From the church porch the widow fairly flew;
Her heart was beating with a sense of doom.
At home, no sign of cake or smell of stew –
And no Mavrusha anywhere. She entered
280Her own room – horror, as her searches ended!
XXXVI
She saw her cook, before Parasha’s mirror,
Seated gravely upright on a chair,
Shaving. She screamed – and fell upon the floor.
The cook, with lathered cheek, leapt over her
(An indication of a downright boor),
Ran through the hall, the porch, with hidden face
And in an instant vanished from the place.
XXXVII
Parasha came back home a little later.
290‘Mama dear, what’s happened?’ – ‘Pàshenka!
That cook of ours, Mavrushka …’ – ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m shaken up still … Was it really her?
Before the mirror … All her face in lather …’ –
‘I can’t make sense of this – what’s happened here?
And where’s Mavrusha?’ – ‘Oh, she was a bandit!
I caught her shaving! … Just like my dear man did!’
XXXVIII
Here did a blush infuse Parasha’s face?
I must admit, I haven’t any notion,
And of Mavrusha there has been no trace
300Since then! She never took remuneration
And had no time for serious pillages.
Who followed her in her domestic station?
Again, I cannot say. Don’t think me rude
If I now choose the moment to conclude.
XXXIX
– That’s all? You can’t be serious! – Yes, I am.
– So that’s where your ottava rima leads!
All that fuss turns out to be a sham,
Blazing a trail, boasts of poetic deeds!
This was the way, you thought, to win the palm?
310You found no better tale to meet your needs?
And can’t we have a moral at the end?
– Well, no … well, yes, all right; if you’ll attend …
XL
Now then, here’s the moral of my tale:
To hire an unwaged cook is dangerous.
I furthermore find anyone born male
Wearing a skirt bizarre and profitless:
There’ll always be a time he cannot fail
To shave his beard, and nothing could go less
With female nature, don’t you think … Behind
320This tale of mine that’s all you’re going to find.
1830
The Bronze Horseman
A Petersburg Tale
This last of Pushkin’s poemy takes his characteristic narrative vehicle in verse, the iambic tetrameter, to a final stage of development, achieving a level of density, stylistic complexity and range of reference that places it at the summit of Russian poetry alongside Eugene Onegin. (See Introduction for further commentary.) Here the bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) by the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, unveiled in the centre of St Petersburg in 1782, which has become the emblem of St Petersburg, is the core presence in the poem, merging into the persona of Peter himself.
Pushkin’s subtitle, ‘A Petersburg Tale’, is significant. In his day the word povest’, ‘tale’, meant a Romantic verse tale with exotic setting. A non-Romantic contemporary city setting subverted the term at the outset, bringing the poem into the realm of everyday reality. But Pushkin, typically, has it both ways, first in the prologue, a paean of praise for Peter’s creation of the new capital city in 1703 on a desolate, un-human-friendly spot on the Gulf of Finland in order to ‘chastise the Swede’ (line 12), and then in the dramatic human story of a defiant but powerless victim of the catastrophic 1824 flood. While of course Pushkin had profound admiration for Peter the Great as a creative force, he was fully conscious of his destructive side. ‘He despised humanity perhaps even more than Napoleon,’ he had noted in 1822, long before conceiving The Bronze Horseman (quoted in Binyon, p. 436). This poem pits two principles irreconcilably against each other – unlimited state power and the claims of individual human lives. A manuscript sketch by Pushkin might be taken as some indication of what he predicted or dreamt of for the future of Russia: a drawing of Falconet’s horse rearing on its rock without its rider (reproduced in A. S. Pushkin, vol. 3, p. 299).
It was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s bitter criticism of Peter the Great and the Russian nation, however, that prompted Pushkin to write the poem. A poem sequence within Mickiewicz’s epic drama Forefathers’ Eve (forming Part III of the work, ‘Digression’), completed in 1832, contained sharp polemic against Russian autocracy, the creation of St Petersburg, and the Russian people for accepting their harsh treatment. Although always annoyed by foreigners’ criticism of his country, Pushkin usually largely shared their views, as he did in this case. But in his poem he sets out to put a counter-case. He parodies certain passages in Mickiewicz, such as the latter’s description of a Russian army review, ‘Monotonously, side by side they stand, / Like horses lined up at a trough to eat’ and ‘To mark the troops among this infantry / One needs a naturalist’s ability / To glance at squirming swamp-worms as they pass, / Distinguish them and place each in its class’ (translated in Lednicki, pp. 123 and 124). In his prologue Pushkin transmutes this depiction into a description of the magnificent ordered beauty of military formations. In his poem ‘The Monument of Peter the Great’ in Forefathers’ Eve, Mickiewicz gives Falconet’s equestrian statue the appearance of ‘a maddened beast’ about to fall over a precipice; Pushkin’s famous image of the statue presents Peter as a master of destiny who ‘reared up Russia / Upon the brink of the abyss’ (lines 392–3).
While he worked on The Bronze Horseman in his miraculously creative autumn of 1833, Pushkin was also immersed in Shakespeare, finishing his reworking of Measure for Measure as a narrative poem just before making a fair copy of his new poem. The Tempest has been seen as a significant Shakespearean intertext, with Peter a ‘contradictory figure of creation and destruction’, his foundation of a city so vulnerable to the elements being equivalent to Prospero’s conjuring up of a shipwrecking storm (Lednicki, p. 104).
The poem offended the susceptibilities of the tsar and officialdom. Only the prologue, with one short passage omitted, was published in Pushkin’s lifetime (in 1834, in the popular journal Library for Reading), and the first complete edition of 1841 was prepared in a version acceptable to Tsar Nicholas I, omitting Yevgeny’s defiant confrontation with the bronze statue and with some emollient rewriting by Pushkin’s posthumous editor, Vasily Zhukovsky. A complete and authoritative text was not published until a comprehensive monograph edition edited by N. V. Izmailov was produced by Nauka in Leningrad (now the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg) in 1978.
PREFACE
The event described in this tale is based on fact. Details of the flood are taken from journals of the time. Those interested may consult the account by V. N. Berkh. – A. P.
PROLOGUE
Beside the watery waste He stood,
And gave himself to lofty thought.
Before his far-fixed gaze the river
Vastly stretched; a humble boat
Strove on it in lone endeavour.
Against each mossy, marshy bank
Here and there low huts showed black,
The shelters of the wretched Finn;
The ancient forest, dark and dank,
10Perpetual stranger to the sun,
Sounded around.
He pondered well:
‘From here we shall chastise the Swede.
Here we shall raise a citadel:
Our haughty neighbour shall take heed.
Here we have been ordained to hew
A window on to Europe; new
Shall be our hold upon the sea.
Through unknown waters, every state
Shall send its ships to us to trade,
20And we shall toast the open sea.’
A century passed. Out of the forest,
Out of the marshy waste, the fort
Grew to a city of the fairest,
Jewel and wonder of the north;
Where once the Finnish fisherman,
Neglected foster-son of nature,
Standing on the low-lying bank,
Cast upon the nameless water
His time-worn sweep-seine, now along
30The teeming banks, in stately masses,
Harmonious rows of towers and palaces
Greet the nations’ ships that throng
From every corner of the earth
For moorings at the quays of wealth;
The Neva is arrayed in granite,
Bridges overhang its waters;
The art of skilful cultivators
Has clad in green the isles that span it;
Before the younger capital
40Old Moscow loses all her lustre,
Like the dowager in purple
Before the newly crowned tsaritsa.
I love you, Peter’s grand creation,
I love your stern and stately face,
The Neva in majestic motion,
Its stretching shoreline’s granite grace
And railings of ornate cast-iron,
I love your meditative night
And moonless gleam so bright that I can
50Read and write without a light,
The streets with not a soul in sight,
The slumbering mass of every building,
The brilliant Admiralty spire
Clear to the eye, and, not admitting
Darkness to the golden sky,
One twilight hurries to relieve another,
Allowing night a mere half-hour.
I love your stubborn winter’s rigour,
Your motionless sharp air and frost,
60The sledges running on the river,
Girls’ faces brighter than the rose,
The glitter and the din of balls,
The goblet’s overflowing foam
When the carousing hour falls
And the punch’s pale blue flame.
I love the warlike animation
Upon the playing field of Mars,
The ranks of infantry and horse
Meticulously in formation,
70The colours swaying in harmony,
Tattered from their victory,
The glint of bronzen helmets holed
In battles recent and of old.
I love, O martial capital,
The thunder of your citadel
When the empress of the north
Gives the imperial house a son,
Or one more victory is won,
Or when the Neva carries off
80Its cracked blue ice towards the sea,
Scenting the coming spring in glee.
Peter’s glorious city, stand
Unyielding as the Russian land,
Let the conquered element
Find respite with you in the end;
Let the Finnish waters curb
Their profitless hostility,
Their age-old malice not disturb
Peter through all eternity!
90A time of rare catastrophe
Is vivid in the memory still …
And it is what, my friends, shall give
The matter of my narrative.
Sad is the tale I have to tell.
Part One
Over murky Petrograd
Breathed November cold and hard.
With thunderous waves the river Neva
Struck against its stately railings,
Cast about in restless flailings
100Like someone in a raging fever.
It was late and it was dark;
The rain beat down, became beserk,
The wind set up a dismal whine.
Our youthful hero chose this time
To visit friends and then come home:
Yevgeny we shall have his name …
It has a pleasant sound; besides,
My pen first knew it long ago.
His family name we need not know;
110Although it may be one that rides
High in the annals of our land,
Thanks to the pen of Karamzin,
Now it has sunk to mere has-been,
Forgotten by both low and grand.
Our hero does some kind of work,
Lives in Kolomna, shuns the great,
And in his mind no memories lurk
Of bygone days or of the dead.
And so, late coming home, Yevgeny
120Threw off his coat and went to bed.
But long he lay awake, for many
And rousing thoughts ran through his head …
That he was poor, that only work
Could bring him independence, honour –
If only God would one day make
Him sharper-witted, earn more money;
That some there were, well-fed, bone-lazy,
Not clever – their life was so easy! –
While it was two years altogether
130That he had laboured. What foul weather,
He thought too; it had not abated –
With such a swiftly rising river
They’d take the bridges off the Neva;
And so he might be separated
From his Parasha for, who knew,
Longer than a day or two.
Yevgeny, with a heartfelt sigh,
Turns to poetic reverie:
Get married? Well … why not? He’ll see.
140It will be hard, he’ll not deny;
However, he is young and strong,
There’s nothing he’ll refuse to try;
It certainly won’t take him long –
He’ll make a simple home one day,
And with Parasha as his wife
He will enjoy a peaceful life.
‘A year, and I’ll be on the way.
I’ll have a post – Parasha, she to
Take charge of household matters, see to
150The children’s upbringing … And so,
Until the grave lays claim to us,
Hand in hand through life we’ll go;
Our grandchildren will bury us …’
Thus he mused. And he was sad
That night; he wished the angry rain
Would beat less madly on the pane,
The wailing of the wind would fade …
He closed his sleepy eyes at last.
The next he knew, the stormy night
160Had ended; came pale dawn … Aghast
He saw the day.
With all its might
The river Neva all night long
Had strained towards the open sea
Against its savage adversary,
To prove, though, in the end, less strong …
Now people gathered all along
The riverside to watch the night’s
Aftermath – the foaming heights.
The sea-winds blowing up the gulf
170Had checked the Neva’s flow; it reared,
Forced backwards, in a mighty huff,
And all the islands disappeared.
Soon the weather grew still worse,
The angry Neva roared and swelled
And like a cauldron seethed and swirled,
As if a captive beast let loose
Fell on the city … Before it
The people flee; soon none to see –
And now the waters suddenly
180Gush into cellars underground,
Canals and hidden sluices sound –
Behold Petropolis like Triton
Appearing, waist-deep, to Poseidon.
Siege! Assault! Malicious waves
Swarm over window-sills like thieves.
Sterns o
f loose careering boats
Smash through panes. Soaked street-stall boards,
Pieces of houses, roofs and logs,
Bundles adrift from warehouse stocks,
190The worldly goods of poverty,
Coffins from a cemetery,
Parts of bridges – helter-skelter
Down the streets!
The people see
God’s anger, and the penalty.
Nothing is left now: food and shelter –
Where have they gone?
At this dark time
The late tsar ruled with glory still.
Out on the balcony he came
And, troubled, spoke. ‘It is God’s will;
200The elements no tsar can rule.’
In gloomy thought he sat; his eye
Was fixed upon calamity,
Each mighty square a rising pool
Into which new rivers streamed.
Amongst it all the palace seemed
A hapless islet. But the tsar
Through the perils of the flood,
Through the city near and far,
In due course sent his generals out
210To save the helpless from the foam,
Or else from drowning in their home.
And on that day, on Peter’s Square,
Upon an elevated porch,
Pride of a new-built mansion, where
A pair of marble lions stood watch,
Each with raised paw as if alive;
Without a hat, arms crossed, astride
One of these poor Yevgeny sat,
Fearfully pale, but not afraid
220On his account. He did not hear
The greedy waves advancing near,
Feel on his face the rain that lashed,
The squall that had removed his hat,
He did not feel his soles being splashed.
His desperate gaze was firmly set
Upon a single spot, and there
Like mountain summits, jet on jet
The furious waters clove the air –
The howling centre of the storm,
230Spewing debris in every form …
Out where – oh God! – it was most rough,
Very nearly on the gulf –
A fence, unpainted, and a willow,
A time-worn little house, a widow
There with Parasha, with his dream …
Or was this really all a dream,
Can all our life be nothing worth,
Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 17
