A Window To The West Essay Research — страница 3

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building the city near the Neva river in the wake of danger. The statue of Peter the Great, in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, represents both the city of Petersburg and its founder, “has a supernatural, unfathomable power.” The statue also becomes “an incarnation of some spirit or demon”(Jakobson 5) and “an enduring symbol of both the majestic power and the impersonal coldness of the new capital.”(Billington 232) “In his sudden madness Evgeny clairvoyantly perceives that the real culprit is the guardian of the city.”(Jakobson 7) After Evgeny is through with his threats and curses, the statue comes to life. “The animated statue leaves his block and pursues Evgeny.”(Jakobson 7) Evgeny attempts to flee the mounted Tsar, “but hears behind him, loud as guns/ or

thunderclap’s reverberation,/ ponderous hooves,”(Pushkin 129) behind him chasing after him. This pursuit continues throughout the night: Evgeny running from the figure “one arm stretched” of the “Bronze Rider,/ after him clatters the Bronze Horse.”(Pushkin 129) Wherever Evgeny goes following him is the incessant sound of the galloping Tsar. Evgeny days and nights following the personification of the statue, become entrenched with loneliness and even more so, fear. And from then on, if [Evgeny] was chancing at any time to cross that square, a look of wild distress came glancing across his features; he would there press hand to heart, in tearing hurry, as if to chase away a worry. Pushkin 129 Eventually Evgeny perishes at the shores of the Neva, that brought him so much

pain and suffering. “Mad Evgeny there they found…/ His cold corpse in that same-self ground.”(Pushkin 130) Evgeny eventually “became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction- pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone his control.”(Billington 332) Although the flood managed to destroy Evgeny’s life, it only momentarily set back Petersburg, for the city, although damaged, remained long after the death of the little man. Petersburg was unnatural in its existence, because of this ability. The human aspect of the city did not exist; its indestructible yet, murderous ability was regarded as evil to all of the little men of Russia. The “little man” represents the Russian people and the culture and values of

Old Russia. With the death of Evgeny, so comes the death of Old Russia. With this passing of the old system of values and culture, comes Westernized and unnatural Russia. In The Bronze Horseman Peter, embodied through the Bronze Horseman created “the image of the poem as of the city and destiny;”(Bayley 128) his city and he victimize, abandon, exploit, terrorize, and kill “the little man” in Evgeny, and all the little men of Russia. Bayley, John. Pushkin: A Comparitve Commentary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Jakobson, Roman. Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth. Trans. John Burbank. Paris: Mouton & Co., 1975. Larvin, Janko. Pushkin and Russian

Literature. New York: Macmillan Company, 1948. Leiter, Sharon. Akmatova’s Petersburg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Pushkin, Alexander. “The Bronze Horseman.” An Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Writings to Modern Fiction. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1996. 118-31. Shvidkovshy, Dmitri. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. Trans. John Goodman. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1996. Simmons, Ernest J. Pushkin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937. Thompson, John M. Russia and the Soviet Union: An Historical Introduction from the Kievan State to the Present. 4th ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998. Voyce, Arthur. Russian Architecture: Trends in Nationalism and Modernism. New York: Greenwood Press,

1948.