St Petersburg полностью

Marvelous buildings, gilded by the morning sun, were reflected brightly in the clean mirror of the Neva, and we both exclaimed unanimously, “What a city! What a river!” “The only city!” the young man repeated. “So many subjects for the artist’s brush! … I must leave Petersburg,” he continued, “I must leave it for a bit, I must see the ancient capitals: old Paris, sooty London, in order to appreciate Petersburg’s worth. Look—what unity! how all the parts respond to the whole! what beauty in the buildings, what taste, and what variety from the mixture of water with buildings.”

Having put Paris and London in their place, Batyushkov finished with a toast:

How many wonders we see before us, wonders created in such a short period, in a century, just one century! Glory and honor to the great founder of this city! Glory and honor to his successors, who completed what he had barely begun, in the course of wars, internal and foreign discord! Glory and honor to Alexander, who more than anyone, during his reign made beautiful the capital of the North!

Such a classic speech would have been impossible for the Decembrists, who in their own words “no longer believed in the good intentions of the government.” Their favorite aphorism, “The world is beginning to learn that nations do not exist for tsars but the tsars for nations,” was previously unthinkable in Russia, where the concept of monarchy was traditionally viewed as sacred.

In 1825 these first modern Russian dissidents marched boldly into Senate Square, their weapons drawn. The crowd looked on speechless. These armed men were no longer loyal subjects but claimed to be intellectually and morally free citizens of Russia—not classicists at all but revolutionary romantics. It was the first crack in the facade of Petersburg’s neoclassical Empire.

Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman further opened this first crack. The poem was interpreted by many as an allegory and requiem for the failed Decembrist uprising, which had threatened to flood Petersburg just as the elements had a year earlier. On the day of the uprising Pushkin was two hundred miles away, in the village of Mikhailovskoe, serving his five-year exile for his nonconformist thinking, by the order of Alexander. Now Nicholas I was on the throne, succeeding his elder brother Alexander, who had died in 1825—under somewhat mysterious circumstances—far away from Petersburg, in the southern city of Taganrog. Soon Nicholas recalled Pushkin to Petersburg for a private audience.

Deemed extraordinary by contemporaries, this meeting between tsar and poet in 1826 immediately became the stuff of legend. It was said that Nicholas I and Pushkin spoke for two and a half hours, an audience no minister was granted at the time. What did the imposingly handsome, thirty-year-old emperor with blond hair and hypnotizing, cold gray eyes talk about with the poet, who was three years younger, of medium build, with abrupt movements, curly hair, and a dark complexion? Pushkin, deeply touched, ran from Nicholas’s study with tears in his eyes. “How I would like to hate him! But what can I do? For what can I hate him?” In his turn, Nicholas announced to his stunned courtiers that he had just talked with “the wisest man in Russia.”

The emperor’s question to the poet was, “Pushkin, would you have taken part in the rebellion on December 14th, if you had been in Petersburg?” Pushkin replied honestly and boldly that without any doubt he would have been in Senate Square with the revolutionaries. “All my friends were there.”

As we know, Pushkin was forgiven by Nicholas, who appreciated directness and honesty. Then the conversation turned to Nicholas’s intended far-reaching reforms; the emperor asked Pushkin for advice and support. The tone and content of the conversation brought to Pushkin’s mind the illustrious reformer, Peter the Great. A virtuoso manipulator, Nicholas had undoubtedly been striving for that very effect.

At that moment a spiritual triangle was created: Peter I-Nicholas I-Pushkin. This must be kept in mind when reading The Bronze Horseman, which was completed eight years after the Decembrists were defeated. The potential readership for almost everything Pushkin wrote in those years was divided in two: Nicholas and everyone else. Nevertheless, even though Pushkin began his “Petersburg tale” with a panegyric, he quickly gave it a tragic character.

Pushkin was prepared to agree with Nicholas, who maintained with hypnotic willfulness that Russia needed an absolute sovereignty, that without a strong ruler the country would perish. At the same time Pushkin feared and hated tyranny.