Although Toporov’s famous work mentions the Polish poet by name, acknowledging his role in establishing the eschatological (images of the city’s future destruction – the apocalyptic vision of a flood) and infernal motifs (Satan in Mickiewicz) within what became the Petersburg text, it is hard not to feel as though Mickiewicz plays a marginal role in Toporov’s work, appearing only as a kind of footnote. In fact, however, Mickiewicz’s role and his real influence on the creation of not only The Bronze Horseman but the whole literature of the ‘Petersburg text’ seems to go much further.
Pushkin kept a close eye on the work of his old friend after he left Russia in 1829. At the same time, their paths, once connected by their poetry and the spirit of freedom (personified in the Decembrists’ revolt, put down in December 1825), parted ways definitively at this time. This was marked at the time by Pushkin’s famous anti-Polish poems against the November Uprising, such as ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ (1831).
We know that before writing his epic, the Russian poet carefully read Mickiewicz’s ‘Digression’, freshly published in Dresden in 1832, as well as Forefathers’ Eve. Part III. We know this because long fragments of this work have survived, copied (in Polish!) in Pushkin’s hand: among them two entire poems (‘Oleszkiewicz’ and ‘To the Friends of the Muscovites’) and one longer excerpt (‘The Monument of Peter the Great’). As scholar Marian Jakóbiec suggests, Pushkin probably did this in order to better understand the meaning of the Polish text, which without the translation may have not been entirely clear to him.
Mickiewicz’s piece, being banned – like nearly his entire oeuvre in the Russian Empire after the November Uprising – must have posed a considerable problem to Pushkin. After all, it was quite an overt critique of the Russian state and ruler, a painfully accurate assessment of the despotic regime, with its disrespect for human rights and omnipresent militarism. It also presented St. Petersburg as the embodiment of this merciless idea – a city built on human bones, inhuman or even diabolical. Mickiewicz presented its founder, Peter the Great, as a grim demiurge, working against principles both human and divine.
