The Bronze Horseman: Falconet's Monument to Peter the Great

by Alexander M. Schenker

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in any language of the most consequential work of art ever to be executed in Russia-the equestrian monument to Peter the Great, or The Bronze Horseman, as it has come to be known since it appeared in Alexander Pushkin's poem bearing that title. The author deals with the cultural setting that prepared the ground for the monument and provides life stories of those who were involved in its the sculptors Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Marie-Anne Collot, the engineer Marin Carburi, the diplomat Dmitry Golitsyn, and Catherine's "commissar" for culture, Ivan Betskoi. He also touches upon the extraordinary resonance of the monument in Russian culture, which, since the unveiling in 1782, has become the icon of St. Petersburg and has alimented the so-called "St. Petersburg theme" in Russian letters, familiar from the works of such writers as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Bely.

Genres: History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2003

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tend to like books that are dedicated to a single seemingly narrow subject and that use the narrow subject as a lens for a larger cultural perspective, so this book had great promise for me and seemed to be organically connected to my interests in Russian history and literature. I knew of the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great through Pushkin's famous poem about it and from other references to it in Russian literature, such as Bely's Petersburg, but I knew little about about the statue itself or its sculptor, Falconet. Now I know more about both than I will ever need to know. The book is certainly comprehensive, but it plods on. Schenker's writing style is less than dazzling, and in a book filled with colorful characters, he manages to make none of them come alive.

There are definitely points of great interest here -- the debate between Falconet and Diderot over whether art should be created for posterity or for a contemporary audience, the enigmatic Carburi, the bureaucratic wranglings of the Russian imperial government, the theory behind the construction of the statue, and the different interpretations of the monument itself as a work of art. For me these elements were enough to overcome the pedestrian writing style, but for someone less interested in the subject matter, this book would just be a snoozer.

[Kim]

this book marks the day where i am not able to read books as a pure hobby anymore and instead read books for presentations and research papers because i entered university.

i’ll look back at this review and consider it a historic event