Abstract
The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg, canonized by the literary tradition known as the "Petersburg text of Russian literature", to the semantics of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benjamin in his studies of German baroque and revolutionary Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of the "Bronze Horseman", the equestrian statue of the city's founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from A. S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the 19th century to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic language of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by avant-garde artists and made to resonate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
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