Our course is titled as "St. Petersburg – Miracle, Mystery, Authority". What better way to describe the aura of The Bronze Horseman. World wide every city has a monument, building, something that represents that particular city. New York has the Statue of Liberty, Paris the Eiffel Tower, and London has Big Ben. However, Russia’s St. Petersburg has the most dramatic, majestic, and mystical monument of all, The Bronze Horseman.
This monument has so much of Peter the Great in it, one can almost imagine it coming to life and riding through the streets of St. Petersburg as described in Alexander Pushkin’s tale The Bronze Horseman. (Pushkin, lines 446-450).
As a tribute to Peter the Great, Catherine II commissioned Etienne Maurice Falconet, a Frenchman, who had been recommended to her by her friend the philosopher Diderot, to build a monument to Peter the Great that would justify him and his creation of the city of St. Petersburg.
It took four years to find a site for the monument and sixteen years to sculpt the statue. The place chosen. for the statue was the space surrounded by the Senate, the Admiralty, St. Issacs Cathedral and the Neva River. (Knopf Guide, p. 190). From the beginning of the process, the very spirit of Peter was put into the statue.
The 1600 ton piece of granite, on which the statue would stand was located in Lahta on the Gulf of Finland. "Peter had affectionately named it ‘Thunder’ and from it he used to observed the surroundings."
(http://win.www.online.ru/sp/fresh/sights.senate.htm). It was "raised by levers, put on a platform of logs and rolled
on copper balls along rails with grooves to the Gulf of Finland
from whence a specially constructed barge delivered it to the square by the Senate ." (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dima/peter.html).
Next came a model for Peter’s beloved horse, Lisset. Falconet searched the famous stables of Count Orlov for a mare of the same Golshtine bloodline and successfully found two, Caprice and Diamond, which he would use a models. (http://www.horse.spb.su/spb/spb1_e.htm). While Falconet is given credit for this work, it was his seventeen year old assistant, Maria Callot, who provided solutions to two very important features of this statue. Falconet was having trouble with putting the laurel exactly right on Peter’s head. Maria worked on this and supposedly completed the task in one night. (Volkov, p. 19). The other problem she solved was getting his looks just right. His facial features were her work and she got a very good likeness of him using his death mask and sculpting hair on his head. (Ibid). The same death mask was used by Chemiakin for his seated statue of Peter but without adding hair, the head appears too small for the rest of the body.
The statue of Peter with his right arm extended toward the Neva River, sitting astride a rearing horse that is stepping on a snake was unveiled in 1782 in the center of the Russian capital. Several interpretations have been given to this particular pose. One interpretation is, "From the top of this ‘cliff’ Peter shows the way for Russia, while his horse steps on a snake, which represents the enemies of Peter and his reforms."
(http://wwwcityvision2000/.com/city-tour/bronze.htm). Another observation is made by Pushkin in his poem The Bronze Horseman, where he asks "Whither do you gallop, haughty steed, And where will you plant your hooves?" (Pushkin, lines 418-19) and of Peter, "Oh, might potentate of fate!/Was it not thus, aloft hard by the abyss,/That with curb of iron/You reared up Russia?" (Pushkin, lines 420-23). These lines show the might of both the man and horse which are successfully conveyed in the action of the statue. "The horse of the Bronze Horseman differs from any other horse of all the known European equestrian monuments, where the horses "walk peacefully and solemnly under their famous riders. The horse of the Bronze Horseman is an inseparable whole with its owner like soul and flesh joined in one thrust into a new day."
(http:/www.horse.spb.su/spb/spb1_e.htm). The more one
reads about the power that can be observed in this statue, the more one can appreciate the many interpretations given to this horse and rider.
It is as if you can feel the bond between the two, the dynamics of their personalities; the horse that won’t peacefully walk and the man who would raise a city out of a swamp.
Beside the authority this statue exudes, there is also a mystical aura that surrounds it. The "miraculous appearance of the lovely city in a marsh" …. And "the folklore prediction of its imminent demise" (Volkov, p. XIII) has always hung over St. Petersburg. The city was Peter’s vision and that vision resulted in a beautiful city of palaces, cathedrals, and parks. However, his seemingly disregard of the human lives that were lost to raise this city from the marsh is also part of the mythos of St. Petersburg. One of the common beliefs of St. Petersburg is the city was built on the bones of the workers. When the statue was unveiled in 1782 in the center of the Russian capital ..."the onlookers were struck from its power and strength." (Volkov, p. XII). But the event that gave the statue the status it still holds today, the symbol of St. Petersburg, was the poem written by Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman. Pushkin transformed a "merely brilliant monument to the awesome emperor into the emblem of Petersburg". (Volkov, p. XIII). This story gave the statue life and the mythos that still envelops it today. In the Bronze Horseman, it is not Peter, per se, that is chasing Yevgeny through the streets of St. Petersburg, but the authorities of the city chasing a poor citizen. The statue is now developing a mythos of Peter being an active guardian of the city.
People defying or questioning authority will now have Peter chasing after them. Pushkin’s tale seems to have given the citizens of St. Petersburg the imagination that The Bronze Horseman would defend the city against hostile feelings and actions. This guardian folklore was especially obvious during WWII. During the Siege of Leningrad, precious works of art were packed up and shipped out of Leningrad when the Germans were drawing close. Those works that did not get out, were buried in various parts of the city to save them from being destroyed or taken by the Germans. In the Leningrad Diary, it mentions the removal of the bronze Leningrad horses by the Anitchkov Bridge to a place where they would be safe from shells and bombs. (Inber, p. 70). During the Siege of Leningrad, the statue of the Bronze Horseman was not taken down, but was protected by piling sandbags around it and then building a wooden structure around everything. By some miracle, the statue survived the 900 day siege and after more than 150 years, the "myth" of the Bronze Horseman and the fate of St. Petersburg if the statue was moved from the center of the city was strengthened. Leningrad/St. Petersburg and the Bronze Horseman survived.
How has the mythos of the Bronze Horseman changed in recent years? It has been challenged, but it
still remains the symbol of St. Petersburg. In the early 1920, during the avant-garde movement, Vladimir Tatlin planned his gigantic metal spiral to take the place of the Bronze Horseman as the symbol of Petrograd. (Volkov, p. 370)
In Petersburg, Bely depicted the statue as an apocalyptic figure galloping through St. Petersburg trying to Westernize it. With glasnost there came an avalanche of new information, revised information and propaganda was exposed. Revisions of the past were made and according to Brodsky, "the ground beneath the feet of the hard liners was shaking. The Bronze Horseman of the Petersburg mythos was threatening to knock them down and trample them". (Volkov, p. 542). Also, in 1991 the name of Leningrad was officially changed back to St. Petersburg.
In a Joseph Brodsky essay, A Guide to A Renamed City, a comparison is made between Peter the Great and Lenin. During the first hundred years Peter gave vision to St. Petersburg and guided its growth. St. Petersburg was a city alive with the building of exquisite palaces, buildings and parks. The tsars and tsarinas , while not perfect, offered a stability to Russia. It was a golden era when wars were won and the image of the city grew in the literature of Puskkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky. Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman gave the monument life and a feeling that Peter’s spirit was very much a part of St. Petersburg. That spirit was keeping the city in the role Peter had envisioned it to be: strong, growing both in size and ideas, and an example for the rest of the world. Gogol’s tales painted in darker colors the human side of the city, in addition they added a fantasy quality to the Petersburg myth that was ever gaining strength. In his book, St. Petersburg, Bely’s describes the city in colors, the Neva appears green-blue, the Winter Palace "glowed purple." (Knopf Guides, St. Petersburg, pp. 121-22). Such colorful descriptions plus the many others of ethereal White Nights give St. Petersburg a fairytale like atmosphere that appears throughout Russian literature. Even the colors of the buildings in St. Petersburg are not the usual brown, red, white that you find in most cities. They are yellow, green, and blue, and decorated with columns, statues, spires, and mouldings that also add to the mystical atmosphere of the city.
During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the literature, music, and the creativity that made St. Petersburg the jewel it was, was suppressed and practically obliterated by Stalin and Lenin before him. The spirit of the Bronze Horseman gave strength to some and threatened others. Maria Yudin, a pianist, sometimes placed a picture of the Bronze Horseman on her piano to help her convey the intensity of "the hoof beats, the chase, the fear" in her music. She was inspired while, as stated earlier, with the coming of glasnost and the freedom to create once again appearing, the hard liners of the old government felt the ground shaking beneath their feet. The Bronze Horseman of the Petersburg mythos was threatening them.
As a last example of the ever present mythos of Peter overseeing the welfare of his beloved St. Petersburg, is a recent cartoon. It depicts The Bronze Horseman in Pushkin’s style chasing a television through the streets instead of Yevgeny. What was on the television that riled the authorities and set loose the Bronze Horseman? Even today, from the Bronze Horseman’s place in the center of St. Petersburg, Peter’s spirit is very much a part of the mythos of St. Petersburg. And, as folklore has it, as long as he remains there, St. Petersburg will exist. Just as the horse and rider are one, the monument and St. Petersburg are also one.
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Created May, 2000