Almost every Russian classic which has stood the test of time turns out to have been written in response to some wholly ephemeral fashion of thinking and feeling in the society which produced it. Pushkin's masterpiece, The Bronze Horseman, a Mozartian vision of jubilation and despair in St Petersburg, was composed not only in response to the widespread feeling of shock that followed a particularly severe flooding of the capital, but - more significantly - as a reply to the challenge offered by another poem: Mickiewicz's satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. 'Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,' wrote Pushkin, 'but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.' Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say.

LRB 23 July 1987 | PDF Download