In the first two stanzas, Peter the Great stands at the edge of the River Neva and conceives the idea for a city which will threaten the Swedes and open a "window to Europe".

Saint Petersburg was in fact constructed on territory newly regained from the Swedes in the Great Northern War, and Peter himself chose the site for the founding of a major city because it provided Russia with a corner of access to the Baltic Sea, and thus to the Atlantic and Europe.

Part I opens with an image of the Neva growing rough in a storm: the river is "tossing and turning like a sick man in his troubled bed" (ll.

Evgenii falls asleep, and the narrative then turns back to the Neva, with a description of how the river floods and destroys much of the city (ll.

The frightened and desperate Evgenii is left sitting alone on top of two marble lions on Peter's Square, surrounded by water and with the Bronze Horseman statue looking down on him (ll.

The narrator does not describe Evgenii's death directly, but the poem closes with the discovery of his corpse in a ruined hut floating on the water (ll.

[3] This mix of genres is anticipated by the title: "The Bronze Horseman" suggested a grandiose ode, but the subtitle "A Petersburg Tale" leads one to expect an unheroic protagonist.

[6] He points to Pushkin's extensive use of Old Testament language and allusions when describing both the founding of St Petersburg and the flood and argues that they draw heavily on the Book of Genesis.

Further evidence for the categorization of Pushkin's poem as an epic can be seen in its rhyme scheme and stanza structure which allow the work to convey its meaning in a very concise yet artistic manner.

[8] However, Wachtel adds that the Evgenii plot runs counter to the epic mode, and praises Pushkin for his "remarkable ability to synthesize diverse materials, styles and genres".

There are more questions than answers in this new type of epic, where "an agnostic irony can easily find a place" while "the unbiased reader would be forced to recognize as concerned with the profoundest issues which confront humanity".

Pushkin's poem can be read in part as a retort to Mickiewicz, although most critics agree that its concerns are much broader than answering a political enemy.

Catherine the Great, a German princess who married into the Romanov family, commissioned the construction of the statue to legitimize her rule and claim to the throne to the Russian people; she had actually come to power through an illegal palace coup.

It depicts Peter the Great astride his horse, his outstretched arm reaching toward the Neva River in the western part of the country.

The statue is lauded for its ambiguity; in a book about Petersburg in 1821, the French statesman Joseph de Maistre commented that he did not know "whether Peter's bronze hand protects or threatens".

The difficulties of construction were numerous, but Peter was unperturbed by the expenditure of human life required to fulfil his vision of a city on the coast.

Pushkin makes Evgenii go mad to create "a terrifying dimension to even the most humdrum personality and at the same time show the abyss hidden in the most apparently common-place human soul".

[7] In the very act of conceiving and creating his city in the northern swamps, Peter has imposed order on the primeval natural scene depicted at the beginning of the poem.

The city itself, "graceful yet austere" in its classical design, is, as much as the Falconet statue, Peter's living monument, carrying on his struggle against the "wild, tumultuous" Finnish waves.

Peter appears not as an ordinary human being but as an elemental force: he is an agent in the historical process, and even beyond this he participates in a wider cosmic struggle between order and disorder.

Evgenii is accorded equal status with Peter in purely human terms, and his rebellion against state power is shown to be as admirable and significant in its way as that of the Decembrists.

Yet turning now to the question of Evgenii's role in the wider scheme of things, we have to admit that he seems an insignificant third factor in the equation when viewed against the backdrop of the titanic struggle taking place between Peter and the elements.

The vast, impersonal forces of order and chaos, locked in an unending struggle—these, Pushkin seems to be saying, are the reality: these are the millstones of destiny or of the historical process to which Evgenii and his kind are but so much grist.

The Bronze Horseman symbolizes "Tsar Peter, the city of St Petersburg, and the uncanny reach of autocracy over the lives of ordinary people.

[28] Josef Brodsky's A Guide to a Renamed City "shows both Lenin and the Horseman to be equally heartless arbiters of other's fates," connecting the work to another great Soviet leader.

[26] Having opposed the government and suffered his ruin, Evgenii challenges the symbol of Tsarist authority but is destroyed by its terrible, merciless power.

Whilst in keeping with Soviet historiography of the late Tsarist period, Cherniavsky subtly hinted at opposition to the supreme power presently ruling Russia.

[31] Within the literary realm, Dostoevsky's The Double: A Petersburg Poem (1846) directly engages with The Bronze Horseman, treating Evgenii's madness as parody.

In this context, Bely implies that Peter the Great was responsible for Russia's national identity, torn between Western and Eastern influences.

[24] In Valerii Briusov's work "To the Bronze Horseman" published in 1906, the author suggests that the monument is a "representation of eternity, as indifferent to battles and slaughter as it was to Evgenii's curses".