DANIEL R ANCOUR-LAFERRIERE

The Couvade of Peter the Great

A Psychoanalytic Aspect of The Bronze Horseman

It is perhaps difficult to imagine that anything more of interest could be said about Puškin’s Mednyj vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman), given that several large-scale studies of the poem already exist (Knigge 1984; Puškin [Izmajlov] 1978; Lednicki 1955; Makarovskaja 1978). Yet none of the previous studies is psychoanalytic in approach, and the possibilities for psychoanalyzing the poem are legion.

This study will focus on just one psychoanalytic aspect of Puškin’s multi-layered and complex poem. Basically, what I am going to suggest is that Puškin’s characterization of Peter the Great contains hidden fantasies of male childbirth. Reproductive success is a concern of the various representatives of Peter in the poem.

That the founding of Petersburg was an act of “creation” on Peter’s part has of course already been recognized by various scholars. Anciferov (1924: 65) calls Peter a “Kosmokrator.” Gregg says that Peter is a “god-like Creator” who “has brought Cosmos out of the watery Chaos” (1977: 168). Èpštejn (1981: 107) speaks of the “acts of creation” that Peter prepares for as he contemplates the waters. Makogonenko (1982: 168) refers to the “fruitfulness” (“plodotvornost’ ”) of Peter’s idea of building a city that would benefit the Russian people. Banerjee (1978: 52) calls Puškin’s Peter a “thaumaturgic creator.” And so on.¹ But these characterizations do not go much beyond what Puškin’s own Evgenij shouts at the statue: “Dobro, stroitel’ čudotvornyj!” (All right then, wonder-working builder!) What the psychoanalyst looks for is a little farther below the surface than this. Peter is obviously a creator. But what does his creativity mean in the context of the poem? With what other surface structures of the poem does it associate? With what deep structures of the psyche does it resonate?

We can begin to answer these questions, I think, if we consider first the prevalence of water imagery in the poem. Briggs (1976: 233) says that most of the poem’s similes and metaphors concern the Neva River and its flooding. Puškin’s friends referred to The Bronze Horseman as “the poem about a flood” (Blagoj 1929: 295). The poem is bathed, as it were, in the waters of the Neva. At the beginning Tsar Peter contemplates the Neva’s desolate waves and decides to build a city on its shores. A hundred years later Petersburg stands proud and tall where once the humble Finnish fisherman had cast his nets. But the river still dominates the environment. Huge and imposing as the city may be, it is still vulnerable to the whims of the beastly Neva:

As the flooding intensifies, the Neva is transformed from a merely animate being (“zver’ ”) into a human being; i.e., it is personified: “zlye volny, / Как vory, lezut v okna” ( . . . the angry waves / Like thieves climb through the windows). The personification of the river as a kind of kleptomaniac is extended in subsequent images of a “greedy flood” lapping at Evgenij’s feet, and a gang of thieves dropping plunder:

Even after the Neva has calmed down and Evgenij has realized that the river took away his beloved Paraša, the image of a thief remains:

This is accusatory social commentary, of course. The “plucky tradesman” is not a true victim of the Neva’s thieving fury. Rather, Evgenij is. It is Evgenij who has really been robbed, been made poor in the profoundest sense of the word: “bednyj, bednyj moj Evgenij” (my poor, poor Eugene). This “bednjak” (wretch, poor one) does not even have his sanity anymore, much less his possessions or his Paraša. His poorness now consists in his very lack of a mind, for the narrator alliteratively and tautologically calls him a “bezumec bednyj” (poor madman).

But Evgenij’s insanity has certain advantages. He is a madman whom no one has bothered to lock up. He is free both to roam the streets of Peter’s city and to think the most subversive thoughts. He can return to the scene of the crime and re-live the experience which originally drove him mad.

Only the scenes do not quite match. Whereas when he went mad he was standing at the spot where his beloved’s hut had been washed away, when he explodes at Peter the Great he is standing near the Bronze Horseman:

Phonologically, this is one of the most successful examples of expressive alliteration and repeated rhyme in all of Russian poetry (cf. Brjusov 1929; 91). Clinically, the passage describes an attack of paranoia (Gregg 1977: 174). Bronze statues do not chase people. But paranoia is not the only misperception here. The passage is also a misplaced resolution of Evgenij’s feelings. The thieving Neva, not Peter, took his Paraša away (cf. Gregg 1977: 172; Slonimskij 1963: 295). Evgenij should be shouting at the river, not at the statue. He should imagine the waves coming after him, not the Bronze Horseman.

Why is it that Evgenij runs (bežit) before the galloping tsar, just as earlier the people had run before the threatening waves of the Neva (“Vse pobezalo”—cf. Belyj 1929: 203)? There must be, as Èpštejn has already noticed, “a kind of secret commonality of intentions” between the river and the Bronze Horseman (1981: 105). That secret needs to be brought out into the open. The equivalence between Peter and his river needs to be explored.

The poem begins with a grandiose Peter and his grand river in stark juxtaposition:

A most masculine tsar this is, says the hypermetrically stressed “Stojal on” (Stood he). And a most feminine river, says the feminine noun “Reka” and the subsequent feminine personification of the river in “V granit odelasja Neva” (Neva has been clad in granite). Yet the equivalence of these apparent sexual opposites is inescapable. Where would Peter be without his Neva? His intention of breaking a window to the West cannot be accomplished without the river. The narrator adores the “Nevy deržavnoe tečen’e” (Neva’s majestic flow), but makes this expression rhyme with the similarly inverted “Petra tvoren’e,” thereby leading the reader to accept the river as “Peter’s creation.” Even the Neva’s epithet deržavnoe, because it means “sovereign” as well as “powerful,” suggests that the Neva stands in for Peter (when in fact Peter had merely clothed the river in granite). Still later in the poem, Puškin uses this epithet in its nominal form to refer to Peter himself: “ . . . Bezumec bednyj .../... vzory dikie navel / Na lik deržavca polumira” (The poor deranged man .../... cast fierce glances / Upon the countenance of the ruler of half the world).

On the phonological level, the confrontation of Peter and his river in the poem’s opening is accompanied by a powerful rhyme: “voln”/“poln,” where the first element is an attribute of the river, the second an attribute of Peter. Reinforcing this rhyme is an almost perfect parallelism of the opening couplet’s ictic vowels:

Ictus

The effect of such phonemic similarity is to enhance the semantic similarity of the Neva (described in the first line) to Peter (described in the second line).

The most interesting suggestion that the Neva is the equivalent of Peter comes after the worst of the flooding is over:

The rhyme of “polny” (full) with “volny” (waves) reminds the listener of the powerful opening rhyme, “voln”/”poln.” But whereas the opening rhyme involved Peter contemplating the Neva, this one involves just the Neva.

Or does it? The Neva seems to have taken on some of Peter’s characteristics. The fullness of her waves (“polny”) is the fullness of Peter’s brain all over again (“poln”). Her malice (“kipeli zlobno volny”) reminds the reader of Peter’s own hostility toward his neighbor (“Na zlo nadmennomu sosedu”). The flame (“ogon’ ”) which smolders in her depths seems to be the same as the fire in Peter’s horse (“A v sem kone kakoj ogon’!”). And of course, once “ogon’ ” is mentioned at the end of a line, a rhyme with “kon’ ” soon follows—both in the passage describing the Neva, as we have seen, and in the passage describing Peter on his horse (“Kuda ty skačeš’, gordyj kon’ . . . ?” [Whither do you gallop, haughty steed . . . ?]). Not without reason does Belyj ask the rhetorical question: “Is not the Neva the steed of the Bronze Horseman chasing after the madman?” (1929: 186).

The Neva, then, like Peter’s horse, is his equivalent and/or his instrument. She seems to do his will. She is not merely contiguous to the Bronze Horseman but is tied to the Horseman in some essential way. The two belong together:

At the very least the Bronze Horseman is inseparable from the Neva because he is a statue and is therefore immovable (“nepodvizno vozvysalsja”). But the Horseman and the waters are linked by a vertical axis of semantic relations as well. If he is high above the square (“v temnoj vysine,” “Kto . . . vozvyšalsja”), the waters (“potop,” “volny”) are down below. The city he founded is also very low, too low, in fact. This judgment against Peter had already been made in Nikolaj Xmel’nickij’s dramatic fragment Arzamasskie gusi in 1829: “ . . . Petr Alekseevič! byl umnyj car’, / Da k morju čeresčur pod”exal blizko. / Kak v jame stroit’sja, kogda est’ materik?” (Peter Alekseevich was a clever tsar, / But he approached the sea too closely. / Why build in a hole, when you have dry land?)² Puškin’s phrase “Pod morem” is usually translated “By the sea.” But the preposition “pod” basically means “under,” so the phrase “Pod morem” suggests that the city is not so much by the sea as below sea level, or even underwater (cf. Epštejn 1981: 105; Corbet 1966: 129). What is more, it was Peter’s own intention that the city be built at such a low level: “Togo, č’ej volej rokovoj / Pod morem gorod osnovalsja” (Him by whose fateful will / The city by the sea was founded). The antonymous rhyme of this last line with “vozvysalsja” (loomed) further emphasizes the vertical contrast of Peter with all that is below him.

This vertical configuration pitting high against low³ may be diagrammed as follows:

If Peter willed that the city be built at such a dangerously low level, then, in effect, he willed that it be flooded. The river’s waves (“volny”) which so terrified Evgenij were already present in Peter’s opening meditation (“Na beregu pustynnyx voln” [Upon a shore of desolate waves]). The waters of the Neva were already in motion in front of Peter’s eyes (“Pred nim široko / Reka neslasja. ...” [Before him broadly / The river rolled]), just as Peter himself moved after poor Evgenij from behind (“Za nim nesetsja Vsadnik Mednyj” [There speeds after him the Bronze Horseman]). The powerful current, “derzavnoe tečen’e,” which the narrator claims is Peter’s creation, “Petra tvoren’e,” was already quite powerful and quite fast in “siroko” and “neslasja.”

We saw earlier that the flooding Neva was extensively personified as a thief or as a gang of thieves (“zlodej, / S svirepoj šajkoju svoej”). Assuming that, at one level, the Neva represents Peter, then Peter is a thief. The two most important things Peter steals from Evgenij are his intended bride, Paraša, and his sanity (“Bezumec bednyj”), i.e., his one reproductive asset (children were planned) and his ability to behave rationally. It is as if Peter’s own ability to be rational, purposeful, or intentional enough to construct a city were a form of bride-capture aimed at producing offspring.

In essence, Peter gets the blame for the unhappy fate of poor Evgenij because he wants the credit for the flow of the Neva. But he wants credit for the flow of the Neva, and especially the flooding of the Neva, because such a rush of waters is a metaphor for birth. The flooding of Saint Petersburg is one manifestation of the couvade of Peter the Great.

Couvade is a phenomenon familiar to anthropologists and physicians. It may be defined as a male’s conscious or unconscious imitation of the properly female process of childbirth. For example, in our culture when a man’s wife is about to deliver, the man may develop abdominal pains. In some cultures the husband will don his wife’s clothing, take to his bed, and groan in ritualized labor. There is an enormous literature on couvade, which I have reviewed elsewhere (Rancour-Laferriere 1985: 362ff.). Here I would just like to mention a couple of the psychoanalytic sources on this subject, such as Bettelheim (1954) and Zilboorg (1944). Bettelheim says that couvade is a “pretense” in which the man

Zilboorg includes an example which would appear to be relevant to the behavior of Peter in Puškin’s poem:

Just as Athena sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus, so Petersburg springs from the full-to-bursting brain of Peter (cf. “dum velikix poln” [of lofty musings full] and “Kakaja duma na čele!” [What thought upon his brow!]). But the price of such hubris, such couvade, is great: “I vsplyl Petropol’ kak triton, / Po pojas v vodu pogruzen” (And afloat was Petropolis, like Triton / Steeped to the waist in water) (PSS V: 140). The image of a watery Triton is most appropriate. One of the epithets of Athena was Tritogeneia (Hammond and Scullard 1970: 138). The warlike nature of Peter’s city—it is a threat to the Swedes, it is decked out in fields of Mars, it is a “voennaja stolica” (martial capital)—is also apt, for the most conspicuous functions of Athena were connected with war (1970: 138).

But the point is not merely that the myth of Athena is one of the subtexts for The Bronze Horseman.⁴ Rather, it is that Peter, who happened to be like Zeus bearing Athena, was practicing a form of couvade when he conceived of his brainchild on the low banks of the Neva.

Early in the poem Peter says that he (i.e., the royal “we”) was fated by nature to build a city: “Prirodoj zdes’ nam suždeno / V Evropu prorubit’ okno” (PSS V: 135). There is an interesting motherliness about the feminine noun “priroda” (nature) here, and again a few lines later when the humble fisherman is described as a “stepson of nature.” By motherliness I mean some of the typical lexical associations with “priroda” given in the Academy dictionary: “priroda-mat’ ” (or: “mat’-priroda”); “ditja prirody” (cf. Puškin’s “pasynok prirody”); “na lone prirody”; “ot prirody” (= “ot rozdenija”), etc. (ANSSSR 1950-65 XI: 704-705). There is also the obvious morphological relationship of the verb for giving birth, “rodit’,” with “priroda.” Although Peter is the one who gives birth to the idea of building a city on the Neva, he shifts some of the blame (or credit) for the idea onto mother nature: “Prirodoj . . . suždeno” (by nature . . . destined). This makes sense not only because it helps him rationalize the terrible thing he is about to do to the Finns, to the slaves who will build his city, and to the environment, but also because it is more acceptable for a woman than for a man to be represented as giving birth.

As the narration moves along, Peter makes use of another maternal figure, the Neva, to accomplish his goals. We saw earlier that Peter is repeatedly equated with the Neva. The Neva is a body of water, and it is in flood for much of the duration of the poem. The poem is literally awash in images of Peter’s river.

Psychoanalysts have observed that in dreams, mythology, folklore, etc., water imagery is very often associated with birth. Otto Rank discusses this association at length in his classic study The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1964 [1914]). King Sargon of Babylon, for example, was set afloat in a reed vessel on the Euphrates River right after being born. The infant Moses was found floating in an ark of bullrushes. So also was the infant Kama, according to the ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata. Oedipus was exposed on the waters of the Cithaeron before being saved. While the King Cyrus of Persia was being bom, his mother dreamt that “so much water passed away from her that it became as a large stream, inundating all Asia, and flowing as far as the sea” (Rank 1964: 38). In the Grimms’ tale “Dame Holle’s Pond,” newborn children were said to come from a well. Nor should we forget Puškin’s own Prince Gvidon who, as an infant, is placed in a barrel with his mother and cast onto the sea. Examples of this association of water imagery with birth/infancy are numerous in the psychoanalytic literature (see also Freud 1953-65 V: 399-402; Niederland 1956-57; Laferriere 1977: 113).⁵ The flood sequences in the Mesopotamian myths (which Anciferov [1924] has related to the flood in The Bronze Horseman) would themselves be psychoanalyzed as birth fantasies. When the flow of waters achieves mythic proportions in the collective memory, the thought of another kind of “waters” is activated in personal memory.

In Puškin’s poem the Neva is frequently characterized by the plural noun “vody” (waters): “ . . . Brosal v nevedomye vody / Svoj vetxoj nevod. ...” (Used to cast into unknown waters) (PSS V: 136) // “ . . . Mosty povisli nad vodami ...” (Bridges are suspended over the waters) (PSS V: 136) //“... Vody vdrug / Vtekli v podzemnye podvaly. . . . “ (the waters suddenly / Flowed into cellars underground) (PSS V: 140) (etc.). One of the meanings of “vody” is the fluid accumulating around the fetus (ANSSSR 1950-65 II: 494; cf. English “waters,” i.e., the amniotic fluid). This, of course, is not the overt meaning of “vody” in Puškin’s poem. But the repeated use of the plural noun to describe the flooding of the Neva hints at another, covert meaning. “Volna,” too, occurs often in the poem, usually in the plural form.

The narrator says that among the objects floating down Petersburg’s inundated streets are “Lotki pod mokroj pelenoj. ...” (Pedlars’ trays under sodden cover) (140). In the plural the last word would refer to the swaddling clothes in which Russian infants were traditionally wrapped. Semantically, the “lotki” enshrouded by the “pelena” are plural. The related verb “pelenat’ ” means ‘to swaddle.’

At one point the narrator quite explicitly discusses the birth of an infant. A connection is made, moveover, with the flow of the Neva:

The grammatical parallelism of {-ova-} verbs embedded in this passage is revealing:

The parallelism not only confirms our suspicion that the violent flow of Peter’s river is analogous to giving birth (1/3), but also suggests that victory over an enemy is like giving birth (1/2). Two pages earlier that enemy is mentioned: “I dumal on: / Otsel’ grozit’ my budem švedu. ...” (And he thought / From here we shall threaten the Swede) (PSS V: 135). Building Petersburg is an act of spite against a foreign power. But victory over an internal enemy, Moscow, seems to be just as important:

Moscow, personified as an aged dowager, is now clearly past her reproductive prime. She fades before Peter’s young new queen-city (“pered novoju caricej”). Therefore, when we later encounter the words “polnoščnaja carica / daruet syna,” it seems in retrospect that Peter’s city, certainly as much his representative as are the waters of the Neva, has given birth.

Brett Cooke, in his interesting dissertation on Puškin’s creativity (including Puškin’s fantasies of male childbirth), says that the opening lines of The Bronze Horseman describe the “creative frame of mind” that Puskin himself experienced when writing: “It seems to be no coincidence that Puškin had used the same ‘voln’ / ‘poln’ rhyme to describe the inspiration of the hero of ‘Poèt’ ” (1983: 508). In the latter poem the rhyme occurs in the following context:

The penultimate line is almost identical to the opening line of The Bronze Horseman. For Puškin the process of poetic creativity and the act of conceiving Petersburg were clearly similar (cf. Banerjee 1978: 54). Puškin could capture the couvade of Peter the Great so well because he, as a poet, knew a bit about couvade himself. Cooke (1983: 247) quotes a passage from “A Conversation between Bookseller and Poet,” which graphically illustrates the poet’s kind of couvade: “I tjažkim, plamennym nedugom / Byla polnamoja glava; / V nej grezy čudnye roždalis’ ” (And with heavy, flaming discomfort / My head was full; / In it marvelous dreams were born) (PSS II: 325). Here, as in The Bronze Horseman, the head is “full,” and birth is inevitable.⁶

Perhaps the creation of The Bronze Horseman was itself accompanied by symptoms of couvade. At about the time he started composing The Bronze Horseman during the second Boldino autumn of 1833, Puškin wrote to his wife: “Really, aren’t you with child? Why are you so touchy? Farewell, darling. I’m somehow not very well today. My little stomach aches, like [P. K.] Alexandrov’s” (Shaw 1967: 614, emphasis added).⁷

To say that Puškin’s great poem about Petersburg contains hidden fantasies of male childbirth is by no means to exhaust all the psychoanalytic possibilities. A complete psychoanalysis of the poem would have to deal, for example, with the enmity between Peter and the Neva (cf. Makogonenko 1982: 175ff.), not only the alliance between them or their similarity to each other. Likewise, both Evgenij’s hostility to Peter and his numerous similarities to Peter would have to be dealt with (for example, he sits astride a lion as Peter sits astride a horse; his head is as full of “dumy” as is Peter’s at the beginning of the poem; when he is about to confront Peter he is described by means of majestic, Petrine Slavonicisms, etc.). Gutsche says that Evgenij “identifies himself with the statue” (1986: 30). For both the Neva and Evgenij, some form of identification with the aggressor (Peter) seems to be taking place.

Evgenij appears to be involved in positive Oedipal competition with the paternal Peter for the maternal Paraša (cf. Gutsche’s “Parasha/ mother” in 1986: 157) and, like any child in such a situation, both hates and identifies with the father. Evgenij revolts against the image of Peter which, although it has been translated into socio-political terms (a mistreated class rises up against oppressive authority—e.g., Blagoj 1929: 263-328; Xarlap 1961) and into biographical terms (the personal hostility of Puškin to Nicholas I—e.g., Belyj 1929; Corbet 1966), has yet to be fully translated into the psychoanalytic language of son-father conflict.⁸

The psychoanalyst would also want to comment on the negative or inverted side of Evgenij’s Oedipal relationship with Peter, that is, on the homosexual aspect. Monas speaks of the “phallic thrust” of Falconet’s famous statue (1984: 390). Perhaps it is precisely the thought of phallic aggression which sparks Evgenij’s sudden paranoia. Here it should be noted that the relationship of paranoia to latent homosexuality is just as obvious to a psychoanalyst (Freud 1953-65 XII: 63) as the relationship of Russian to Protoslavic is obvious to a Slavist.

Then there is the deep ontogenetic background of the poem. The Bronze Horseman was written by a poet who had a history of intense emotional conflict with his father. That conflict has to some extent been examined in a psychoanalytic light by Kučera (1956: 283-84) and Proffer (1968: 352-53), but the relevance of the conflict to The Bronze Horseman has not been explored. Can the oft-noted contradictory attitudes toward Peter in the poem (e.g., “Ljublju tebja, Petra tvoren’e” [I love you, Peter’s creation] vs. “Užo tebe!” [I’ll show you!]—see especially Corbet 1966, Lednicki 1955, and Knigge 1984) be related to Puškin’s strongly ambivalent attitude toward his father? What do the specifically demonic and supernatural aspects of Peter have to do with the poet’s feelings about his father?

In short, much psychoanalytic work remains to be done. The future probably holds yet another big book about Puškin’s little masterpiece.