Wild Horses

Claude Rawson

• ‘The Bronze Horseman’ and Other Poems by Alexander Pushkin, translated by D.M. Thomas
  Penguin, 261 pp, £2.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 14 042309 5
• Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study by A.D.P. Briggs
  Croom Helm, 257 pp, £14.95, November 1982, ISBN 0 7099 0688 9
• ‘Choiseul and Talleyrand’: A Historical Novella and Other Poems, with New Verse Translations of Alexander Pushkin by Charles Johnston
  Bodley Head, 88 pp, £5.25, July 1982, ISBN 0 370 30924 3
• Mozart and Salieri: The Little Tragedies by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Antony Wood
  Angel, 94 pp, £5.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 946162 02 6
• I have come to greet you by Afanasy Fet, translated by James Greene
  Angel, 71 pp, £5.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 946162 03 4
• Uncollected Poems by John Betjeman
  Murray, 81 pp, £4.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 7195 3969 2
• Travelling without a Valid Ticket by Howard Sergeant
  Rivelin, 14 pp, £1.00, May 1982, ISBN 0 00 904524 4

The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens. The statue celebrated Peter’s building of St Petersburg, that symbol of Russia’s Westernisation which Francesco Algarotti called her window on Europe (Pushkin cited Algarotti in a note: Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in the building, and the intended manifestation of Enlightenment was often seen, in the words of the Polish poet Mickiewicz, as ‘A tribute to a tyrant’s cruel whim’. The Europeanising Tsar retained in some eyes what a student of Mickiewicz and Pushkin has called ‘the traits of an Asiatic despot’.