Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is a masterpiece-the trouble is that it, like any masterpiece, has far too much worth unpacking for this humble blog post to cover. I will start with a small detail; I will enter through the servant’s door, Frol Skobeev’s coin jingling in my petticoats.

Throughout the poem, St. Petersburg is called by four different names. In the third stanza of the Prologue, it is Petra tvoren’e (creation of Peter), in the sixth stanza it is grad Petrov (city of Peter). In the first stanza of Part 1 it is Petrograd (Peter-city), in the fourth it is Petropol’ (Petropolis). With each name change, her aspect changes as well- from a strict and beautifully-ordered object of love, to the unshakeable death-knell for the elements, back to a November-kissed darkened city, and finally (and most dramatically) to ‘Triton, immersed up to the waist.’ The city is mutable and protean, stamped with Peter’s mark, yet failing to settle into one shape.

The effect of this on the reader (this reader, to be precise) is one of untethering. Pushkin gives us a poetic description of the city in the Introduction, but without a stable identity to pin it on, both the description and the city seem to escape the realm of the concrete. The city is a spatial non-sequitur, and only when the flood comes, bringing with it human tragedy and the destruction of concrete physical objects, can she be pinned down and transformed into a backdrop for small-scale grief-it is significant that St. Petersburg is given no further names in Part 2 of the poem, as Evgenii contemplates his loss and slips into madness.

Is it any wonder, then, that Petersburg has developed around itself a myth of unreality, that for Herzen it “disappears from my eyes in the fog”, unique and elusive in being “the embodiment of the general abstract notion of a capital city”? The idea of St. Petersburg being an ‘unreal city’ is not my own-it is a complex (and fascinating!) cultural trope, which we will discuss next class. It is interesting, however, to observe the small tweaks in language that can buttress this unreality-a syllable here, an allusion there, and St. Petersburg recedes into the night…*
*Read Andrei Bely’s Petersburg for this and more.