The Bronze Horseman: A St Petersburg Story

Though Russians have long regarded Pushkin as their national poet, it was still possible fifty years after his death for Matthew Arnold (in his i88j essay 'Count Leo Tolstoy *) to state that Russia had not yet had a great poet. Even today, Pushkin ys reputation inside Russia is taken largely on trust elsewhere. As the problem is generally agreed to be one of translation, it is heartening that over the past twenty years some excellent versions of Pushkin 's poetry have at last begun to appear in English. There is Charles Johnston *s virtuoso rendering of Eugene Onegin (iqjq); James Falen's more recent version of the same work (iq88); and accomplished translations of some of the shorter lyrics by Alan Myers (in An Age Ago: A Selection of Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry, ig88) and Anthony Briggs (in his Pushkin: Selected Poems, 1997). Briggs*s selection also contains a version of The Bronze Horseman.