21 pages • 42 minutes read
Alexander PushkinThe Bronze Horseman
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1841A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Art and Architecture
The magnificent city of Saint Petersburg, with its large, imposing buildings, bridges, gardens, and vibrant cultural life, symbolizes the human triumph over the chaos of nature. The city imposes an order that is conducive to human life; it has tamed the wild forces of the nearby Neva River and its surrounding marshes. The river, on the other hand, symbolizes those very forces that the city has supposedly conquered. When the river floods, it represents nature bursting out of the unnatural boundaries that human ingenuity has imposed on it; it wreaks havoc as a kind of revenge. The poem takes care to describe the water disrupting the very architecture that makes the narrator proud, the waves pouring into buildings like thieves out to loot and plunder. The statue of the Bronze Horseman symbolizes the power of a single inspired man to build a great city in an apparently inhospitable place and the autocratic power of the state to control the destiny of the common people.
The Supernatural
The poem never clarifies what is really happening during the dramatic episode when the Bronze Horseman comes alive to pursue Yevgeny in answer to Yevgeny’s angry challenge. Is the poor addled man imaging this whole thing? Or does a supernatural force actually inhabit the statue that night? The text of the poem is intentionally ambiguous. As translator John Dewey argues, in the poem, Tsar Peter’s “living presence seems to permeate the city. Pushkin hints in many ways that Peter’s statue may be alive, but never actually oversteps the bounds of realism by stating explicitly that this is so” (37). The motif is reminiscent of an incident from the story of Don Juan, the legendary lothario who at one point must face a stone statue that comes to life—a topic taken up by Pushkin’s idol, the English Romantic poet Lord Byron in his 1819 poem Don Juan, by Mozart, in his opera Don Giovanni, and by Pushkin himself, in his play “The Stone Guest,” written only a few years before “The Bronze Horseman.”
The Book of Genesis
The poem has a number of allusions to the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis. Just as Genesis opens with God conceiving of the world and then creating it, the poem’s Introduction shows us Peter the Great having a vision of Saint Petersburg and then building the city. Like God, who orders to “Let there be” physical phenomena such as light, Peter also issues a series of commands: “A city . . . / . . . shall be erected” (Introduction, Lines 13-14) and all the flags of the world “shall here be seen, / and we shall feast without restriction” (Lines 19-20). Moreover, just as in Genesis, God separates the land from the water, Peter creates a great city where before there were only bogs, marshes, and fog.
Another biblical motif is the flood. Angry at his misbehaving creation, God punishes human sinfulness by flooding the earth, and only the righteous Noah and the creatures on his ark are saved. Pushkin’s flood is described in similarly destructive terms, as an unstoppable, inescapable force bent on erasing the city from the land.
Related Titles
By Alexander Pushkin
