Noah Kumin—RUSS 28400—3/18/09

“The Bronze Horseman” in Petersburg: The Emotional Power of Parody

Parody in Petersburg serves as a positive means toward the evocation of emotion. It is

not the case that emotional force of “The Bronze Horseman,” Pushkin’s poem of madness

and despair, is obscured in order to convey that the characters of Bely’s novel are broken

off from the emotional ancestry of poor Evgenii’s story. Rather, the exact opposite is the

case: no matter how hard Apollon Apollonovich tries to box himself in among

parallelepipeds or how near Lippanchenko comes to confining his world to the clear-cut

drudgeries of a political provocateur’s daily cockroach-swatting and solitaire, the circular

of Petersburg expands so that its characters are forced into spaces of the soul, of pure

emotion divorced from consciousness: eternal locations which no historical development

will manage to completely cordon off.

And, despite the hugely different thematic artifices Bely and Pushkin have

constructed to illuminate this realm, the particular emotional landscape toward which the

characters of Petersburg are compelled—a land of despair—is in fact the same emotional

terrain through which poor Evgenii runs madly until his lonely death in “The Bronze

Horseman.” Parody then serves to test and overstep the limits of mockery and

obfuscation. Petersburg’s parodies move Pushkin’s phrases and figures as far away as

possible from the abject sadness they once served to evoke, and then, as the parodic

phrases and figures (particularly the Bronze Horseman himself) develop, Bely molds

them and assimilates them into the peculiar thematic elements of his own work, thereby

eliminating the sense of comedy that their disfigured bodies once inspired and
transforming them into entirely new and potent devices, now free to join their

predecessors in the realm of despair and illuminate it with a new and newly potent light.

We have our first hint of this method from the first epigraph of Petersburg’s first

chapter:

It was a dreadful time, in truth,

Of it still fresh the recollection . . .

Of it, my friends, I now for you

Begin my comfortless narration.

Lugubrious will be my tale . . .

The question immediately presents itself: why invoke the last lines of Aleksandr

Pushkin’s introduction to “The Bronze Horseman,” when the story and tone of

Petersburg is to be quite different from that of Pushkin’s. Certainly it cannot be the case

that Bely did not think that he could write an apt enough epigraph; his deft, almost

despotic command of his novel’s own frantic tone indicates that had he wanted three to

five lines of anxiety-producing, semi-comic verse, he could have summoned them up. So

then, unless he considers the theme of his novel essentially interchangeable with the story

that follows Pushkin’s poetic introduction, or unless the quotation of these lines is but an

arbitrary and lazy invocation of Russia’s greatest poet, it must be that there is

immediately something essential to be gleaned about “The Bronze Horseman” in relation

to Bely’s own work.

As the introductory epigraph is typically used to aptly and coherently introduce a

book’s theme, and “The Bronze Horseman” and Petersburg both contain, for instance,

madness and disaster in the city of St. Petersburg, Russia, we might erroneously see this
epigraph as a simply fitting foreword to the novel. And yet we immediately find that

Pushkin’s poem is somehow out of place here. While the first chapter of “The Bronze

Horseman” immediately following the poetic introduction begins with a straightforward

and modest account of the tale’s setting and a brief description of its hero Evgenii, Bely

is strange and irreverent in his treatment of his characters from the first line of

Petersburg’s first chapter. Evgenii is a simple fellow whom Pushkin gives a sad and

tenderly brief description: he “lives in Kolomna, works / Somewhere, avoids the paths of

the famous, mourns / Neither dead relatives nor the forgotten past” (Pushkin, 249).

Apollon Apollonovich’s family history gets a more thorough treatment. To begin with, he

“was of venerable stock: Adam was his ancestor” (Bely, 3). The rest of his ancestral

lineage is provided, too: from the Semitic Shem down to his baptism as Ab-Lai of the

Ears.

Bely already can be seen mocking not only the typical Russian nobleman’s

preoccupation with ancestry and the novel of manners’ traditional opening, but also

reminding us of Pushkin’s omission of poor Evgenii’s surname, which, while it may have

once been famous, is now “forgotten by the world / And fame” (Pushkin, 249). So, from

the outset the to-the-point relation of sadness on which Pushkin’s poem relies is

contrasted against a winding, comically different sort of writing that is anything but to the

point. Already it is the case that Bely has taken a device from Pushkin and distorted it’s

emotional effect by yanking it into a strange new world where it does not belong.

Paramount to Pushkin’s evocation of sadness is the restrained and somber introduction he

provides for a fantastically tragic event, and yet Bely openly mocks this narrative device,
by following Pushkin’s verses with an opening paragraph that is at once gaudy and

hysterical.

So, looking at Bely’s ensuing references to “The Bronze Horseman,” our first task

is to understand what makes them parodic. The titular figure of Pushkin’s poem,

however, doesn’t immediately appear comic in his first interaction with the characters of

Petersburg. Coming home from the masquerade of terrible consequences, Sofia Petrovna

feels the pieces of her consciousness falling away, as if “her life had not existed, ever”

and hears behind her “the pounding of a metallic steed, with a ringing clatter against

stone . . . . There, behind her back, the metallic Horseman had started up in pursuit”

(Bely, 120, emphasis mine). These lines mimic in both tone and content Pushkin’s

relation of Evgenii’s disaster, in which after the great flood, the narrator asks us, “Or is

this all a dream? Is all our life / Nothing but an empty dream, heaven’s jest?” (Pushkin,

252). Here Evgenii’s grief begins to lead him toward his insane ramblings around the city

and to his second encounter with the Bronze Horseman, who “rushes / After him on his

ponderously galloping mount; / And all night long, wherever the madman ran, / The

Bronze Horseman followed with a ringing clatter” (Pushkin, 257). There is nothing comic

yet about Bely’s mimicry of Pushkin’s poem, as in this scene of Bely’s Horseman retains

the emotional sense of Pushkin’s poem. A terrible, maddening event has taken place for

both Evgenii and Sofia, and as both relinquish their hold on ‘concrete’ reality, these

pangs of despair manifest themselves through imagination as the Bronze Horseman’s

pursuit. Bely then has set up our expectations so that we might believe that he will treat

the figure of the Bronze Horseman much the same way that Pushkin has.
 Soon though the emotional tone of Bely’s Horseman references shifts. Having set

us up for a potentially parasitical and uncreative invocation of Pushkin’s dooming

demigod, just as the first chapter’s epigraph might initially appear as uninspired

borrowing, Bely in the fifth chapter of his novel leads the metallic figure into a comic and

incongruous new Petersburg. First though he firms up the parallels between his work and

Pushkin’s. As shady Morkovin presents to Nikolai the terrible choice of parricide,

suicide, or arrest, the student finds himself slipping into a realm of insanity brought on by

despair, and we even find that the Horseman’s “green, many-tonned arm pointed

menacingly” (Bely, 148) just as it is at the inception of Evgenii’s madness (Pushkin,

252).

But apart from the concrete contours of the dramatic situation (our hero is

maddening and despairing) and language (emphasis on the statue’s outstretched arm) this

scene holds little in common with Pushkin’s poetic use of the Bronze Horseman. For one,

the figure of the Horseman is for a period removed from his normal lodgings at Peter’s

Square and placed by the door of the seedy restaurant from which Nikolai and Morkovin

are emerging, and he seems to have taken the form of a streetwalking thug. When Nikolai

asks about this giant figure, Morkovin responds as though Peter were his right-hand man,

telling Nikolai that it is “‘He who dooms us all—irrevocably”’ (Bely, 148). Here

Morkovin uses the dispassionately vengeful Peter as a means to bully Nikolai. This comic

and demonic specter of a conspirator makes the Horseman a patsy for the Party’s absurd,

muddled, and cruel provocations. Then, a singularly fantastic meteorological

phenomenon occurs, as the evening’s “storm clouds were rent asunder and, in the

moonlight, clouds swirled like the green vapor from melted bronze” (149). And while
Pushkin associates the Horseman with a great storm and the raging post-flood Neva, this

bronze-infused tempest bears distinctly Bely’s mark.

So, Bely has taken the theme of the Horseman as dispassionate and primarily

symbolic pursuer of the ruined and transformed it for comic effect. While in Pushkin’s

poem we have ample room to understand the Horseman’s animacy as the illusion of a

despairing madman’s fancy, in Petersburg he literally becomes the henchman of a

conspirator hoping to cajole Nikolai into killing his father, and as we’ll see later, he

becomes the crazed murderer or Party boss Lippanchenko. So Pushkin’s dispassionate,

vengeful Horseman has now become subject to the lurid and petty squabbles of the

novel’s characters: Bely has removed the Horseman from the cool austerity of Pushkin’s

poem and dropped him in the center of his own work’s comic confusion.

There is a comic effect too in Bely’s exaggeration of the storm from Pushkin’s

poem. The sky is wont to turn all sorts of colors in the world Bely has created, but in this

specific passage, in which the Horseman gives an “enigmatic smile,” as “everything

flared: waters, roofs, granite,” (Bely, 149) there is something truly comic to be found in

the exaggeratedly fantastic meteorology that accompanies Nikolai’s vile epiphany that he

must kill his father. So then we see that mimicry of “The Bronze Horseman” has now

become parody. Alongside the borrowed themes and images from Pushkin’s poem, Bely

has introduced incongruous elements and stretched the limits of the theme such that the

image he is borrowing has become comic and skewed.

But, having parodied Pushkin thoroughly, Bely returns to direct and serious

evocations of mad despair. More so, it is only through parody that we are able to turn

more intensely toward this feeling. The sort of madness the Bronze Horseman inspires
actually propels the Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin to murder Lippanchenko. We may

think of it also as the Bronze Horseman himself who commits the deed, but, either way it

is the case that the parody of “The Bronze Horseman” has stretched so far, Peter I’s

clamoring vengeance has grown so active, that we can no longer see the murderous

Horseman as a mere game Bely is playing in reference to a seminal Russian poem. The

new Bronze Horseman that Bely has created is no longer a parody, but instead a new and

utterly sincere expatiation on the theme of despair.

The Bronze Horseman has, through his murder of Lippanchenko, taken on a

serious new meaning, killing off the grotesque party boss just as the narrator was

beginning to paint him in sympathetic, human colors. In the scene of his swan song

Lippanchenko abandons his game of solitaire and his paranoid squabbling with Zoya

Zakharovna to sing a song about loss of faith in love. His “frontal bone,” the conspiring,

cockroach-killing consciousness that builds walls around emotion, does not knows what

he is singing, but despite himself he bears the mark of despair, as his “forehead was small

and creased with wrinkles; it seemed to be weeping.” And, walking into the blackness of

his room, his “whole figure expressed ineffable melancholy” (Bely, 261). So, though

Lippanchenko cannot maintain interest in the “shadowy wedges” of his soul that flit

about his room, and instead moves to the mundane and unimaginative killing of

cockroaches, we see in this scene that even the most repulsive of characters in Petersburg

possesses the possibility for genuine emotion—the expansion of the soul such that it

embraces, as Bely puts it, “not just one point, but all the points” (Bely, 262).

But the Horseman puts a horrible end to this newly understood human life.

Dudkin as Horseman brings ruin regardless, slicing open Lippanchenko in a scene that
evokes intense horror and despair. This new Horseman has been assimilated into the

multi-faceted and confused landscape of Bely’s novel, where he has become a shape-

shifting vigilante. Bely’s appropriation of the Horseman, however, no longer obscures the

emotion of despair, but instead leads us to it through a new path. Now, in Petersburg,

Bely shows that even a persecuted Evgenii character (in this case Dudkin) is wont to

transform into the wrathful Horseman, thereby using the shape-shifting theme into which

he has incorporated the Horseman for emotional effect. He makes this parallel between

Dudkin and Evgenii explicit, writing in the scene of the alcoholic’s hallucination:

“Alexander Ivanych—Evgeny—now understood for the first time that he had been

running in vain for a century . . .” (Bely, 214). But now, through hallucinatory

inspiration, the Horseman’s bronze has melted into him.

And, buying the scissors with which he’ll kill Lippanchenko, this new Dudkin-

horseman encounters a “sleepy mug (must be the owner of the drills and saws)” who is in

fact Lippanchenko the victim. At the end of the chapter we learn that this proprietor’s

“forehead, creased with wrinkles, was very low and narrow. It seemed to be weeping”

(Bely, 216). These lines foreshadow Lippanchenko’s shift from persecutor to persecuted,

from cold inhuman avenger to poor victim. And Dudkin’s role as vengeful persecutor

becomes solidified as we see him astride the dead Lippanchenko, having appropriated

Peter’s small mustache and extended arm.

The Horseman theme is now so entrenched in Bely’s muddled world that this

strange occurrence no longer has the feel of the comic; instead, because the entirely new

permutation of the theme is no longer simply “out of place,” but instead firmly rooted in

the place of Bely’s Petersburg, we must reckon with the horror, insanity and despair that
characterize the events of this world. Bely has sliced in two the theme of Pushkin’s poem

so as to better access the stuff at its core: now every character plays in part the role of

vengeful Peter, and each plays the role of ruined Evgenii. This formal integration of the

Horseman in Petersburg has taken the expectation of earnest homage and defied it,

placing the Horseman in comically new settings; then, this expectation of parodic

silliness has been subverted it as well, as Bely uses the Horseman’s new manifestation as

transient and shape-shifting avenger as means for the evocation of genuine horror and

despair.

With this positive use of parody in mind, let us return to Petersburg’s opening

epigraph. Pushkin told us that the tale would be sad, and then Bely mocked the clarity of

his verse with a bombastic and sprawling opening which gives the impression that the

sentiment Pushkin hoped to evoke has no place in this novel. But in the end Petersburg

is essentially what this first epigraph said it would be. The emotional force of the verses

quoted above, twisted and obscured by a tale that has maddeningly defied our

expectations of what a coherently ensuing narrative should be, now returns with renewed

resonance. The lunatic wandering of Petersburg’s form eventually leads us to no more or

less than the story of an unhappy family on the verge of reconciliation: “We, the author,

had forgotten about Anna Petrovna,” Bely writes, “And as usual, the heroes of the novel

—following our example—had forgotten about Anna Petrovna” (Bely, 265). So while

Nikolai (along with “We, the author” and we, the readers) have been scurrying around

through the tangled webs of semi-coherent political conspiracies and semi-serious prose,

we have missed the one person who can capably remove the shackles of madness and

despair that have constricted father and son.

toward the emotional lives of two lonely Ableukhovs and the woman that has come to

reunite them. And it is only after having experienced the petty and pointless provocations

and various parodic dismissals of serious emotion that the appearance of Anna Petrovna

takes on such importance, despite the bomb ticking in the drawing room, despite the

incipient revolution outside. For it is only after having glimpsed at a world composed

only of nightmarish and comic lunacy that we understand the supremacy and endurance

of genuine emotion. As Nikolai weeps and Apollon Apollonovich jokes gaily with his

lackey, we are presented with the possibility that somehow this family will escape the

terror that Petersburg has until now conveyed.

But the bomb obliterates this potential happiness just as the flood obliterated

Evgenii’s in 1824. And while the father is not killed, and both his and his son’s respective

new lives away from the city seem pleasant enough, Petersburg’s final evocation of

tragedy comes from the failure of these two characters to reconcile; each Ableukhov can

only live peacefully away from the other. This is the logical conclusion of Bely’s

variation on “The Bronze Horseman’s” theme of despair, in which each character is the

vengeful Horseman and each is poor Evgenii. The wrath of the horseman is no longer

cleanly inflicted by cold Russia on its hapless victim but is instead, like most else in

Petersburg, is bifurcated: Apollon Apollonovich subjects Nikolai to the terror of his cold

decorousness, and Nikolai subjects his father to the dull, heavy roar of his muddled

pseudo-revolutionary activity. And father and son each end up as part czar and part

hapless beggar in the post-Petersburg world that has been partitioned off for them. The

only thing that remains whole is the immutable sadness of the tale. After all Petersburg
does not end with the explosion of an historical epoch or even with the maddening comic

tension that has pervaded through most of the novel, but rather with the simple ascetic

life of a lonely young Russian exile, whose parents have died, and who will die too—

never having escaped the grievous world of Bely’s comfortless narration.

Bely, Andrei. 1978. Petersburg. Ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Pushkin, Alexander. 1982. The Bronze Horseman. Ed. D.M. Thomas. New York: Viking
Press.

Pushkin, Aleksandr. 2000. Mednyĭ Vsadnik. Ed. Michael Basker. London: Bristol
Classical Press.