The Bronze Horseman was written in 1833 but suppressed by the censorship of Nicholas I (who objected to its implicit criticism of autocracy) and published only after Pushkin’s death in 1837. It is a narrative poem of approximately 500 lines, set during the catastrophic flood of St. Petersburg in November 1824.
Yevgeny, a poor clerk, loses his fiancée Parasha in the flood. Deranged by grief, he wanders the ruined city and encounters Falconet’s famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great — the “Bronze Horseman” who founded the city on the marshes of the Neva, imposing his imperial will on nature itself. In his madness, Yevgeny shakes his fist at the statue and accuses Peter of building his magnificent city at the cost of ordinary people’s lives. The statue comes to life and pursues Yevgeny through the streets.
The poem’s power lies in its unresolvable tension: Peter’s creation of Petersburg was genuinely magnificent — a city of extraordinary beauty built from nothing by an act of will — but it was also built on bones (tens of thousands of workers died during construction) and located in a place that nature periodically reclaims through flooding. The individual (Yevgeny) is crushed between these two inhuman forces — imperial ambition and natural catastrophe — and the poem refuses to arbitrate between them.
Collecting The Bronze Horseman
First publication (Sovremennik, 1837, posthumous): Russian-language.
Market values:
- Original Russian editions: Extremely rare
- Fine translated editions (D.M. Thomas, etc.): $15–$40