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Chapter Eight Poet and Tsar Водились Пушкины с царями; Из них был славен не один . . . The Pushkins have had to do with tsars; more than one of them was covered in glory. —Pushkin, “My Genealogy” WRITING ABOUT THE Napoleonic myth in Pushkin and Stendhal, Lidiia Volpert notes the presence in Onegin’s study of a “little column with a cast-iron doll”—referring, of course, to the figurine of Napoleon, a common decoration in the studies of fashionably romantic intellectuals . Vol’pert (1990) writes: “The image of ‘the cast-iron doll’ can be viewed in the light of Roman Jakobson’s ideas concerning the importance of the statue in Pushkin’s mythology” (p. 104). Here, Vol’pert takes issue with Jakobson’s assertion that, except for a few insignificant exceptions, the sculptural myth is not encountered in Pushkin’s works of the 1820s. Since the coming to life of the statue or, conversely, the petrification of a literary hero is a characteristic of the myth as defined by Jakobson, Vol’pert’s assertion of the importance of the Napoleonic figurine in this context is questionable , for the doll does not come to life; a more pertinent objection might be the hidden reference to the end of the Don Juan legend in the last scene between Tatiana and Onegin in chapter 8 of Onegin. Nevertheless, there is reason to point to certain features of Boris Godunov as representing a curious beginning of the myth as early as 1825. A pivotal text in Pushkin’s sculptural myth, and one central to Jakobson ’s argument, is the poem The Bronze Horseman, in which the statue of Peter the Great on his horse comes to life and pursues the hero. The statue by Falconet, which was erected in 1782, shows Peter on a horse raised on its hind legs, his hand outstretched, and a serpent being trampled by the horse. The entire sculpture stands on a curiously shaped block of granite. The statue is the most important monument in St. Petersburg, and acquired additional significance through the fact that it stands in the center of Senate Square, on which the Decembrists staged their abortive coup d’état in 1825. In his study of the role of the equestrian statue in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, David Bethea discusses the statue in some detail, and points to 165 the resemblance between it and the icon of St. George the Wonderworker, a resemblance that was clearly intended (Bethea, 1989, pp. 47–50). One of the features of the statue that reinforces its resemblance to the icon is the shape of the hunk of granite on which it sits, which bears a striking similarity to the conventional little hills in the icon. In fact, as Bethea shows, the statue was the result of a compromise between those who promoted the Russian tradition and those who wanted a statue in the classical manner of the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline hill: “The tsar as Marcus Aurelius did not arguably mean much to the Russians, but . . . the tsar as Christlike St. George slaying the serpent (pagan forces of history) did” (p. 49). The creation of the statue of Peter and its relationship to the icon underlines the deep cultural divide between the pre-Petrine, Muscovite culture and the post-Petrine, St. Petersburg-centered one. In the former culture there were simply no statues, since statues were one of the forms of aesthetic activity prohibited by Orthodoxy: the only form of imagery was the two-dimensional icon; moreover, the icon was not considered a representation as such, but rather the earthly manifestation of the saintly figure depicted. Here we find the same divide that has occupied us in the text between Muscovite religious culture (i.e., the chronicle and the canon), which was the result of prayer and the rejection by the creator of worldly pleasures (i.e., monastic life), and Western secular culture with its notions of the work of art as individual expression and of representation rather than symbolic identity of individual and material depiction.1 It was only after Peter’s reforms that sculpture became an officially sanctioned form, most notably when he brought the Italian sculptor Bartolomeo Rastrelli to create, among other things, the remarkable bust of Peter that stands in the Winter Palace. The sculpture of Peter on his horse thus stands on the other side of the deep divide separating pre-Petrine Russia from the world in which Pushkin grew up. It represents the shift from the religious, two-dimensional art of Muscovy...

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