crescendo effect with his punctuation: after the first two lines, there is no full stop in the entire stanza until the colon at the end of the penultimate line. Instead there are a series of dependent clauses beginning with čto and governed by the main clause “Mne žal’ ” (‘Tis a pity) and separated by a comma. The comparison between the lion and the ass is the last of these, placing it in a marked or “strong” position. Only after this ultimate comparison can the poet exclaim, in wry exasperation, “This is how far the spirit of the age has gone [that is, taken us]!”

The heraldic lion is a crucial image in this context because it is the first instance in which Puškin actually shows us what might be on one of the coats-of-arms he has earlier associated with feudal barons and the world of pre-Petrine Russia. And in fact the earliest recorded²⁵ Russian landed (as opposed to family) coat-of-arms is that of a lion raised up on its hind legs holding a silver cross in its right paw. It belonged to the town of Vladimir but owes its origins to the sign of Jurij Dolgorukij (founder of Moscow), which dates to the twelfth century (Speransov 1974: 24-25). That the lion had an Orthodox mission is attested to by the presence of the cross. Without the Christian coloring it is simply a traditional symbol of courage, strength, fury, and, on occasion, magnanimity (Speransov 1974: 16). The defeated lion, which is the more accurate symbol in this instance, is, on the other hand, representative of impotence and fallen, trampled glory. Puškin obviously could not have read later commentators on the heraldic tradition such as Lakier, Lukomskij and Tipol’t, and Speransov, but he could have learned something of the sort from the “gossip” (tolki) of his “Muscovite grandmother” or from his own investigations into his family tree.

The lion is being kicked by the “democratic hoof” of the ass, a lower, parodic version of the steed. That is to say, this duel between lion and ass is a rehearsal for the duel in Bronze Horseman between Moscow and Petersburg, Evgenij and Peter, sacred and secular horseman. The second oldest recorded Russian landed coat-of-arms, and one with which every native subject with the least interest in national history would be familiar, is that of the Moscow horseman, who by Puškin’s time had also become synonymous with St. George. This emblem first began to appear on Russian soil shortly after the Battle of Kulikovo and can be found in seals that were attached to late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century gramoty (Speransov 1974: 24). It depicted a mounted warrior who defeats in combat a winged serpent. The warrior’s mount is raised on its haunches over the serpent, and the rider has plunged his lance into the beast’s mouth or heart. Soviet commentators are quick to assert that the emblem of the Moscow horseman did not originally have any religious connotation, that it was intended rather to show the native warrior freeing his country from the forces of the Tatar Yoke: “These changes in the [interpretation of] the ancient emblem [as St. George] took place because of [po vine] foreigners who were invited to work at the Chancery of Russian Heraldry and who didn’t understand Russian national symbolism, but who did know the legend of the fantastic feat of ‘St.’ [sic] George” (Speransov 1974: 26). Be this as it may, such a “reinterpretation,” which Speransov suggests occurred at the beginning of the eighteenth century (that is, during the reign of Peter!), was a fact of cultural life by the time of Puškin.

To sum up, both the lion and the horseman possessed sacred variants linked with the fate and holy mission of Muscovite Rus’. It is quite likely that Puškin himself would have known this (or else why would he make specific mention of the “heraldic lion”?). Finally, these symbols, taken together, provide a logical, artistically economical (and “ancient”) foil to the Bronze Horseman, the universally recognized symbol of “new” Petersburg. In this regard, it is ironic that Petersburg’s official coat-of-arms shows two anchors in the shape of an “X” with a gold scepter lying vertically over the point of intersection. Any “sacred” meaning (e.g., the St. Andrew’s cross) has apparently been “secularized” out of the emblem, with the result that its function as totem or tutelary spirit has, for many natives at least, been preempted by that of Falconet’s equestrian statue.

BRONZE HORSEMAN

Our analysis of Bronze Horseman will focus on the two confrontations between Evgenij and the Bronze Horseman. Bronze Horseman is similar to a number of other works by Puškin in that it is constructed around a pair of confrontations or “duels” (actual or psychological) that are themselves separated in time by some significant event: Tat’jana and Evgenij before Lenskij’s death and after Tat’jana’s marriage in Eugene Onegin, Silvio and the Count before and after the Count’s marriage in “The Shot,” Germann and the Countess before and after the Countess’s death in “The Queen of Spades,” Grinev and Pugačev before and after the outbreak of the Pugačev Uprising in The Captain’s Daughter, etc. In such instances Puškin is apt to suggest important shifts in the status quo by enforcing a reverse parallelism; that is, the principals may be meeting for a second time, but the tables are turned. Thus on this occasion Evgenij sends a letter to Tat’jana and goes to see her, Mazepa is awakened by Marija (the voice of conscience and judgment) as Marija was earlier awakened by her mother on the morning of her father’s execution (Poltava); Grinev is now in a position to receive, rather than offer, a gift to Pugačev, etc. A similar shift in status quo will be suggested by the seemingly minor, but in actuality crucial, changes in the descriptions of the two confrontations in Bronze Horseman.

Puškin sets the stage for the confrontations between Petersburg and Moscow “horsemen” by introducing, in muted fashion, the themes we have already noted elsewhere. In the “Introduction,” “old” Moscow is said to have paled before the splendor of the “youthful capital”: “I pered mladseju stolicej / Pomerkla staraja Moskva, / Kak pered novoju caricej / Porfironosnaja vdova” (And before the younger capital / old Moscow has faded, / as before a new empress / the dowager in purple robes) (PSS V: 136). And Evgenij’s origins, while greatly generalized from the drafts and from the “trial runs” in Ezerskij and “Genealogy,” still bear a strong lexical and semantic resemblance to earlier mentions of the ancient nobility, their traditions and distinguishing characteristics (including gerby):

Puškin is quick to distance himself from any facile autobiographical link through his use of “perhaps”—that is, all of these already non-specific details about Evgenij’s past may be simply conjecture. On the other hand, they are all the reader has at his disposal to flesh out a preliminary portrait of the hero. And here, it is true, all emphasis seems to be on oldness, antiquity, tradition, historical memory: the bygone times, the historian’s pen, the native legends. However, these values are now forgotten, and the fact that the hero avoids those of his class and no longer bemoans his “sleeping/deceased kinfolk” is revealing (note that Puškin’s choice of words is very close to what was seen in “Epistle to Del’vig,” Baxčisaraj Fountain, “My Genealogy,” and “Genealogy of My Hero”). To repeat, Puškin removes as much as possible any concrete connection between himself and his hero. Now, for example, he can (or will) not say, as he did in “My Genealogy,” that “Pod gerbovoj moej pečat’ju / Ja kipu gramot sxoronil / I ne jaksajuš’ s novoj znat’ju, / I krovi spes’ ugomonil” (Under the seal of my coat-of-arms / I’ve hidden away a pile of [ancient] documents; /I don’t keep company with the new nobility / and have stilled the haughtiness of my blood) (my emphasis; PSS III: 262-63).

Evgenij’s first confrontation with the statue is during the flood, directly after the description of the people’s fear of divine retribution and Alexander’s admonition that it is not for man, even if he be tsar, to compete with the divine elements (PSS V: 141). The introduction of a specifically divine element into this tale about the effects of one man’s attempt to secularize Russian history makes the sudden appearance of Evgenij, that history’s lone and unlikely paladin amid the chaos of the flood, all the more foregrounded and laden with meaning. This fact is indeed made explicit by the poet’s decision to begin a new verse paragraph, the next-tolast of Part One, at this point:

Part One of the poem has been dominated thus far by the great movement and force of the storm. But now all action halts momentarily as the camera eye, so to speak, fixes on the hero, who sits “immobile, terribly pale,” on the stone lion. Puškin is always meticulous when using landmarks, and this description is no exception: the stone lions do in fact exist at the entrance to the house of Prince A. Ja. Lobanov-Rostovskij (built in 1817-19 by the architect Montferrand).²⁶ Moreover, Puškin in all likelihood was familiar with the anecdote, circulating throughout Petersburg and later retold in the notes of A. V. Kočubej, about a certain Jakovlev who saved himself from the flood by climbing onto one of the lions (“Dokumental’nye materialy,” in Puškin [Izmajlov] 1978: 123-24). In other words, this entire scene could be motivated by the poet’s knowledge of the actual details surrounding the flood (recall that he chided Mickiewicz in one of his own notes for some of the inaccuracies in the latter’s presentation) and therefore have no other “figurative” meaning.

Still, it can be argued that Puškin’s choice of the lions (especially in the wake of the geral’dičeskij lev) and, equally important, Evgenij’s pose on one of them (when Kočubej’s version of the anecdote makes no mention of this) is marked in context. The lions do not merely appear in passing, but are one of the salient leitmotifs in the poem; they are presented in almost identical poetic lines during both confrontations (cf. PSS V: 147), thus becoming, as stone beasts, the only other force in the poem to compete with the “idol on bronze steed.” Their front paws are raised, again a fact of no little consequence when one considers that the poet chose to underscore this as a distinguishing feature. Evgenij is sitting “astride” (verxom) the lion, a word which has obvious equestrian associations in the Russian context. And finally, his arms are folded in the shape of a cross (krestom)—the cross over the breast of St. George or St. Andrew?—a sign of his Orthodox affiliation.²⁷

But the confrontation is not, of course, equal. Evgenij, unarmed, is turned into a parody, a stonelike double (“immobile,” versus the “unshakeable” [nekolebimyj] Peter) of the Petersburg horseman (see Alpatov 1937: 370). He has been transferred to Peter’s territory (“Peter’s square”), frozen as the guardian spirit of a newly erected house (as opposed to the “old little house” [vetxij domik] of Paraša and her mother that he would prefer to be protecting). The lions should be guarding the traditions of “old” Russia, but in fact they too have been transplanted to the camp of the enemy. Puškin creates the effect of two equestrian statues locked in fatal confrontation through his raising up of Evgenij (the mark of the eques) onto the elevated (vozvyšennoe) portico above the flood and through his transformation of the human hero into a stone monument seemingly impervious to the natural (and by implication social/political) storm. This, after all, had been the collective result of Peter’s colossal efforts to turn the wheel of state: people had been turned into so many stone objects.

The confrontation between subject and tsar, however, is not only unequal, it is not even real. The Moscow horseman is thinking not of himself (“He was in terror, poor [soul], / not for himself”) but of Paraša and all that she represents for his (and thus his clan’s) plans for survival into the future. Yet he sits on his steed as though “bewitched” (okoldovan), “riveted” (prikovan) to the marble and to his role as victim. True to form, the Bronze Horseman does not acknowledge his existence, but sits with his back turned on the “little man” and hence on the possibility of a genuine meeting:

Part One ends in the suspended animation of a stand-off, with the two stone horsemen looking out into the distance at their very different versions of the future (Paraša and her little house versus Peter’s extended arm). And all of this frozen stasis will be launched into motion only when that future enters the present, becomes known, and “turns the tables” on Peter’s plans and ultimately on the shape of Russian history.

Part Two is structurally the mirror opposite of Part One. Now the flood has abated; now Evgenij, who was separated from Paraša by the raging waters, is able to learn her fate; now the hero has a second, genuine confrontation with the Bronze Horseman. The effect of Paraša’s death on the hero not only is devastating psychologically, but, equally important, it turns him into an eternal strannik, a pedestrian with no place to go, with no future and therefore no past worth remembering or preserving (PSS V: 146). He moves about constantly in the climax of Part Two, whereas in Part One he was limited to his role as fixed parodic horseman. This is another way of saying that by this point in the drama Evgenij is cut off, freed from his function as heroic paladin, savior of Moscow and her traditions. Puškin consciously brings his hero back to the site of the first confrontation in order to set in greater relief the contrast between the man and the statue:

Instead of being raised up like his adversary, Evgenij walks around at ground level to confront the statue of Peter brazenly en face (still, of course, looking up). He is empowered with the same wild abandon as the flood waters when he hurls up his famous challenge.²⁸ He has, in effect, joined forces with the opposition, which up to now has been symbolized by the swirling Neva—and the chaotic hoi polloi—threatening to trouble the “sleep” of the unshakeable bronze statue. And whereas earlier his “desperate glances” (otcajannye vzory) were directed toward Paraša, now his “wild glances” (vzory dikie) are fixed on “the countenance of the ruler of half the world” (PSS V: 142, 147-48). Terror has been replaced by madness, the staid pose of the eques by the restless, peripatetic circling of the man in the streets, the tutelary function of St. George by the rage of the revolutionary.

All of this makes Puškin’s famous question of the Bronze Horseman— “Was it not thus, aloft hard by the abyss, / that with curb of iron / you reared up Russia?”—even more ambiguous and vexed. Framed by the “before” and “after” of Evgenij’s cognitio, and reinforcing the dread potency of the Petrine myth (“Awesome [užasen] [is] he in the surrounding gloom! / What thought upon his brow! / What power within him hidden! / And in that steed, what fire!” [PSS V: 147]), this query catches the eques at the point—both verbal and visual—of maximum equipoise even as it asks where this force will go once it hits the ground and the “turning-point” is passed (“Whither do you gallop, haughty steed, / and where do you plant your hooves?”). Futurity, as it were, is embedded in the present (a potentially apocalyptic notion). If it could be said that, generally speaking, the “Introduction” of Bronze Horseman foregrounds an eighteenth-century, “panegyric” treatment of Peter and his “Northern Palmira,”²⁹ and Parts One and Two show an increased interest in the déclassé hero of emerging nineteenth-century prose, then this passage, coming as it does directly before Evgenij’s challenge, is a climax in several senses. Most important, however, it is the point at which each character, hero and anti-hero, changes his “mode of address” toward his adversary.³⁰

As was suggested in our prefatory remarks, all too often Evgenij has been cast in the role of wretched victim. The most significant fact about the climax of Puškin’s poem is not that the hero perishes—he had, in effect, already perished with the loss of Parasa—but that the “unshakeable” statue is provoked into motion by the words, the “Just you wait!” (Uzo tebe), of the little man. The defining characteristic of the Petrine myth had been its supreme inevitability, its refusal to acknowledge the existence of anything else save the tsar-conqueror’s inviolable design. Thus not only has Evgenij ceased to be St. George, the Moscow horseman, but Peter (or his spirit) has also ceased to be the imperturbable bronze eques, the Petersburg horseman. The argument that this final episode, including the horseman’s pursuit of Evgenij, may simply be the hallucination of a madman, and therefore to be discounted as any real shift in the status quo is, one might submit, a moot point. If this new Peter, concerned enough with the verbal assaults of the little man to leap off his pedestal, exists in the mind of Evgenij, the potential revolutionary, then he exists in fact. And his punishment of Evgenij becomes, in a circular logic of which the author was certainly aware, a self-indictment and a self-judgment.

This essay has attempted to demonstrate how two distinct equestrian traditions, that of European statuary and that of Russian heraldry, might be seen to enter into dialogic confrontation in Bronze Horseman. There is no victor, which fact accords with the studied irresolution of Puškin’s poem, the combined sense of splendor and cruelty that permeates Peter’s design and the poet’s artistic presentation of it. Puškin incorporated in his hero many of his most cherished values at the same time that he distanced himself from him (the hero), and from them (the values). The religious/ mythic link with St. George and old Moscow was one of these. And although Bronze Horseman cannot be said to be “apocalyptic” in any explicit sense—the notions of a fatal parallax involving biblical Endzeit, national myth, and revolutionary movements would have to await a writer of a completely different temperament such as Dostoevskij—one can say with certainty that Puškin himself was keenly aware of how the Petrine reforms contained the germs of future social unrest. As he reminds us in the famous lines of an unpublished chapter of The Captain’s Daughter, “May God preserve us from a Russian rebellion—senseless and merciless.” His way, however, was better suited to the verbal equipoise, the “moving stasis,” of what many believe to be his greatest creation. For only in a work such as Bronze Horseman, in which the concept of “turningpoint” becomes a crucial element at every level (style, structure, theme, etc.), can the reader truly experience the paradox of Peter’s Russia. Reigning and “reining,” the greatest of tsars would one day unleash the forces of recalcitrant nature and man; the “revolutionary” monarch would become, to another generation, the apocalyptic horseman signaling the fiery end of old Russia, of monarchy and Orthodoxy itself.