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The Bronze Horseman - Aleksandr Pushkin


The Bronze Horseman
Translation, preliminary study notes
Eduardo Alonso Luengo. Bilingual edition.
Issue 1: 2001. 2 nd edition: 2005.
101 pp. Russia.
Pushkin, Alexandr
poetry Hyperion, 387
ISBN :84-7517-673-9 / 978-84-7517-673-4
Price: 8 €



In 1833, Alexander Pushkin ended one of the fundamental works his brief but dazzling biography. The Bronze Horseman is a narrative poem of average size: 481 lines, which although part of a real event - the flooding that hit St. Petersburg in 1824 - built from the particular perspective of Eugene, a poor officer loses his girlfriend in the flood, a rare epiphany, where the character, maddened by pain, faces the statue of Tsar Peter, who stands triumphant as the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on a huge pedestal of rock on the banks of the Neva.

The poem progresses from the extreme violence of the storm inside the character's anguish and to an increasingly darker, with a plasticity, pace and sequence of images overwhelming.

A near-perfect poem and part of a work as a whole is considered that founded the modern Russian literature and on the other, gives rise to a brilliant line of St. Petersburg poets among them are Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Brodsky ...

This poem inspire the same Adolescent Dostoyevsky when he reflects on San Petersburg: "If you go back just as the fog and goes back, does not she go with all that rotten, muddy city, not rise with the mist and disappear like fog, and his place will be in the old swamp Finnish, and at its center, for ornament, the Bronze Horseman on the wheezy horse? ".

As audacious as a bit condescending to Tsar Nicholas I was one of the few works that have remained steadily in the Russian literary canon, even after the cultural upheaval of the Soviet revolution. In the preface says the frequent comparisons with Mozart Pushkin, both because of his prodigious talent to his brief biography. This work may yet be able to connect fully with another artist of the day: Eugene Delacroix, with the movement that gives his works, with the strength of the line and the intense use of chiaroscuro.

Excerpt: (...)
Surrounding the pedestal
the poor fool is about, and look
nails in the face of the Czar of half the world. In breast
troubled and oppressed
frost settles on the head gate.
It blurs your vision and called him
runs through the veins, and blood begins to boil
. He darkens the gesture
to the superb monster, you
grind teeth and his hands were twitching
dark when I have to force
whispers trembling with rage:
"Wait, architect of miracles!
'll see !..." and escapes to the race
believe the terrible Tsar
burning anger, the head was turned ... (...)