Petersburg is an amazing city that has left a big mark in Russian history. It has varied and incredibly strongly influenced our life, our society! And, of course, the image of Petersburg inspired many Russian writers and poets. Words geniuses such as Gavriil Derzhavin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lomonosov, Konstantin Batyushkov, Mikhail Lermontov often used the theme of St. Petersburg in their works, but none other than Alexander Pushkin created the complete and integral image of the city. He gave St. Petersburg the power of independent existence, described the spiritual beginning of the city, living its own life, now calm and quiet, then full of distress and suffering. The magnificent creation of Peter the Great, sprawled beautifully and menacingly on bones and swamps, exists by its own laws, and no one can fight its mighty element.
Pushkin "The Bronze Horseman". The image of St. Petersburg
The poem begins with the history of the city. Previously, water and wind reigned in its place, but it was here that Peter the Great decided to lay a new capital. Petersburg ascends "magnificently, proudly," out of spite of nature itself. And now, it seems, there is no small reminder of the chaos that once reigned here: "bridges hung over the waters", "Neva dressed in granite." The image of St. Petersburg in the poem The Bronze Horseman demonstrates the triumph of man over natural forces, but this impression is misleading: the city during a flood is more likely an accomplice of the elements than a winner.
Riot of water
Personified in the image of the Neva, the water first appears before the reader as a defeated element: "Neva rushed about like a patient." Then the author depicts her in the image of a beast that destroys and sweeps everything in its path. The flood damage is similar to the consequences of a “meaningless and merciless” riot. So the fate of people is dependent on the elements. With blind indiscrimination, she takes away the most precious person from Eugene, the hero of the poem The Bronze Horseman. The image of Petersburg now seems to him merciless, destructive. Eugene’s life loses all meaning; he cannot cope with misfortune and goes crazy. This hero reflects the fateful doom and regularity of fate and other "little people", whose existence is entirely dependent on the geopolitical aspirations of the authorities and the king. When Peter the Great decided to establish a new capital, he thought about the people and the state as a whole, but not about each specific person.
So, the image of St. Petersburg in the poem "The Bronze Horseman" reveals one of the components - the "little man", humiliated and dependent.
Peter the Great
The theme of the city is inextricably linked with its creator. In the introduction, Alexander Pushkin does not name the king by name, but uses the pronoun “he”: “He stood on the shore of the desert waves, the great thoughts ...” Petersburg was built by the sole will of Peter by the labor of many nameless workers. Therefore, the image of the king is present all the time on the pages of the poem "The Bronze Horseman". Description of St. Petersburg is closely intertwined with the figure of the ruler. Here, cast in bronze, during the flood, he observes the atrocities that the Neva is doing, even as if approving them: “He stands with his hand out Idol on a bronze horse”. Even in the name of the monument, Pushkin purposely omits the name of the tsar and calls him either the “Bronze Horseman” or “the powerful sovereign of fate”. So, the image of Peter the Great looms ominous, gloomy.
City of Living Statues
When creating the poem, Pushkin used various legends associated with St. Petersburg. For example, there was a myth that the ghost of Paul the First wanders in the Mikhailovsky Castle . So in the blurred brain of Eugene, the ghost of the king also arises, but only Peter the Great. And the monument “The Bronze Horseman” in St. Petersburg is like a revived statue and becomes the embodiment of the ruthless will and unlimited power of the sovereign. Tsar Peter appears as an unattainable and incomprehensible deity, mighty and formidable, and Petersburg itself - a city mysterious and mysterious, destroying people and suppressing their will.
Duality of the image
At the same time, Petersburg in the poem The Bronze Horseman is revealed not only in an ominous, but also in a positive halo. This is a beautiful, majestic city full of graceful forms, striking magnificence. It is full of graceful outlines: "huge slender palaces and towers", "rich marinas", which "ships from all over the earth" strive for ... Among all the unique features of St. Petersburg, Pushkin's amazing descriptions of white nights cannot be noted. For this, the author finds unique comparisons, uses perfectly honed words: “Your thoughtful nights have a translucent dusk, moonless shine ...” I must say that Pushkin’s contemporaries were lucky, because in those days the architectural appearance of the city was much more perfect. You can only envy people who saw with their own eyes that beautiful and mysterious Petersburg, and even could recognize it in the verses that just came out from the pen of Alexander Pushkin.
For us, the image of Petersburg, in the poem "The Bronze Horseman" described by the poet, drowned in the "legends of antiquity", and now only his creations serve as a guide to the city during the life of Pushkin. Contemporaries of Alexander Sergeyevich claimed that he was much brighter than other writers, was able to recreate the appearance of an amazing city on the Neva. We can only agree with this.
The true being of the Northern capital
The image of Petersburg in the poem The Bronze Horseman is drawn to the reader in a diverse, at the same time beautiful and terrifying way. Pushkin reflected in it both the material and spiritual life of the city. In the unsurpassed poems Petersburg appears different, but the outlines that are familiar and close to today's residents of the Northern capital are guessed in everything: the “cast-iron fence” of the river, the “marvelous lattices” of the Summer Garden, the “Admiralty Needle” ... And the Neva is always present in the description of the city as something inseparable like the heart of Petersburg.
Instead of a conclusion
The poem “The Bronze Horseman” would not have been complete without the spiritual completion of the image of North Palmyra, shown at different times of the day, year, in its different parts: in the suburbs and in the center. The reader sees in the work the ambiguous Petersburg: rich and poor, raging and silent, menacing and beautiful. The poem reflects the difficulties of the birth of this city, the tyrannical nature of the ruler who created it, the slavery of the people.
In essence, Petersburg is a city on human bones. And all these features were perfectly revealed by Pushkin in his brilliant work. Alexander Sergeyevich made the whole world out of St. Petersburg, and anyone who wanted to say his own word about this city should have taken it into account.