Bronze Horseman Research Articles

Representations of the image of Peter the Great as exemplified by “The Bronze Horseman” by É. Falconet and A. S. Pushkin in the context of social memory: From artistic image to mythological figure

Representations of the image of Peter the Great as exemplified by “The Bronze Horseman” by É. Falconet and A. S. Pushkin in the context of social memory: From artistic image to mythological figure

Bryusov's Pushkiniana in the Perspective of Modern Cultural Studies

In the work, in the light of modern cultural studies, the literary and poetic activity of Valery Bryusov, a bright Soviet critic and an outstanding symbolist poet of the Silver Age, is reinterpreted. The material for the analysis was Bryusov’s Pushkiniana and, in particular, the article “The Copper Horseman” (1909) and the poem of the Soviet period “Variations on the theme of the ‘Copper Horseman’“ (1923). It is traced how the critic Bryusov analyzed Pushkin’s “Petersburg story” in detail, how analytically precisely he formed the main trends of the research discourse. The appeal to the system of arrangement of Pushkin’s characters explicated Bryusov’s idea of the antithetical confrontation between the autocrat Peter and the “most insignificant of the most insignificant” poor official Eugene. However, an analysis of the works of modern Pushkinists allowed the authors of the article to show that Bryusov, the researcher, was mistaken in his hypothesis of the “little man”. It is shown that the prototype of poor Eugene in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” was his closest friend, the lyceum student Wilhelm Kuchelbecker. But the involvement in the analysis of Bryusov’s poem “Variations on the theme of the Bronze Horseman” allowed us to show that the poet Bryusov, unlike the critic Bryusov, turned out to be visionarily more accurate, intuitively introducing into the lyrical text the name of “noble Eugene”, the lyceum student Wilhelm. As a result, the difference between the poet-Bryusov and the critic-Bryusov is clarified, it is shown that the restriction of the poet’s freedoms in the Soviet years activated his intuitive vision of literature and, as a result, history.

SPATIAL SYMBOLS OF A. BÖCKLIN’S THE ISLE OF THE DEAD IN ANDREI BELY’S PETERSBURG

The paper attempts to explore the structural elements of the landscape of Andrei Bely’s novel in correlation with the spatial coordinates and symbolic images of A. Böcklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead. The Swiss artist’s techniques used in the novel are highlighted: color and light painting, the technique of inverse and combined perspective. In addition, microplots of fog, sails and the Bronze Horseman are presented in the novel as ‘pictures with motion’, due to which the visual images-symbols smoothly ‘flow’ into each other, forming a single whole, which meets the author’s desire to reproduce a three-dimensional mythopoetic model of the world based on the unity of macrocosm and microcosm, nature and man. From Bely’s point of view, gloomy rocks, the sky, white clothes, cypresses are a kind of coordinate axes of Böcklin’s painting - they set the horizontal and vertical levels of the universe. In the painting The Isle of the Dead, the horizontal is the Styx and the sky that seems bright; the vertical is shaped by the cypress and the rock. In the novel Petersburg the spire(s) acts as a vertical. The spire is not only a connecting line stretching from the city to the sky, but also a component of the symbolism of the cross: the Neva and the city streets, Petersburg lines, primarily act as a horizontal line. In addition, the image of the spire also fulfils a psychological and compositional function by drawing attention to the climaxes of a particular storyline: as a rule, the moment of the highest psychological tension (whether we are talking about the senator, the terrorist Dudkin, Anna Petrovna, or others) is marked by the mention of the ‘needle’, and extended introspection is often replaced by a ‘point’ indication of this detail of the city panorama, which turns out to be the focus of the character’s perception.

Nayman, A. (2023). Russian Long Poem. Moscow: Alpina non-fiction. (In Russ.)

Anatoly Nayman’s Russian Long Poem is devoted to six landmark works of Russian literature: opening with a discussion of I. Bogdanovich’s Dushenka, A. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman [Medniy vsadnik], and N. Nekrasov’s Red-Nosed Frost [Moroz, Krasniy nos], the book goes on to analyze 20th-c. experimental long poems, including V. Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers [Oblako v shtanakh], A. Blok’s Dvenadtsat [The Twelve], and A. Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero [Poema bez geroya]. The author proposes a new angle for viewing the poems, shifting the reader’s focus from preconceived interpretations to the poetics of the texts, which function primarily as a cultural rather than historical fact. Nayman’s book shows accurate appreciation of the uninterrupted tradition passed down among the poems and points out their ties with a common European context, such as C. Baudelaire’s poetry or Dante’s Divine Comedy. The author details the development of poetic writing, its form and meaning determined by cultural and historical circumstances.

Nayman, A. (2023). Russian Long Poem. Moscow: Alpina non-fiction. (In Russ.)

Anatoly Nayman’s Russian Long Poem is devoted to six landmark works of Russian literature: opening with a discussion of I. Bogdanovich’s Dushenka, A. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman [Medniy vsadnik], and N. Nekrasov’s Red-Nosed Frost [Moroz, Krasniy nos], the book goes on to analyze 20th-c. experimental long poems, including V. Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers [Oblako v shtanakh], A. Blok’s Dvenadtsat [The Twelve], and A. Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero [Poema bez geroya]. The author proposes a new angle for viewing the poems, shifting the reader’s focus from preconceived interpretations to the poetics of the texts, which function primarily as a cultural rather than historical fact. Nayman’s book shows accurate appreciation of the uninterrupted tradition passed down among the poems and points out their ties with a common European context, such as C. Baudelaire’s poetry or Dante’s Divine Comedy. The author details the development of poetic writing, its form and meaning determined by cultural and historical circumstances.

Implicit Motive and Its Role in the Plot of A. S. Pushkin

The article examines the concept of implicit motive. Its specificity lies in the fact that it does not actively manifest itself in the plot and does not directly influence the development of the action. Its purpose is different: to connect texts that are far apart from each other into supertextual unites, organizing the author’s model of the world. Using the example of three works by A. S. Pushkin – “My Pedigree”, “Yezersky” and “Bronze Horseman” show how ancestry motive creates such unity. “My Pedigree”, written three years before the other two texts, reflected Pushkin’s dual position: an impoverished aristocrat among poets and a poet among the wealthy nobility. Thus, the poem turned out to be a rhetorical invective directed at two addresses: against the literary party of Bulgarin, on the one hand, and against the new nobility, on another. In the first case, Pushkin’s victory was unequivocal and consolidated the poet’s fame for centuries. It was more difficult with another addressee: the nobility, very far from the literary struggle and who continued to look at Pushkin with considering disdain. A reflection of continuing duality was the poet’s rejection of direct rhetoric and the transition to poetics, where the autobiographical motive of ancestry was transformed into fate of fictional characters: first Andrey Yezersky, then Eugene from “The Bronze Horseman”. Such a transition, in our opinion, gives grounds to consider the three works as a single super text.

Skazani na imperium. Wizja rosyjskiej drogi dziejowej w Jeźdźcu miedzianym Aleksandra Puszkina

The article is an attempt to explore the vision of Russian history in Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. The key role in the poem is played by the figure of Peter I, who is shown as a despot on the one hand, and a bold visionary on the other. In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin presents a suggestive image of the flood in St. Petersburg, referring to such problems as the clash between an ordinary man and history or the essence of rebellions and revolutions. Deciphering the meaning of individual motifs allows us to perceive Pushkin’s coherent and multidimensional historiosophical vision. The main conclusion of the article is the statement that Russian imperialism in The Bronze Horseman is shown as an organic element of Russianness, without which Russia could not have formed as a strong and modern state. Moreover, the poem can invariably be seen as a key to understanding the essence and vitality of Russian imperialism.

Веничка и Кремль: «Ужо тебе!..» и «Подымите мне веки…»

The article presents the experience of understanding the images of Venichka and the Kremlin in V. Erofeev’s poem “Moscow — Petushki”. Comparison of the key antithesis of Yerofeev’s poem with the images of Eugene and the Bronze Horseman from the “Petersburg story” by A. Pushkin, Akaky Akakievich, Khoma Brutus, Viy from the stories of N. Gogol, the image of Viy in O. Mandelstam’s “Fourth Prose” reveals the typological relationship of these images in the context archetypal opposition of the “little man” to irresistible omnipotence, the motive of the taboo on “vision”.

Discourse of Another in Joseph Brodsky’s Poem “In Front of the Pushkin Monument in Odessa”

The topic of the article was someone else’s word in I. Brodsky’s poem “Before the monument to A. S. Pushkin in Odessa.” The method of intertextual analysis and the biographical method were used. Pushkin’s intertext is analyzed using allusions to A. S. Pushkin’s poems about freedom (“Prisoner”, “God forbid, God forbid me to go crazy…”, “To the Sea”), references to his other texts (fairy tales, “The Bronze Horseman”). The inclusion of other forms of someone else’s word in the text of the work is also explored. Describing A. S. Pushkin, commenting on his poems on the topic of freedom, I. Brodsky reveals similarities with his own position: in the poem he focuses on those facts of the poet’s biography that resonate with his biography, and to enhance this similarity he places them in the right place for himself context. The work presents the image of A. S. Pushkin, which is seen by I. Brodsky the exile, but not by the researcher-biographer, therefore some features of this image are exaggerated, and some are omitted (this is how, according to I. Brodsky, freedom appears to A. S. Pushkin the most important value). The author of the poem perceives A. S. Pushkin through the prism of his own worldview, giving him the features of an exile, realizes his ideas in the text both explicitly, speaking about “kinship” with the poet, and implicitly, through comments on Pushkin’s lines. This allows I. Brodsky to consider himself a continuator of the poetic mission of A. S. Pushkin, which is to declare various values (including the value of freedom) in poetic texts.

«Нерукотворный памятник» Пушкина как поэтический храм Свободы в контексте идеологии российской имперской государственности и религиозной философии масонства

The article analyses the concept of “Alexandria column” in Pushkin’s Monu­ment as a symbol of Russian imperial statehood and ideology edifice (“Alexan­dria” of Alexander I – by analogy with the pseudo-historical “Alexandria” of Alexander the Great) in opposition to the “non-handmade monument” cre­ated by Pushkin, which in light of religious philosophy of Russian Masonry and in correlation with Mk. 14:58 and 2Cor. 5:1 could be considered as a poetic temple of Freedom – “Alexandria” of Alexander Pushkin. In parallel to this, the article interprets the ideological and philosophical peculiarities of Pushkin’s in­terpretation of Peter the Great’s mission as the founder of the Russian Empire and St. Petersburg as the Fourth Rome, reflected in “The Bronze Horseman”. Particular attention is paid to the identification of certain aspects of the se­mantic field of Pushkin’s concept of “non-handmade” (hapax legomenon of the poet’s language) in comparison with its meanings in the sources, from which the term can be borrowed. The author also analyses Pushkin’s concept of freedom in correlation with the corresponding Russian Masonic views on free­dom and the spiritual temple of freedom – world/universal and inner/individual. The author also considers the peculiarities of evolution of Pushkin’s idea of the inspiration of God in his works, first of all, in the comparison of his poems “The Prophet” and “The Monument”. The author concludes that Pushkin’s no­tion of true freedom, in correlation with his belief in the divine inspiration, is close to the corresponding concept of Joseph de Maistre, whose works were well known to the poet.

Распределение атрибутов в поэмах А. С. Пушкина и гипотеза Скиннера

The article aims to test Skinner’s hypothesis regarding the distribution of linguistic units in the text. In accordance with this hypothesis, the distances between similar linguistic units should be less than between different units. In a more general form, one can raise the question of whether there is any regularity in the length of distances between identical units in the text. The units taken for this study are distinguished at a rather abstract level – different types of attributes. The scheme of attribute types is based on the part-of-speech characteristics of words that replace the syntactic position of the attribute. Attributes, constituting an extremely important component of the description of the artistic world, at the same time are an optional syntactic element in the sentence structure and are not determined by the valency of verbs in the predicative position. This allows the author to use attributes based on one’s preferences and the characteristics of the author’s style, which makes attributes an extremely successful means of describing an individual style. Distances between attribute types are determined by the number of steps from one attribute to another identical attribute in the chain formed by all attributes in the order in which they appear in the text. The article also considers the possibility of identifying patterns in the alternation of distances between attributes of the same type. The research material is six poems by Alexander Pushkin, written in iambic tetrameter. These poems are especially significant in connection with the place of the brilliant poet in the development of Russian literature and the Russian language. The poems are: “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray”, “Count Nulin”, “Poltava” and “The Bronze Horseman”. The study was carried out by quantitative analysis of large volumes of text using a number of statistical measures (Busemann’s coefficient, chi-square, etc.). As a result of the analysis, data were obtained on the degree of attraction of the same type of attributes to each other, and the degree of structural ordering of the description was determined. The use of the exponential function was very successful in fitting the distribution of distances between identical attributes. It was found that within each poem there is not only a predominance of short distances over large distances for identical attributes, but also a certain trend in the distribution of these distances, which is well caught by the exponential function. As a result of the analysis, Skinner’s hypothesis was confirmed. This is expressed in the fact that in judging by the distances between attributes of the same type there is a hidden tendency towards order in preserving formal repetition until the fading of the stimulus.

«ПИКОВАЯ ДАМА» ПУШКИНА: К ВОПРОСУ О ГЕНЕЗИСЕ ЖАНРА ПЕТЕРБУРГСКОЙ ПОВЕСТИ

The Petersburg Tale is a specific genre formation within the framework of the Petersburg text of Russian literature. “The Queen of Spades” is traditionally regarded by researchers as Pushkin’s second (after the poem “The Bronze Horseman”) Petersburg Tale. However, the receptive history of the text indicates that this reading only emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. In this article an attempt is made to trace changing of the correlation between the readers’ reception strategies and the narrative strategies of the text at different times, and to describe the mechanisms of readers’ interpretation, which resulted in the transformation of “The Queen of Spades” from a secular short story (close to The Belkin Cycle) into the Petersburg Tale.

The Naked World: A Tale with Verse by Irina Mashinski

Reviewed by: The Naked World: A Tale with Verse by Irina Mashinski Susan Blumberg-Kason Irina Mashinski The Naked World: A Tale with Verse Cheshire, Massachusetts. MadHat Press. 2022. 185 pages. IRINA MASHINSKI IS one of the most notable contemporary Russian American translators and poets. While she usually composes poetry in Russian, in her latest work she writes in English to examine her family's origins in the former Soviet Union and their exodus to the United States. In the preface, poet Ilya Kaminsky writes that Mashinski's memoir is "a magical book, a story of four generations of one family, told through poems." Mashinski, Kaminsky, and many others are labeled as Russian American writers, and their Judaism is often not mentioned or perhaps deemed unimportant by editors and publishers. Yet their experiences in the Soviet Union and the reasons they emigrated specifically transpired because of their Judaism. In the Soviet Union of Mashinksi's childhood and early adult years, Jews had special marks in their passports, were prohibited from certain professions, and were not promoted in the jobs they could find. Children were called slurs and often beaten up just because they were Jewish. Mashinski's memoir is magical, as Kaminsky writes, because she addresses her family's Judaism through a combination of interconnected poetry and short essays. The Soviet Union was formed to provide equality to all citizens, but it didn't take long for Stalin to become wary of a perceived growing threat from Jews in the government. Mashinski's family felt the effects of this distrust going back to her grandparents' young adult years, specifically in 1928 when her paternal grandfather, Alexander, was arrested and imprisoned just before the birth of Mashinski's [End Page 74] father, Victor. Alexander's brother-in-law, Sergei Gorny, had been the consul general in Turkey during the early years of the Soviet Union and was suddenly on the outs with Stalin. No family member was left untouched, and, because of this, Alexander was imprisoned for the first, but not last, time. Mashinski writes about her paternal grandparents and their family separation in the essays "Alexander and Alexandra, The First Arrest" and "Victor," followed by a poem, "Love": "… counts her beads of trifles, / slips of tongue, quick glances, / having tortured millions / of crumpled petals, anguishing / from encounters, for one year watching / from the four corners, having not uttered / even two words." Alexander would be arrested again twenty years later in 1948 and sent away for six years that time. Mashinksi was born in Moscow in 1958, half a century after Jews had moved beyond the Pale of Settlement or what is now Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and parts of Poland, Latvia, and Russia. Several million Jews were confined to this area from the late 1700s until the founding of the Soviet Union and murdered in pogroms en masse when economies declined or rulers felt the need to solidify their power. Another million Jews in Ukraine were shot to death in mass killings during World War II. Many Ashkenazi Jews around the world can trace their origins back to the Pale of Settlement, including Mashinski. In her prose essay "The Bronze Horseman, Natasha," Mashinski writes of her mother's exodus from Kiev in 1941 just before the city fell to the Nazis. Mashinski's mother, Natasha, was only nine years old when her mother, Ophelia, had the foresight to leave Kiev and head east for the Urals, away from Europe. Before they could flee, the Germans bombed their train. Ophelia acted quickly and put Natasha on a truck with relatives leaving the city. Thanks to her grandmother's quick thinking, Mashinski is here today. In reading this essay, I could not help but reflect on today's conflict in Kyiv, as it's known in Ukrainian, as families are torn apart—if they survive. And that the number-one Jewish target of aggression in this current conflict happens to be the president of Ukraine, which would have been unheard of twenty years ago. A number of former Soviet Jewish memoirs by authors like Yelena Lembersky (see WLT, May 2022, 22–25), Lev Golinkin, and Margarita Gokun Silver, among others, show how...

The Bronze Horseman of Justinian in Constantinople: The Cross-Cultural Biography of a Mediterranean Monument

The Bronze Horseman of Justinian in Constantinople: The Cross-Cultural Biography of a Mediterranean Monument

Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” and the Formation of the Official Image of Peter the Great in Russia in the Era of Nicholas I

The article is devoted to the formation of images and plot of the “Bronze Horseman” by A.S. Pushkin in the context of the state ideology, as well as ideas about Peter the Great in the Russian educated society. The author reveals the main strategies for the development of the positive image of Peter in the 18th century, as well as their criticism in public circles at the turn of the 18th – 19th centuries. He considers the ways of creating Pushkin’s authorly image of the emperor and the tasks that the poet solved with its help. The Bronze Horseman is analyzed in the context of the political confrontation between A.S. Pushkin with A. Mitskevich. The relationship between Pushkin’s apology for Peter and the state cult of the tsar-reformer, recreated in the early 1830s, is noted. The author comes to the conclusion that two lines of development of the positive myth about Peter, coming from Feofan Prokopovich and Catherine II, are synthesized in Pushkin’s work. Initially, the poet strove to achieve an amnesty for the Decembrists, but after 1830 the image of a “revolutionary from above” arose, and the topic of amnesty ceased to be relevant. In the 18th century the image of Peter in the public consciousness was formed under the influence of the state ideology, but after 1825 the situation changed to the opposite.

PROSIMETRICAL COMPOSITIONS IN THE WORKS OF VIKTOR PUL’KIN

The article deals with the problem of prosimetry (prosimetrum) in a work of literary fiction. Viktor Pul’kin’s works in the literary tale genre (narration in the first person, or skaz) from “The Kizhi Stories”, “The Bronze Horseman”, and “The Royal Fingers” literary collections were analyzed. A hypothesis is put forward that Viktor Pul’kin’s works can be classified as prosimetrical compositions. Literary tales (skaz) are proven to be an important material for the study of prosimetry and are of particular interest for verse studies. The author discovers that Viktor Pul’kin relies on the spoken and chanted folk verse traditions. Various genres of Russian (and, in rare cases, Karelian) oral folk art act as sources of poetic elements in Viktor Pul’kin’s prose. These genres include proverbs, sayings, riddles, lyric songs, byline (heroic epics), spiritual verses, incantations, runes of the Kalevala metrics, etc.Prosaic fragments with increased rhythm were also discovered, specifically, these include constructions with syntactic parallelism and most often with grammatical rhyme, which cannot be conclusively qualified as poetic elements. An important aspect of the poetics of Viktor Pul’kin’s skaz is comprised by the experiments with folklore spoken verse, or the so-called rayoshnik. Such texts are numerous, but they almost never reach a significant length. At the same time, the rayoshnik occupies the intermediate place between verse and prose: usually the tales (skaz) written in rayoshnik are, strictly speaking, rhymed prose, rather than verse.This applies both to direct folklore quotations and to folklore and literary experiments. The article attempts to correlate the poetics of Viktor Pul’kin’s works with the poetics of the literary tale (skaz) genre as such. The presence of folklore poetic fragments in a prosaic text seems to be largely predetermined by the poetics of the literary tale (skaz), which is characterized by an orientation towards the “living” word, stereotypes of everyday speech, and the colloquial-speech basis of traditional popular culture.

THE SQUARE AS SYMBOLIC SPACE IN A.S. PUSHKIN’s WRITING

Repetition and variation of some baseline motives and images are a hallmark of A. Pushkin’s poetic system. A comprehensive system of A. Pushkin’s writing arises due to complex and contradictory relationships of specific elements. A principle of ‘resourceful contradiction’ forms the basis for the system. The square is one of the key space images which not only unites a wide range of works (from ‘Boris Godunov’ tragedy to ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ novel) but forms a recurrent plot as well. The author of the paper demonstrates the functioning of this image and elicits its semantics by means of numerous texts. The square space in Pushkin’s works is both a death site and a place of salvation; both a place of historic resolutions and a place of historic dead end. Special attention is paid to the allusive principle which is constitutive in Pushkin’s fiction system. The image of the square is inseparable from the events of December, 14, 1825 and July, 25, 1826 in a number of works (‘The Bronze Horseman’, ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ and others).

«А благородство моё во мне унывает…»: Какой из четырех Евгениев настоящий?

The article is devoted to the analysis of four characters named Eugene (heroes of A. Kantemir’ satire, A.E. Izmailov’s novel, A. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and The Bronze Horseman), represents the initial stage in the evolution of the semantic halo of this name in Russian literature, through an onomastic prism. The study is based on a matrix that takes into account the interaction of components that make up the semantic core of the concept of "nobility": nobility of the family, adherence to external decorum, high moral qualities. The main point was to check in Russian literature for "true Eugene", possessing all the signs of nobility, genetic, external, internal. The answer turned out to be negative: the semantics of the loss of various components turns out to be a constitutional feature of the semantic halo of the name. Russian literature at the initial stage of the development of "Eugene's plot" was more likely to move away from the semantics of the name, fixing the absence of nobility in the "noble", differently approaching the description of this phenomenon. Four heroes were involved in a united plot of the evolution of the semantic halo of the name - processing from satire to tragedy.

Reese , Kevin Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions (review)

REVIEWS 557 Reese, Kevin. Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions. The Real Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. xxiv + 253 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. $109.00. Cosmology is not a conventional route into Russian literary scholarship. But, as Kevin Reese’s important new monograph argues, any apparent conventionality in the fiction of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii always screens, or prefigures, a startling inversion of reality. The brothers’ co-authored science fiction novels, most of which appeared between 1960 and 1990, unite popular appeal with ethical profundity. They enjoyed cult status among Soviet readers; they are still widely appreciated today. Andrei Tarkovskii adapted scripts by the Strugatskiis for Stalker (1979) and The Sacrifice (1986); other Russian auteur directors, including Aleksandr Sokurov and Aleksei German Sr, also based major films on the brothers’ novels. Yvonne Howells, author of the only previously published English-language monograph on the Strugatskiis (Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, New York, 1994), showed that these stories’ complex ethical systems and mythical subtexts resonate with Jewish, Christian and Gnostic beliefs. She located Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii within the same tradition of writer-philosophers as Andrei Belyi, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov. To this list of cultural luminaries in dialogue with the Strugatskiis, Reese adds Pushkin: Celestial Hellscapes opens with an epigraph cited from the latter, as does each of its eleven sections. Pushkin, Reese tells us, determines ‘the cosmology of Russian literature’, and therefore ‘[t]o ignore Pushkin in this context would be akin to writing a history of astronomy without Galileo’ (p. xvi). While almost all the Strugatskiis’ major fictions appear at least briefly, Celestial Hellscapes is primarily concerned with seven of the brothers’ most significant novels. Taken in chronological order of composition, each book is discussed in terms of its genesis, political context, the peculiarities of its narrative universe (or cosmology), and their scientific underpinnings. Reese is well-versed in the Strugatskiis’ literary inspirations (from Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kruchenykh, Maiakovskii and Aksenov); he confidently explains abstruse astrophysical references (even providing occasional diagrams). A highlight is the appendix re-interpreting the final pages of Grad obrechennyi (The Doomed City, written in 1974). The novel’s hero, Andrei, appears to be safely home, observing the star Vega from the window of his Leningrad apartment. By performing an astronomical reading of the passage, Reese proves that Vega would have been invisible to any observer at that time and latitude. Therefore, for readers with the astronomical nous to notice the discrepancy, the Strugatskiis imply that the novel’s apparently happy ending SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 558 is an illusion: Andrei cannot be in terrestrial Leningrad and is therefore still stranded in some infernal simulacrum of Earth. Similarly, Reese’s unpacking of the technical term ‘radiant’ in Piknik na obochine (Roadside Picnic, 1972) helps to illuminate the symbolism of that novel’s mysterious Zone, strewn with alien artefacts. His familiarity with physics, mathematics, science fiction and history of science allows Reese to unlock the Strugatskiis’ extensive extra-literary coding, although their literary subtexts remain essential. He reads Vtoroe nashestvie marsian (The Second Martian Invasion, 1967) in light of its obvious precursor text, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), and Piknik na obochine as a counterpart of Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman, 1833), since the protagonists of both works defy indifferent, incalculably superior powers. Chapter four, dramatically titled ‘Poincaré’s Starless Hell’, exemplifies Reese’s interdisciplinary approach. Henri Poincaré speculated in 1905 about humanity’s likely spiritual impoverishment without our view of the stars; in Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island, 1969), the Strugatskiis realized this cosmological scenario in the planet Saraksh, with its opaque atmosphere. The inhabitants of Saraksh believe they live on the inner surface of a hollow globe; their conservatism and isolationism is an obvious allegory for Brezhnev’s Russia. Unsurprisingly, Obitaemyi ostrov was heavily censored. Yet the novel’s protagonist, interstellar explorer Maksim Kammerer, is a Soviet Socialist Realist hero par excellence. As Reese suggests, the Strugatskiis did write Socialist Realism: only, on the analogy of Saraksh’s cosmologically deluded denizens, they turned the standard...

New data on the granite pedestal of the monument to Peter the Great “The Bronze Horseman” in Saint Petersburg

In order to expand and popularize knowledge about the stone decoration of Saint Petersburg, we present new data on the mineralogy and petrography of the famous Thunder-Stone, the parts of which were the basis for the monument to Peter the Great – the legendary “Bronze Horseman”. In the course of studying geological documentation of the monument's granite base, we examined the mineral composition and internal structure of granite, as well as the fragments of a pegmatite vein and veinlets found in it. 25 single-mineral samples were collected from the available micro-scaled shear fractures within the pedestal surface and studied by electron microscopy, electron probe and X-ray phase analysis. It was established that K-Na feldspar in the granite composition was represented by microcline, whereas micas were represented by annite-siderophyllite and muscovite. Accessory minerals included monazite, xenotime, thorite, zircon, rutile, apatite, fluorite, Ti-, Nb-, Ta-bearing minerals, uranium phosphates. The presence of topaz is characteristic of pegmatites. The revealed structural and textural features of four granite boulders in the monument pedestal, as well as mineralogical and chemical composition of their rock-forming and accessory minerals, showed the similarity of this rock to Precambrian biotite-muscovite granites and topaz-containing pegmatites (stockscheiders) of the late formation phase of the Vyborg rapakivi granite massif. The research results are considered as the basis for further geological and mineralogical study of the Thunder-Stone origin and determining the place of its separation from the primary source.