ANTONIO MEZZANOTTE’S POEM ABOUT THE ST. PETERSBURG FLOOD AND “THE BRONZE HORSEMAN”

This article offers a comparison of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and Western European poems about the St. Petersburg flood, with the focus on An tonio Mezzanotte’s poem “La inondazione di Pietroburgo avvenuta nel dì 19. Novembre 1824” (1825). Pushkin often used the same techniques as Mezzanotte, an aesthetically conservative Italian classicist poet. In the article, possible newspaper and journal sources of some episodes in both poems are identified, as well as close motifs and similar rhetorical and poetic devices. The compositional features of the two poems are compared. The Italian poem has a traditional construction in which the natural elements are opposed to the beneficial State power embodied in the Savior Sovereign. For this reason, Mezzanotte begins with the horrors of the flood and ends with a eulogy for the Emperor. In Pushkin’s “Petersburg Tale,” in which two impersonal forces (that of Nature and that of the State) oppose the fate of an individual, Peter the Great appears as an ally of the destructive elements. The Russian poem begins with a panegyric to Peter and ends with the tragic death of the main character and his loved ones.