The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alexander Pushkin · Медный всадник · Петербургская повесть (A Petersburg Tale) · a narrative poem in an Introduction and two parts, with a prose foreword and five notes by the author · written at Boldino in October 1833, held back from print in Pushkin’s lifetime, and first printed in 1837 in a text altered to meet the censor · scored on the poem as Pushkin left it in 1833, restored from his manuscripts, on Pushkin’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and Oliver Elton’s English version for sense
Mode
Narrative poem: state ode and Petersburg tale in one structure, with the realist report of a poor man’s life and death
Mythos
The founder as demiurge, building a city against nature; the flood as the element’s revenge; the founder become an idol that turns and pursues the man who threatened it; the myth of Petersburg itself
Phase
From Peter on the empty shore at the founding, through the city a hundred years on, to the night and day of the flood of 7 November 1824, a year of wandering, one night on Senate Square, and a death on an islet
Presentation
Fiction in verse on historical ground; a prose foreword stating that the incident is founded on truth, an Introduction in the voice of the ode, Part One and Part Two told by a narrator who declines his hero’s surname, and five notes by the author
Register
From the Church Slavonic and high diction of the ode to the plain prose phrasing of a clerk’s hopes, the piling verbs of the flood, a broken half-line of revolt and the bare report of a burial
Scale
One clerk of Kolomna and the two women he loses, the founder and his statue, a living Tsar on a balcony, and the whole city from palace to suburb under one flood
Governing Proposition
Peter stands on an empty shore and conceives a city against the sea; a hundred years on the city stands, and the poet loves it and prays that the conquered element make its peace. Then the river rises, a poor clerk loses the girl he meant to marry and her mother’s house, goes mad, and one night threatens the bronze statue of the founder, which turns and pursues him through the city; his body is found on a waste islet and buried for God’s sake. The wager of the poem is that an ode and a tale can stand in one metre and read each other, so that the greatness of the state and its cost to one life are known together and neither is withdrawn.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“На берегу пустынных волн / Стоял он, дум великих полн”
(On the shore of the desolate waves / he stood, full of great thoughts). The founder is not named. He stands on an empty shore of swamp and water and thinks of the city he will build there, against nature, to spite a haughty neighbour, a window into Europe. Then the poem passes a hundred years, and the city stands.
Before the Introduction stands a prose foreword of a few lines. It says that the incident is founded on truth and that the details of the flood are taken from the journals of the time, and it points to V. N. Berkh’s account. After the poem come five notes by the author, one of them citing Mickiewicz’s verses on the same monument. The foreword and the notes are the poem’s apparatus, and they are weighed as such; the unit is the poem as Pushkin left it in 1833, the foreword, the Introduction, Part One, Part Two and the five notes.
Pushkin wrote it at Boldino in October 1833. Nicholas I, acting as his personal censor, marked passages for change; Pushkin would not make them, and the poem was not published in his lifetime. The Introduction appeared in 1834 as a fragment. The whole was first printed after his death, in Sovremennik in 1837, with alterations by Zhukovsky to meet the censor, and the text as Pushkin left it was later restored from his manuscripts; it is the standard text of the Academy editions, and it is the text scored here. The poem rests on three facts: the city founded in 1703, Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter on Senate Square, unveiled in 1782 on the Thunder Stone, and the flood of 7 November 1824.
Movement II
“Люблю тебя, Петра творенье”
(I love you, Peter’s creation). The narrator speaks in his own voice, and the voice is the ode’s. He loves the granite embankments, the white nights, the frost, the balls, the parades on the Field of Mars, the breaking of the Neva’s ice in spring. The catalogue is long, and it is meant to be: it is the order the flood will breach, and it must be loved before it is broken.
It ends in an address and a prayer: “Красуйся, град Петров, и стой / Неколебимо, как Россия”
(Be splendid, city of Peter, and stand / unshakable as Russia). Let the vanquished element make peace with the city, and the Finnish waves forget their ancient enmity. The ode is written in full voice and not in irony, and the poem never takes it back.
The prayer is the claim the two parts will test, and Part One opens by breaking it. From here the same tetrameter that praised the founder will tell a clerk’s evening thoughts, and the reader hears the state’s music and the private voice in one metre and cannot separate them.
Movement III
Part One opens on the night of 7 November 1824. A young clerk lives in Kolomna. The narrator calls him Evgeny and declines to give his surname: our hero lives in Kolomna, and works somewhere. He thinks of his modest hopes, a little advancement, a corner of his own, marriage to Parasha, who lives with her mother, a widow, in a small house by a willow and a gate, and a family. The plain prose of his thoughts is set in the same verse as the ode.
By morning the river is up. The Neva tosses like a sick man in his bed; the waves climb into windows like thieves; the city stands in the water like a Triton to the waist; coffins from a washed-out cemetery float in the streets. The flood’s verbs pile in short clauses. The living Tsar, Alexander I, stands on the palace balcony and says, in substance, that tsars cannot master God’s element. Amid it all the narrator spares a line of mockery for Count Khvostov, the poet who has already sung the disaster in immortal verses.
Evgeny sits astride a marble lion, hatless, arms crossed, staring at one point. Above the water, with its back to him, stands the idol on the bronze horse. Part One closes on the man and the statue, and the statue does not see him.
Movement IV
Part Two: the waters fall. A boatman takes Evgeny across, and he finds the widow’s house gone, and the widow and her daughter with it. They are never seen alive in the poem. His mind breaks.
For a year he wanders. The narrator reports it plainly, in the same metre that sang the parades, and the man the state had already made anonymous is now nobody at all: his protest, when it comes, will be madness in the eyes of the order.
One night he comes again to the square and sees the statue above him and knows it: “Ужасен он в окрестной мгле!”
(Terrible is he in the surrounding gloom!). The narrator rises to an apostrophe to the mighty lord of fate who reared Russia up over the abyss with an iron bridle. The ode returns here at full height, and it is spoken over a madman.
Movement V
Evgeny speaks to the idol: “Ужо тебе!”
(Just you wait!). The half-line stands alone, the metre broken at the one moment of revolt. The square is Senate Square, and later readers heard in the threat the rising of December 1825, a year after the flood; the poem lets the private grief and the place stand together and does not say it.
The founder’s face seems to turn. Evgeny runs, and behind him through the whole city he hears “тяжело-звонкое скаканье / По потрясенной мостовой”
(heavy-ringing galloping / over the shaken pavement). The metre becomes the hooves. Whether the statue moves or the madman imagines it the poem does not say, and the power that would not see him in the flood now pursues him for the rest of his life.
The close is a bare report. A house washed out to a waste islet is found there, and at its threshold the madman’s body; he is buried there for God’s sake. The poem began on an empty shore and ends on one. Between them stand the founder’s city, loved and not unsaid, and a man without a surname whom it crushed.
Act III · The Twelve
The severe case is that the Introduction’s catalogue of the city, its granite embankments, white nights, frost, balls, parades and the breaking of the Neva’s ice, is panegyric of a set kind that could be halved. The answer is in the structure: the catalogue is the claim the poem tests. It ends in a prayer that the vanquished element make peace with the city and that the Finnish waves forget their ancient enmity, and Part One opens by breaking that prayer. Cut it and the flood answers nothing. The two parts are matched, the river’s revolt against the city and the man’s against the founder. No episode is idle. What holds the axis a step from the top is one cut a reader could make without loss: the jibe in Part One at Count Khvostov, the poet who has already sung the disaster in immortal verses, a private joke the poem does not need.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The hostile case is that the poem does not disclose but balances, under the eye of a censor who was also the Tsar, and that Evgeny is a schema with no inner life beyond his wish for a wife and a corner. The refusal to judge is itself the disclosure, and it can be stated and holds: the power that makes a nation’s history is real and necessary, and indifferent to the life it costs; the private man has no standing before it except in madness, and his protest is pursued through the whole city for the rest of his life. And the citizen loves the very thing that destroys his neighbour: “Люблю тебя, Петра творенье”
(I love you, Peter’s creation) is not retracted after Part Two. The living Tsar on his balcony admits, in substance, that tsars cannot master God’s element. Held at the threshold, not above it, because Evgeny is thin by design, a man the state has made anonymous, and the disclosure reaches less far inward than outward.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation in a short poem might be one great scene, and the Introduction’s grandeur might be the convention of the ode. Here height and frequency are both present. The opening is the grand sublime in two lines, “На берегу пустынных волн / Стоял он, дум великих полн”
(On the shore of the desolate waves / he stood, full of great thoughts). The flood rises in a sequence of figures: the Neva tossing like a sick man in his bed, the waves climbing into windows like thieves, the city standing in the water like a Triton to the waist, coffins from the washed-out cemetery floating in the streets. Evgeny on the marble lion, the idol on the bronze horse above the water with its back to him, is the dreadful sublime fixed in an image. Part Two rises twice more, at the statue in the dark and in the chase. Few poems of its length rise so often, and the close lands the height downward, in a burial.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth here could be called inherited furniture: the statue that comes to life is the Stone Guest, which Pushkin had used already in 1830; the flood is the Deluge; the founder on the shore is Genesis. But the myth is built, and it is load-bearing. Peter on the empty shore is the demiurge, raising a city out of swamp against nature and to spite a haughty neighbour; the flood is the element’s revenge for its conquest; the statue is the founder become an idol, and in Part Two the idol turns and pursues the man who threatened it. Each element bears weight: the city must be built against nature for the flood to be its punishment, and the founder must be bronze for the pursuit to be a power that cannot be addressed and cannot die. The particular stays particular: a clerk in Kolomna, a widow’s house by a willow and a gate, a date in November 1824. And the myth was originated here: the Petersburg of a city founded on one will, cursed by its element and pursuing its own people is this poem’s making, and the later Petersburg writing of Russian literature builds on it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The means are inherited. The tetrameter is Pushkin’s own and the eighteenth century’s; the Petersburg panegyric descends from Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Batyushkov’s walk through the city; the narrative poem is the form of his southern poems and of Byron; and the meeting with Peter’s statue answers Mickiewicz’s digression on the same monument in the third part of Dziady, which Pushkin’s notes cite. The turn is in their use: a narrative poem whose hero is neither a Byronic outlaw nor a prince but a poor clerk without a surname, set inside the form of the state ode, so that ode and tale read each other; a verse that admits the plainest prose phrasing, our hero lives in Kolomna and works somewhere; an ending with no apotheosis and no moral. The stake was paid: the Tsar marked the poem, Pushkin refused the changes, and it went unpublished in his life. What holds the axis is that the instruments were his own and his age’s, recombined rather than invented.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The poem’s knowledge, the state against the man, could be told in prose, and Gogol and Dostoevsky told it. Change the form, though, and the poem loses what it knows. The double voice is the argument: the Introduction is a true ode and the tale a true tale, and the poem holds the state’s greatness and its cost together only because it speaks in both registers, in one metre, without reconciling them. In prose the Introduction would be propaganda or irony; in verse it is both and neither. The tetrameter without stanzas lets the verse paragraph run at the length of the action: long in the flood, broken to a half-line at the threat, then quickened into the gallop, where the metre becomes the hooves on the pavement. The symmetry of the two parts, each closing on the man and the statue, is the form of the argument, and the islet at the end returns the poem to the empty shore of its first line.
Score: 9.1 / 10
A short poem can be exhausted, and its critical history might be one argument repeated: is the poem for Peter or for Evgeny? The evidence is nearly two centuries of return that has not settled even that and has found much else. Belinsky in 1846 read it as a justification of the state’s historical necessity over the individual; Merezhkovsky and the Symbolists as the tragedy of the individual crushed and of a city doomed; Bryusov put the irreconcilable conflict at its centre. The twentieth century added the Decembrist reading, of the threat on Senate Square a year before the rising there, the reading against Mickiewicz, the mythopoetic readings of the Tartu school, and readings of Evgeny’s madness as a counter-vision of the same power; formal readings return to the metre, the sound and the symmetry. Each holds a part and none exhausts it. What holds the axis is that the field of return is chiefly Russian.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is Russian literature of the 1830s and the century after. The intrinsic force: the poem made the poor clerk a tragic subject of the highest poetry and set him against the state in one structure, and made the city a protagonist with a myth and a fate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Gogol’s Petersburg tales and “The Overcoat” (1842) take the anonymous clerk into prose; Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk and The Double (both 1846) and Crime and Punishment inherit the clerk, the city and the madness, The Double most closely; Bryusov’s poem to the Bronze Horseman (1906) and Bely’s Petersburg, in which the statue enters a room, rewrite it openly; Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero and Mandelstam’s Petersburg poems live inside its myth; Benois’s illustrations made its images a visual canon, and Glière’s ballet (1949) staged it. The window into Europe of its Introduction is in the language. Discounted for the late and censored printing, and for a reach that runs within Russian culture more than across Europe.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The charge is that the text was first printed altered by another hand and its full form had to be recovered, and that outside Russia it is read mainly in the academy. Weighed on form, presence and fabric across nearly two centuries from composition. Form: the poem survives whole in Pushkin’s manuscripts and the standard text is his; the printing of 1837 is a matter of transmission now repaired, a small charge. Presence: in Russia as wide as any poem’s; the Introduction is learned in school and quoted in public life, the statue is called by the poem’s name, and the poem has been in print, read and taught without a break since 1837. Fabric: the flood of 1824 and a clerk’s rank are of their moment and need no gloss to be felt. Held short of the widest figure by its narrower presence abroad, translated into the major languages but read mostly in courses, and by the repaired text.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Russian, and the command is of register within one metre. Church Slavonic and the high ode stand beside the plain prose of a clerk’s hopes and the bare report of his burial: “Красуйся, град Петров, и стой / Неколебимо, как Россия”
(Be splendid, city of Peter, and stand / unshakable as Russia). Sound is load-bearing: in the chase, “тяжело-звонкое скаканье / По потрясенной мостовой”
(heavy-ringing galloping / over the shaken pavement), the heavy compound and the ringing vowels do what they name; the flood’s verbs pile in short clauses; the half-line of the threat breaks the metre at the one moment of revolt. Enjambment is controlled across the unstanzaic paragraph, so that the verse speeds and stops with the action, and the symmetry of the parts is exact without being shown. The surface is judged on the passages known closely in the Russian; nothing in them is slack, and the axis stands a step from the top only for the music of the whole, which cannot be argued line by line without the text in hand.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The hostile reader says the Introduction’s love of the city and the tale’s horror at it are two laws, and the poem is split. Take the two most distant elements: the ode’s parade on the Field of Mars, with its prayer for peace with the element, and the corpse on the islet buried for God’s sake. One law governs both: the made order and the natural element are at war, and the human life lives on the line between them, adored by the order when it is a parade and crushed by it when it is a man. The ode is not refuted; it is shown to be true and partial. The flood and the statue obey the same physics: each is an element that does not see the man. The law holds the widest range in the poem, from the founder’s thoughts on the shore to the madman’s whisper on the square, and nothing in the poem stands outside it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on what the poem holds, as a short poem. The state and its history: Peter’s founding, the war with Sweden, an empire and its capital, the Tsar of 1824 helpless on his balcony. The natural order: the river, the sea wind, the flood. The city as a whole, palace to Kolomna. Labour and class: a poor clerk’s work, his wages and his hopes of advancement. Love and the family: the marriage he plans and the widow’s house. Consciousness, in his madness. The sacred: God’s element, the idol, the burial for God’s sake. They are held together by the single conflict, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is depth more than range: Evgeny’s consciousness is held only in outline, the girl he loves is never seen alive, and a poem of this length cannot hold the life a novel holds; the figure records the form’s limit.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3 and The Sublime at 9.2. A command of register within one metre, from the high ode to a clerk’s plain hopes and a broken half-line of revolt, with sound that becomes the hooves of the chase; a myth of Petersburg built and originated here, the founder as demiurge, the flood as the element’s revenge and the founder become an idol that pursues his subject; and a height reached often in a short poem, from the empty shore to the statue in the dark.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2, held by depth more than range: the state, the river, the city, labour, love and the sacred are all held, but Evgeny’s consciousness only in outline and a short poem cannot hold what a novel holds. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.8, for instruments inherited from Pushkin’s own work and his age’s, recombined rather than invented, though the stake was real and paid.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Alexander Pushkin’s Медный всадник (Mednyi vsadnik), subtitled Петербургская повесть (A Petersburg Tale), a narrative poem in unstanzaic iambic tetrameter in free rhyme, written at Boldino in October 1833. Nicholas I, acting as Pushkin’s censor, marked passages for change; Pushkin did not make them, and the poem was not published in his lifetime. The Introduction appeared in 1834 as a fragment; the whole was first printed after his death in Sovremennik in 1837, with alterations by Zhukovsky to meet the censor. It is scored on the poem as Pushkin left it in 1833, restored from his manuscripts and standard in the Academy editions: the prose foreword, the Introduction, Part One, Part Two and the five notes, the foreword and the notes weighed as apparatus. Every axis is judged on Pushkin’s Russian, which is not in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian is quoted only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation; other passages are paraphrased. The sound of the verse is judged on the passages known closely in the Russian, not on every line. Translation · Oliver Elton’s English version was used for sense; it is not quoted, and nothing in it is charged or credited to the work. Mickiewicz’s verses on the monument, which Pushkin’s notes cite, and the later works that rewrote the poem are evidence of its field and its reach, not part of it. Facts that could not be verified, among them the count of lines in the poem and in each part, the particular words the censor marked, the title under which the Introduction first appeared, the Tsar’s exact words on the balcony and the English versions beyond Elton’s, are not given.