The Bronze Horseman (poem) - Sources and Inspiration

Sources and Inspiration

The Bronze Horseman of the title was sculpted by Étienne Maurice Falconet and completed in 1782. Pushkin was not the first to feel the statue's ambiguity: in a travelogue about Petersburg in 1821, the French statesman Joseph de Maistre commented that he did not know "whether Peter's bronze hand protects or threatens".

Pushkin's poem opens with a brief foreword stating that the events he depicted are based on reality. Indeed, St Petersburg is often hit by flooding and one particularly severe flood in November 1824 provided the model for this poem.

A number of Russian poets had previously written odes to Peter I: Mikhail Lomonosov wrote "Peter the Great" in 1756–1761 and Gavrila Derzhavin wrote a 1778 ode "To Peter the Great" . There was also a literary precedent for poetry describing the city of Petersburg: Pushkin's own footnotes to "The Bronze Horseman" refer to a poem by Petr Viazemskii which includes admiring verses about the city, "Conversation on 7 April 1832" .

Pushkin was fascinated by the historical figure of Peter the Great and had mentioned him in several works before "The Bronze Horseman". Poltava (1828) is an admiring representation of the Tsar in combat with King Charles XII of Sweden and Ivan Mazepa of the Ukrainian Cossacks. The Negro of Peter the Great is an unfinished novel about Pushkin's ancestors being brought to Russia from Africa. Pushkin made considerable notes for a history of Peter the Great which show the same ambivalence as "The Bronze Horseman": Pushkin notes "Peter I had no fear of the liberty of the people and the unavoidable consequences of enlightenment.... and he held humanity in contempt, perhaps even more so than Napoleon."

Several critics have suggested that the immediate inspiration for "The Bronze Horseman" was the work of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Before beginning work on "The Bronze Horseman", Pushkin had read Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve (1823–32), which contains a poem entitled "To My Muscovite Friends", a thinly-veiled attack on Pushkin and Vasilii Zhukovskii for their failure to join the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825. Forefather's Eve contains poems where Peter I is described as a despot who created the city because of autocratic whim, and a poem mocks the Falconet statue as looking as though he is about to jump off a precipice. Pushkin's poem can be read in part as a retort to Mickiewicz, although most critics agree that its concerns are much broader than answering a political enemy.