JOHNBAYLEY
201
marvelous and uncanny poem
The Bronze Horseman
is as much a
celebration of the great Tsar Peter, personified by his equestrian statue on
the bank of the river Neva in the city he founded, as it is a cry of pity
and protest from underneath, for the little man who only wants to
marry his sweetheart and live a quiet life. Written at the height of his
poetic maturity,
The Bronze Horseman
was not published in Pushkin's
lifetime. At the time he wrote it he was no longer
persona grata
with the
Tsar and he was well aware what disapproval the poem would incur
from the imperial censorship.
Nonetheless, Pushkin's almost obsessional interest in the figure of
Peter the Great had projected itself briefly on Nicholas as Peter's succes–
sor, and he compared the opening of Nicholas's reign with Peter's in an
early poem ("In hope of all the good and glory/ I look ahead devoid of
fear") which won only disapproval from his liberal friends, but which was
to be rapturously quoted by Dostoevsky in his encomium on the
fifteenth anniversary of Pushkin's death. Pushkin could be "used," just as
Shakespeare had come to be, by different factions and ideologies: and yet
all
Russian readers and writers tacitly acknowledge how free he in fact
remains from any connection with such things. It is his art that liberates:
the poet Blok wrote of "the gloomy roll-call of Russian tyrants and
executioners, and opposite to them one bright name - Pushkin."
Yet for Russians Pushkin touches every nerve in his country's feeling,
is central to its whole sensibility. Whereas the politics of Goethe's
Faust
are those of a model German duchy, the politics of
The Bronze Horseman
are those of a rapidly expanding and ruthless empire. And Pushkin was
never left isolated, like Dante in exile or Wordsworth after the French
Revolution, to work out a personal and compensatory vision of his
own. No wonder Russians under Stalin, or in the dark days of invasion
and terror, turned instinctively to Pushkin: the responses of his art are so
various, yet so immediate and so spontaneous. The poem in celebration
of Nicholas's accession to the throne, the tenderly impassive and mysteri–
ous poem of farewell to the Decembrists, "Arion," and the indignant
rhetoric of the ode against the European supporters of the Polish rebel–
lion, "To the Slanderers of Russia" - all possess in contrasting ways the
kind
of authority that comes not from the proper sort of ideology or
belief but from the urgent pressures of involuntary experience. If he had
really
come to terms with and become a part of the system, or if he had
succeeded in his application - made several times during his exile in
Mikhailovskoye - to go abroad into what might have become a kind of
emigration, he could not have achieved that luminous understanding
both
of power and of sympathy with the oppressed which is revealed in
The
Bronze Horseman,
in his novel
The Captain's Daughter,
