My greatest fascination with The Bronze Horsemen stems from its enormous pervading religiosity. There is something biblical about the way the city is engulfed by a flood, leaving nothing but a lone Idol in the watery desolation, futile in its passed glory.  The Bronze Horsemen seems to be an almost cautionary tale of human glory, reflecting many of the religious stories we now know today such the account of Bable and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Indeed, Russian culture has a fantastic way of walking the line between humbleness and self-glorification. The Bronze Horsemen highlights the immense majesty of Saint Petersburg as a bastion of Russian culture. Its imagery of the great bronze statue is sweeping, and the poem ends with it being the last thing standing. It embodies Russia in the sense that it remains glorious in in the face of terrible forces beyond its power to fully overcome. In the poem, such a force is the Neva river. It consumes Saint Petersburg in a fantastic way, glorifying it while bringing it to its knees. By painting the destruction of the Russian Spirit, Pushkin is idolizing it, and this reminded me of many of the other works we have encountered during this class.

First and foremost, I was reminded of the Birth of Peter I Secondary reading. It seemed to have a remarkable fascination with all the suffering and sin that had infected Russia at the time of Peter’s birth. When I first read the text, I simple wrote it off as the cultivation of a Messianic figure. But it seems a bit more complicated than that. The volume of time spent describing the ailments of Russia in this text tell me that the writer had a deep fascination with it. This is also true of the life of Theodosius reading, which more explicitly glorifies suffering in a religious sense.

Overall, perhaps it is safe to say that Russian culture has a fascination with its own suffering because it is somehow empowering. Perhaps it is safe to say that suffering in Russian culture leaves the possibility of people rising above and overcoming said suffering. But once again, this seems like an oversimplification. Indeed, the tale of Theodosius describes how the monk suffered in the flesh so that his spirit would be let free, and ultimately provided a positive portrayal of the fate of the long suffering. But Boris Godunov does no such thing.