Subject
Bronze Horseman in LATH
From
Date
Body
In the last stanza of Bely's poem Harlequinade (1906) an harlequin pleads a cloud to cast grom (a heavy thunder) on the blasphemous and sly race:
Вы думали - я был шутом?..
Молю, да облак семиглавый
Тяжёлый опрокинет гром
На род кощунственный, лукавый!"
Bely is the author of Petersburg (1913). The Bronze Horseman (thanks to Pushkin's poem, a symbol of St. Petersburg) stands on the so-called grom-kamen' (a huge block of granite said to have been hit by a thunderbolt). Gromoboy is a story and Gromval a ballad by G. P. Kamenev (a poet mentioned in LATH). Gromoboy and Vadim are the two parts of Zhukovsky's The Twelve Sleeping Maidens, a tale in two ballads. On the other hand, Kamenev (L. B. Rozenfeld, 1883-1936) and his wife (Trotsky's sister Olga Davidovna Bronshtein) appear in Hodasevich's memoir essay Belyi koridor ("The White Corridor", 1925). While Kamenev comes from kamen' (stone), Peter means "stone", the fact stressed by Bunin in his poem on the 200th anniversary of Peter's death, Den' pamyati Petra ("The Day of Peter's Memory", 1925):
"Красуйся, град Петров, и стой
Неколебимо, как Россия..."
О, если б узы гробовые
Хоть на единый миг земной
Поэт и Царь расторгли ныне!
Где Град Петра? И чьей рукой
Его краса, его твердыни
И алтари разорены?
Хлябь, хаос - царство Сатаны,
Губящего слепой стихией.
И вот дохнул он над Россией,
Восстал на Божий строй и лад -
И скрыл пучиной окаянной
Великий и священный Град,
Петром и Пушкиным созданный.
И все ж придёт, придёт пора
И воскресенья и деянья,
Прозрения и покаянья.
Россия! Помни же Петра.
Пётр значит Камень. Сын Господний
На Камени созиждет храм
И скажет: "Лишь Петру я дам
Владычество над преисподней".
The poem's opening lines are a quotation from Pushkin's Bronze Horseman.
According to Vadim Vadimovich, the statue of Pushkin in Leningrad near which he meets Dora (a friend of Vadim's daughter Bel) was erected by a committee of weathermen: The meteorological associations of the monument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, the right-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise, to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the Leningrad parks). (5.2) Lilacs in bloom remind one of Serov's Five-petaled Lilac depicting Ada Bredow, Vadim's first cousin with whom he flirted as a boy (4.3). It was Baroness Bredow, Vadim's extraordinary grand-aunt, who first summoned him to look at the harlequins: "Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!" (1.2)
Speaking of grom: at the end of Eugene Onegin (Eight: XLVIII: 1-2), when Tatiana has gone, Eugene stands as if by thunder struck (kak budto gromom porazhyon). Another Eugene, the hero of The Bronze Horseman, as he runs away from the statue, hears something like a thunder's rumbling (kak budto groma grokhotan'e) behind him.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Вы думали - я был шутом?..
Молю, да облак семиглавый
Тяжёлый опрокинет гром
На род кощунственный, лукавый!"
Bely is the author of Petersburg (1913). The Bronze Horseman (thanks to Pushkin's poem, a symbol of St. Petersburg) stands on the so-called grom-kamen' (a huge block of granite said to have been hit by a thunderbolt). Gromoboy is a story and Gromval a ballad by G. P. Kamenev (a poet mentioned in LATH). Gromoboy and Vadim are the two parts of Zhukovsky's The Twelve Sleeping Maidens, a tale in two ballads. On the other hand, Kamenev (L. B. Rozenfeld, 1883-1936) and his wife (Trotsky's sister Olga Davidovna Bronshtein) appear in Hodasevich's memoir essay Belyi koridor ("The White Corridor", 1925). While Kamenev comes from kamen' (stone), Peter means "stone", the fact stressed by Bunin in his poem on the 200th anniversary of Peter's death, Den' pamyati Petra ("The Day of Peter's Memory", 1925):
"Красуйся, град Петров, и стой
Неколебимо, как Россия..."
О, если б узы гробовые
Хоть на единый миг земной
Поэт и Царь расторгли ныне!
Где Град Петра? И чьей рукой
Его краса, его твердыни
И алтари разорены?
Хлябь, хаос - царство Сатаны,
Губящего слепой стихией.
И вот дохнул он над Россией,
Восстал на Божий строй и лад -
И скрыл пучиной окаянной
Великий и священный Град,
Петром и Пушкиным созданный.
И все ж придёт, придёт пора
И воскресенья и деянья,
Прозрения и покаянья.
Россия! Помни же Петра.
Пётр значит Камень. Сын Господний
На Камени созиждет храм
И скажет: "Лишь Петру я дам
Владычество над преисподней".
The poem's opening lines are a quotation from Pushkin's Bronze Horseman.
According to Vadim Vadimovich, the statue of Pushkin in Leningrad near which he meets Dora (a friend of Vadim's daughter Bel) was erected by a committee of weathermen: The meteorological associations of the monument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, the right-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise, to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the Leningrad parks). (5.2) Lilacs in bloom remind one of Serov's Five-petaled Lilac depicting Ada Bredow, Vadim's first cousin with whom he flirted as a boy (4.3). It was Baroness Bredow, Vadim's extraordinary grand-aunt, who first summoned him to look at the harlequins: "Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!" (1.2)
Speaking of grom: at the end of Eugene Onegin (Eight: XLVIII: 1-2), when Tatiana has gone, Eugene stands as if by thunder struck (kak budto gromom porazhyon). Another Eugene, the hero of The Bronze Horseman, as he runs away from the statue, hears something like a thunder's rumbling (kak budto groma grokhotan'e) behind him.
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/