Cursing at the Whirlwind: The Old Testament Landscape of The Bronze Horseman

Just over a century ago, Valery Briusov identified three emerging trends in the scholarly response to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, corresponding roughly to the poem’s three dominant ideological planes: the social, the political, and the religious.¹ As David Bethea observes, the poem’s religious angle received scant critical consideration in the subsequent decades, particularly post-1917; the past several years, however, have restored some balance to the critical reception, as a new generation of scholars has begun to address the poem’s rich metaphysical contexts. In 1990, Igor Nemirovsky argued that the basic organization of The Bronze Horseman around sacred events and themes (the creation of the world; the Lord’s wrath; punishment by flood) reveals the Bible as a major creative framework upon which Pushkin modeled the world of his Petersburg tale.² Certainly, as more than one Pushkin scholar has observed, the Prologue to The Bronze Horseman stages a cosmogonic drama, featuring Peter the Great as the city’s mythic Creator, coaxing worlds out of words and wringing cosmos from a boggy chaos.³ Numerous critics have cast the passage as an overtly biblical drama, starring Peter as more than just any old demiurge: urban theorist Marshall Berman calls the Prologue “a kind of Petersburg Book of Genesis, beginning in the mind of the city’s creator-God,” and Gary Rosenshield reads the step-by-step genesis outlined in the Prologue as a metaphoric deification.⁴ Without doubt, Peter’s biblical pedigree has been well established in the critical literature; but what of his mortal counterpart, Evgeny: did Pushkin’s poor hero also have a scriptural forerunner?

Consider the following synopsis:

A creator-God surveys his creation. We meet the story’s hero, an honorable man who trusts in his creator’s existing order. A sudden heavenly interference robs him of his possessions and loved ones. The humble, patient hero of the story’s opening is transformed by his devastating loss into an enraged rebel who, convinced of his own innocence, defiantly curses the creator. At the story’s climax, the divine injustice drives the mad hero to challenge his God openly, demanding a justification for his suffering. The God-figure descends and, whirling in fury, silences his subject with an overwhelming display of power. The hero, awed by this demonstration of authority, is finally subdued into repentance. In the end, God rewards the hero for his submission by restoring his goods and health twofold.

Until the final twist, this brief outline of the biblical Book of Job could equally well describe the plot contours of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. The undeniable thematic similarities led the Soviet critic A. Tarkhov to postulate a Joban subtext to Pushkin’s “Petersburg povest´”; since the publication of his brief but provocative article in 1977, however, the connections between the two poems have not been more fully explored or elaborated.⁵

This study will investigate the rich echoes of the Job text that resound within Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman from various perspectives: the poet’s familiarity with and admiration for the Old Testament tale, and his treatment of Joban themes in his earlier creative work; the structural and thematic parallels between the biblical story and the nineteenth-century poem; and finally, a close analysis of the key themes of Logos and creation in both texts. At the outset, it is worth considering why the poet might have chosen to pattern Evgeny’s tale after the notoriously difficult Book of Job; after all, the revelation of a subtext drawn from the problematic biblical story could hardly serve to simplify The Bronze Horseman: the two poems are bound by their refusal to offer an unambiguous message, with each generating multitudes of meanings and providing fertile interpretive ground for generations of critics and general readers alike. Perhaps the answer lies in the repressive political climate of the years directly following the Decembrist uprising, which made it dangerous for artists to deal explicitly with themes of justice, revolt, and individuality; it may be that weaving a Joban thread deep within the...