Bronze Horseman Research Articles

PETER THE GREAT IN THE FOLKLORE LEGENDS OF THE 19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURIES: PLOTS, MOTIFS, GENRE PROBLEM

Peter the Great is one of the most popular characters in the folk prose of the Russian North. His sojourns in thinly populated and inaccessible places had left a noticeable mark in the people's memory. The first tales about him were written in the mid-18th century. Researchers define the genre of these works in different ways. They are classified as folklore, legends, fairy tales, anecdotes, stories about royal favors. The main motifs they contain are release from work, communication with ordinary people, treats, presenting with a caftan, coat, cloth, money, infliction and compensation for losses. They often contain the motif of Peter the Great's recognition of the enemy's superiority over himself in strength, ingenuity, resourcefulness, navigation, carpentry, making bast shoes, etc. As a rule, the plots of folklore stories are a convoluted mix of motifs from works of different genres. Some of them have magical significance: a miraculous dream, signs, the fulfillment of a prediction, the uncovering of relics, magical punishment, the petrification of Peter the Great in the monument (The Bronze Horseman), etc. A feature characteristic of folklore history is the multiplicity and ambiguity of their genre manifestations. Oral stories about Peter the Great are historically unreliable: the narrator knows a fact in the most general sense, and it is subsequently comprehended in accordance with popular ideas about power. The Tsar is recognizable as a historical person, but he acts in the genre paradigm of a cultural hero. Historical legends about Peter the Great characterize the formation and development of the folk poetic myth of a just tsar who values the common people, lives in the interests of the state, and is concerned about the future of Russia.

TROMPLEJSKA BIĆA I TERATOLOŠKI KONCEPT UMETNOSTI

This paper is about ontological bivalent heroes, named „Trompe l’oeil” beings. In the sense of an optical illusion, the term „Trompe l’oeil” is taken from the fine arts. Starting from revived statues and revived portraits in the literature, we highlighted their „trompe l’oeil” traits: alert- ness, ambivalence, and liminality. We have made a catalogue of works in which revived beings appear: Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and Stone Guest, The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac, La Venus d’Ille by Prosper Merimee, The Oval Portrait by Poe, The Portrait by Gogol, The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, The Marble Killer by Vojislav Ilić. In these works, we focused on the teratological concept of art and the understanding of the artist as a monster that gives birth to a monster.

Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading Under Lenin and Stalin by Megan Swift

Reviewed by: Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading Under Lenin and Stalin by Megan Swift James H. McGavran III (bio) Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading Under Lenin and Stalin. By Megan Swift. University of Toronto Press, 2020. Megan Swift’s study examines the ways in which illustrated editions produced in the early to mid-Soviet period (during Lenin’s and then Stalin’s rule, 1917–1953) reinterpreted and recontextualized verbal texts of the past for new audiences of children and young people. Illustrations themselves functioned, in Swift’s formulation, “as the visual articulation of new book art, but also as an important agent in repurposing the works of the past, reorienting them towards the child reader, mediating the past to signal and connect with political and cultural themes of the day” (5). Accordingly, Swift is interested less in the relationship between word and image in the abstract, or even in any particular illustrated edition— ”Picturing the Page” may in fact be a misleading title—and more in the way that relationship changed over time and in response to political and ideological pressure from the Soviet authorities. This somewhat narrow and unusual focus on illustrations as mediators between old material and young readers is simultaneously the source of the book’s greatest strengths and, at times, a disappointing limitation. The end result, however, is an absorbing, well-researched, and beautifully illustrated cultural history of a handful of texts that also addresses readers’ changing reactions to them, educators’ approaches to teaching them, and the Soviet leadership’s often fickle attitude toward them. The book features high-quality grayscale reproductions throughout (83 in 176 pages of text) and sixteen color plates grouped together in the middle of the book. Many of these images, unearthed by Swift in various rare books collections and archives, are reprinted here for the first time since the 1920s or 1930s; it is heartening and by no means to be taken for granted that a study centered on illustration has so successfully and intuitively incorporated its visual material. Again, one might quibble that the vast majority of the book’s images concern the “picture” more than the “page,” and that the vital question of the interaction of verbal text and graphics (at the level of layout, that is) is sidelined, but this was clearly Swift’s choice as a scholar. [End Page 348] A more serious criticism concerns her claim, in the introduction, that she offers “close readings of texts, analysis of book art, and commentary on cultural history” and shows “how each illuminates and complicates the other” (5). In fact, the book provides nothing that can properly be called close reading, and Swift’s engagement with the verbal texts she considers is generally limited to plot summary and brief discussion of prominent themes and critical interpretations. Obviously, to comment meaningfully and specifically on the texts of fairytales, Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” and the gargantuan Anna Karenina (to name just three of her case studies) would have greatly complicated Swift’s task and expanded her manuscript, but the scope of her study might have been more accurately defined in the introduction; there are, moreover, a few chapters where more information on the text of the work under consideration would have been welcome. Swift’s subtitle points to another distinction that plays a central role in defining the scope of her research and argument: the distinction between “illustrated children’s literature” and “illustrated children’s reading.” The former Swift defines as being “designed for and consumed by the child reader,” while the latter includes literature originally written and published for adults that was illustrated and reprinted for a younger audience during the Soviet era (8). On this definition, two of the book’s three parts address “illustrated children’s reading”: Part I looks at fairytales by Pushkin and Petr Ershov (Ershov’s tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” could certainly be called children’s literature, but both these works were conscious stylizations—literary emulations of the oral tradition of folklore), and Part II concerns illustrated Soviet editions of emphatically adult-oriented nineteenth-century classics by Pushkin and Tolstoy. Part III examines picture books...

ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ СЮЖЕТА И МОТИВЫ РОМАНА «ЧЕВЕНГУР» В РАССКАЗЕ ПЛАТОНОВА «РЕКА ПОТУДАНЬ»

The relevance of the article is determined by the researcher of the semantic poetics of Platonov’s story “Potudan River”. We carry out an analytical review of the lifetime criticism and articles of modern researchers about the story, on the basis of which we formulate the purpose of the study, due to the need for a new approach to the interpretation of the work and the identification of the principles of its poetics. The novelty of the article is determined by the identification of the multilayered symbolism of the title of the story, which allows to establish the insufficiency of the conclusions that the content of the “Potudan River” is limited to the family theme. At the level of micropoetics we reveal symbolic details that connect the content of the story with the motive of love for the distant, medical and construction subjects and revealing the planetary scale of the author’s thinking. For the first time, it was established that Platonov’s story “Potudan River” was written based on part of the plot of the novel “Chevengur” – the love story of Alexander Dvanov and Sonya Mandrova. We show that the heroes of the story “Potudan River” Nikita Firsov, Lyuba Kuznetsova and Nikita’s father are doubles of the characters in the novel “Chevengur” by Sasha Dvanov, Sonya Mandrova, and Zakhar Pavlovich. The connection of the image of Lyuba with the archetype of the bride is considered. The paper reveals for the first time the intertextual connections of the story “Potudan River” with the poem “The Bronze Horseman” and the novel in verse “Eugene Onegin” by A. Pushkin, in the texts of which the writer found material for modeling the ordinary fate of the hero. Multi-level connections of the content of the story “Potudan River” with Platonov’s artistic world, which is a complete metatext, are found, which opens up new opportunities for determining the role of the editing technique and the principles of returning to the plots and motives of the works of the 1920s, as well as their transformation in the writer’s work of the 1930s.

The Language and Mythology of The City in The Lyrics by Alexander Blok: The Case Study of Russian Language

The urban text is of particular importance in the development of the meta-plot of the second volume of Blok's humanization trilogy. The correlation of the language and mythology of the city with the symbol of the elements implies the deployment of the destructive component of the elements. The symbolic images of the Serpent, the bronze horseman as well as sunset symbolism become the meaning-and structure-forming centre. The analysis of the city's mythology and linguistic features in the context of the second volume of Blok's lyrics makes it possible to trace the development of the general meta-plot and, at the same time, to identify the specific features of the functioning of the mythology under study. The sense-forming dominants determine the specifics of the chronotopic and symbolic-associative deployment of mythologemes. The movement of light symbols in the structure of the second volume makes it possible to consider the transformation of the primary system of symbols that define the Blok's meta-plot.

Метафора как основной элемент дискурса

The article deals with the relationship between metaphor and discourse. The metaphor is characterized as the main element of discourse. In the analysis, the emphasis is on its understanding by Bakhtin, when the discourse appears as a “whole utterance”, as a “unit of verbal communication”, which has not meaning, but “meaning related to value – truth, beauty, etc. – and requires a reciprocal understanding which includes an assessment.” According to these positions, on the material of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman”, the works of S. Dovlatov, the works of P. Florensky and others it is proved that the metaphor is a living phenomenon, that “metaphor is a paradigm,” it, “like rapids on a river, makes the recipient's mind boil” (P. Ricoeur). A metaphor is examined as a means of enriching the productivity of philosophical thinking, and it can be a “body of philosophy” (T. Adorno).

«Окно в Европу» в культурной памяти: метаморфозы фронтирной метафоры

Статья посвящается проблеме конструирования представлений о петровской эпохе при помощи метафоры «окно в Европу». Данная метафора с момента своего появления означала преодоление культурных границ между Россией и Европой, разрушенных реформаторской деятельностью Петра I. Она отражала мифологическое восприятие образа российского императора, возродившего страну из небытия. Стереотипное восприятие России после петровских реформ в Западной Европе способствовало рождению рассматриваемой метафоры, ставшей известной из сочинения Ф. Альгаротти. Его фраза, ставшая популярной, была использована А. С. Пушкиным в стихотворении «Медный всадник», в котором в поэтической форме описывается мифологизированный образ Петра I. Пушкинская метафора закрепила в коллективной памяти мифологическое восприятие петровских преобразований, как преодоление культурного фронтира между цивилизованной Европой и варварской Россией. Трансформации метафоры в различные исторические периоды не изменяли ее основных характеристик, наоборот, вариации только еще больше укореняли петровские мифы в культурной памяти. «Окно в Европу» как метафора использовалась и в положительном, и отрицательном контекстах, описывающих процесс российского и европейского взаимовлияния. В современную цифровую эпоху она продолжает оставаться актуальной. Сохранив незримую связь с образом Петра I, созданного поэтом, метафора стала эффективным инструментом конструирования прошлого.

ПОЭМА АНТОНИО МЕДЗАНОТТЕ О ПЕТЕРБУРГСКОМ НАВОДНЕНИИ И «МЕДНЫЙ ВСАДНИК»

This article offers a comparison of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and Western European poems about the St. Petersburg flood, with the focus on An tonio Mezzanotte’s poem “La inondazione di Pietroburgo avvenuta nel dì 19. Novembre 1824” (1825). Pushkin often used the same techniques as Mezzanotte, an aesthetically conservative Italian classicist poet. In the article, possible newspaper and journal sources of some episodes in both poems are identified, as well as close motifs and similar rhetorical and poetic devices. The compositional features of the two poems are compared. The Italian poem has a traditional construction in which the natural elements are opposed to the beneficial State power embodied in the Savior Sovereign. For this reason, Mezzanotte begins with the horrors of the flood and ends with a eulogy for the Emperor. In Pushkin’s “Petersburg Tale,” in which two impersonal forces (that of Nature and that of the State) oppose the fate of an individual, Peter the Great appears as an ally of the destructive elements. The Russian poem begins with a panegyric to Peter and ends with the tragic death of the main character and his loved ones.

Libretto of the G. Presgurvic’s musical «Romeo and Juliet»: author’s original source and literary translation as an interpretation of the first text

Libretto of the G. Presgurvic’s musical «Romeo and Juliet»: author’s original source and literary translation as an interpretation of the first text

МИФ И РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ В ПОВЕСТИ МАРКА ЕФЕТОВА «ПИСЬМО НА ПАНЦИРЕ»

The article analyses the multi-dimensional structure of Mark Efetov’s story “The Letter on Turtle Shell”, which combines the features of a vacation story, the elements of an adventure novel and myth. The realistic story of creating the most famous Young Pioneer camp of the USSR is supplemented with cosmogonic and evangelical myths and cultural and literary myths about Kitezh, the Blue Bird and is superimposed on the socialist realistic myth about “big family”. Defence of the Pioneer camp from fascists is considered through the lenses of the ancient heroic myth, the Crimean etiological myths about the appearance of Adalary rocks and the historical and cultural myth about miraculous escape from the enemies by jumping from the rock; the “stone sailor” story creates a new mythologeme tracing its origin to the Bronze Horseman, Bashmachkin’s ghost, the Mermaid image, etc. The current realistic story is interpreted through the prism of the solar myth and the author’s neo-myth.

From the New Word to the True Word: The Bronze Horseman Subtext of Crime and Punishment

It has become obligatory in Crime and Punishment scholarship to define Raskolnikov's “schism” (raskol), which readers generally attribute to the conflict between intellect/spirit or selfishness/suffering. Many read Part One of the novel as a chart of the hero's divided psyche; indeed, the schizoid path he cuts through Petersburg reads like a roadmap of the battle between rationality and compassion. A reading informed by the novel's position in the Petersburg literary tradition does not invalidate this interpretation, but rather helps to contextualize it: as this paper demonstrates, the schism's roots are actually textual ones, extending back to the iconic roles established by Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman, the tradition's foundational text. In Pushkin's poem, the world‐building words of Peter the Great (“From here we will threaten the Swede, / Here a city will be founded”) instantly take shape in cast‐iron and granite, while those of the poor clerk Evgenii (“Somehow I will build for myself / A humble and simple refuge”) remain forever unrealized. In contrast to Evgenii, the archetypal “inarticulate” little man of the Petersburg tradition, Raskolnikov strives to fully control language: he has actually taken up the pen, written what he terms a “new word” (novoe slovo) and then taken steps (730 of them, to be exact) to actualize that word through the murder of the pawnbroker, a crime explicitly likened to Peter's own “crime” of hacking a window through to the West. The zigzag course that Raskolnikov carves as he alternately steps toward and recoils from the idea of murder may be profitably interpreted in light of this primal split between Peter, controller of word and nature, and Evgenii, voiceless victim of the State. An analysis of Raskolnikov's impressions of and engagement with Peter's city in the moments immediately before the murder and in the days just following it highlights this struggle between the hero's two sides.

«МЕДНЫЙ ВСАДНИК» А. С. ПУШКИНА: ПОВЕСТЬ В ОБХОД ПРОЗЫ

The article analyses the genre peculiarity of A. S. Pushkin’s Petersburg narrative “The Bronze Horseman”. Contributing to previous studies the authors have identified that in this narrative, Pushkin avoided naturalistic description of everyday life matters. According to the poet, description of everyday life has no artistic content, that’s why Pushkin made it dependent on the ode and vision genre forms. The poetical form of the narrative approaching it to a poem helped to achieve the effect. The paper points out that Gogol’s Petersburg narratives, contrary to “naturalistic school” of the 1840s, continue Pushkin’s tradition to sideline the description of everyday life matters.

Tradition and intertext in S.N.Durylin’s play Don-Juan

The article analyzes the previously unexplored play by S.N.Durylin Don Juan (1908), which is important for identifying the writer’s creative establishment. Durylin’s innovation in the interpretation of the archetypical plot about Don Juan is considered. Following A. S.Pushkin and in dispute with him, Durylin creates a new version of how we can interpret the hero. The author first introduces the image of the Bright Maiden as the protagonist of the play about Don Juan. In such a manner, he shifts the semantic accents of the text: this plot is not about retribution, like Pushkin’s, but rather about the forgiveness of the hero by the Light Virgin. The marker for this conceptual bias is the replacement of the statuary characters. Durylin has a Statue of the Light Maiden, not a Commander. The interpretation of the famous plot is shown in the context of the Silver Age of Russian literature. In pursuit of his beloved, he is ready to sacrifice his most precious life. The figure of Don Juan, frozen on a horse before the precipice, beyond which the expanse of the sea is revealed, undoubtedly evokes in his readers’ memory the image of the bronze horseman with the entire complex of eschatological meanings actualized not only by Blok, but also by other symbolists. In this image and its almost statuary completion, Durylin indisputably creates an artistic forecast of the historical future, foreboding the discontinuity of the foundations of Russian life.

Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts by Kathleen Scollins

Reviewed by: Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts by Kathleen Scollins Lev Nikulin Kathleen Scollins. Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2017. xiii + 278 pp. ISBN 9781618115836 (e-book), ISBN 9781618115829 (cloth) St. Petersburg, writes Kathleen Scollins, is uniquely beholden to the Word; spoken into life by Peter on the site of a (discursively constructed) emptiness, it appeared as a city without history, where "mythology rushe[d] in to fill out the missing narrative" (xiv). In this innovative and insightful approach to five canonical works, Scollins analyzes the texts that proliferated in Peter's new, semi-mythical city, analyzing the function of verbal expression in the "early Petersburg texts" of Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. Scollins's attention to detail, richness of sources, and incisive close readings do not fail to impress throughout. To call her discussion and references wide-ranging would be an understatement: a reader who picks up her volume expecting "merely" to learn about Pushkin, Gogol, and the Petersburg text (each a major topic in its own right) may be surprised to also encounter topics as diverse as Pushkin's interest in Hebrew (10) and an 1829 article in The Moscow Herald arguing that the human face and body is encoded, via divine inspiration, into ancient alphabets (186). What is doubly impressive is that the many texts and parallels Scollins brings to her study are convincingly relevant and even come to feel indispensable. Scollins writes that "Peter's defining act assumed mythologized form almost instantly in the national psyche" (xvi). A proliferation of Petersburg texts arose in response to this act of sacralization, their protagonists not only inhabiting but engaging in dialogue with Peter's city. This would later give rise to the theory of the Petersburg Text, represented by scholars such as semiotician Vladimir Toporov; this field receives an excellent treatment in the introduction of Scollins's book (xxi–xxvii). In her corrective to the existing models, Scollins aims to reveal "the linguistic origins of the Petersburg mythos and reinstate the creative Word as the basis and unifying principle of the Petersburg Text" (xxviii). She focuses her readings on the conflicts enacted on the Petersburg stage by the protagonists of Pushkin and Gogol. Scollins brings in five different "subtexts" in order to read them in parallel with the main texts, creating five text pairings, one for each chapter and major work. This structuring decision does much to keep the potential chaos of information in check. Readers raising their eyebrows at any of the pairings are likely to retract their skepticism by the end of the chapter in question, since Scollins's justifications invariably prove to be impeccably argued and sourced. These subtexts illuminate the conflict over language in the early Petersburg text, which is dominated by variously epic and petty battles between "fathers"—the descendants of Peter, exemplified by figures as dissimilar as the imposing stroitel´ chudotvornyi (wonderworking builder) of The Bronze [End Page 235] Horseman and the brash tailor Petrovich of "The Overcoat"—and the wayward "sons," the calculating Germanns and pitifully protesting Akaky Akakyeviches, who dare to raise a challenge to the verbal order of Peter's city. Chapter 1 reads The Bronze Horseman through the Book of Job. After a history of Pushkin's engagement with the biblical story (7–13), the showdown between defiant Evgeny and the thundering statue is analyzed as a response to the Job plot and as a verbal battle between Creator and subject. Both texts are "bound by their refusal to offer an unambiguous message" (3), failing to straightforwardly praise or condemn the autocrats or the challengers. Evgeny's protest is dangerous, carrying "enough power to destabilize an empire" (36), and indeed, he has the literal last word: Evgeny "effectively appropriate[s] the creative logos from Peter" (37). This particular challenge is struck down—but its disruption of Peter's verbal order paves the way for future rebels. In chapter 2, Scollins turns to a savvier upstart who nevertheless suffers a similarly painful defeat: Germann, the ambitious parvenu of "The Queen of Spades." Germann is a beneficiary of Peter's new system of social...

Отражение экспрессивного звучания стиховой речи в художественном переводе

Abstract The present paper gives a positive answer to the question about the possibility of adequate poetic translation. It presents extracts of Russian poetry that contain various phonic devices (e.g. rhythmic variations, sound repetitions, vowel alternations, consonant clusters, etc.) which, in addition to other verbal means, make up the peculiar aesthetic value of a poetic work. The Hungarian translations of the extracts from Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Eugene Onegin, Tyutchev’s Autumn Evening, and Tvardovsky’s Vassili Tyorkin, made by the prominent poets and translators Lajos Áprily, Árpád Galgóczy, and Lőrinc Szabó, masterly reproduce the phonic qualities of the Russian texts, and prove the validity of the Pushkinian claim on the “alliance of sound, thought, and sentiment” in lyric poetry.

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

"The word of gratitude to the Academy of arts" M. V. Lomonosov and "the Bronze horseman" A. S. Pushkin description of urban space

"The word of gratitude to the Academy of arts" M. V. Lomonosov and "the Bronze horseman" A. S. Pushkin description of urban space

Andrej Belyj à propos du rythme du Cavalier de bronze

The article is devoted to the analysis of Andrej Belyj’s book Rythm as Dialectics and ‘The Bronze Horseman’ (1929) and its numerous connections with Belyj’s early articles and his novel Petersburg (1913). Rythm as Dialectics purported to present Pushkin as a revolutionary poet. Belyj tried to support this argument with his statistical analysis of Pushkin’s verse which contained numerous errors. Belyj must have hoped that this transformation of The Bronze Horseman into a revolutionary work could have a positive impact on his reputation, demonstrating the ideological usefulness of his studies of verse for the Soviet state. Moreover, Belyj’s research produces an impression that not only Pushkin’s poem, but Bely’s novel Petersburg was deeply revolutionary in spirit. The comparison of this research with the novel sheds new light on both the former, and the latter.

Der Eherne Reiter: Politischer Barock und russische Revolution zwischen Puškin, Belyj und Benjamin

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.

«ПЕТЕРБУРГСКИЙ ТЕКСТ» ТАТЬЯНЫ ТОЛСТОЙ (мотивный комплекс рассказа «Река Оккервиль»)

In the article devoted to the analysis of “The Okkervil River”, a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya, a variety of motifs are distinguished and interpreted. Those refer the reader to the main motifs of Russian classical literature, however, their semantics is reconsidered by the contemporary writer and presented with different connotations. Saint Petersburg chronotope is analyzed, its simplification and shifts of spatial frameworks are considered. The ironic depreciation of the image of Saint Petersburg – Leningrad sets a playful (derisive) tone of the narration about the “little hero”, Simeonov, a descendant of poor Eugene from “The Bronze Horseman” by Pushkin, as well as Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s “little heroes”. One of the leading motifs of the narration is that of a circle, closely interacting with the image-motif of the luring “silver voice”. It allows for revealing musical allusions, encouraging the development of the “romancing” intertextuality of the story.