In “The Snowstorm”, Alexander Pushkin reminds the reader that while humans may feel they have personal autonomy, outside forces are often what ends up determining the direction of their lives. Larger things like who your parents are, and the time period and place in which you are born obviously have a major effect on who you become, but it is also smaller things like the books you read or the friends you make that can end up determining big parts of your life, like who you fall in love with, or where you end up working. Pushkin uses the creeping cold of Russia’s winters and the snow that follows, as an example of this. By making the snow almost a character in the story, and showing how it unintentionally shapes the lives of Murya and Burmin, he shows how even great passion and intention can be thwarted by the weather.

The power of the weather at the beginning of this story, specifically the cold, is presented as a fact of life, an arbiter of the quotidian. At one point Murya passively accepts seeing Vladimir less because of the winter, showing how it is an enemy that can’t be beaten: “The winter came and put a stop to their meetings, but their correspondence became all the more active.” However, in other parts of the story, the cold takes a far less passive position. Pushkin shows how the winter actively affects and changes lives by anthropomorphizing it and giving it motivations and goals: “The snowstorm had not subsided; the wind blew in their faces, as if trying to stop [them]”.

All along Pushkin is showing the capacity the brutal cold has to define the perception of a human suffering in it: “But Vladimir scarcely found himself on the open road, when the wind rose and such a snowstorm came on that he could see nothing. In one minute the road was completely hidden; the landscape disappeared in a thick yellow fog, through which fell white flakes of snow; earth and sky merged into one.” This is a testament to the snows power. And it is describing more than a dramatic scene when Pushkin describes the landscape disappearing into the yellow fog, he is describing the passion of a first love disappearing into the annals of a forgotten youth.