In the early 19th century Russian literature suddenly came to life, beginning with Russia’s most beloved poet, Alexander Pushkin. He grew up in the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo—he always yearned for it:
Wherever fate decrees that we must go,
Wherever fortune leads us by the hand,
We’re still the same: the world a foreign land,
Our mother country—Tsarskoye Selo
Literature brought to life the human side of an often inhuman Petersburg, never more so than in Pushkin’s famous poem The Bronze Horseman.
Pushkin, the founder of Russia’s humanistic literature, juxtaposed this mighty monument, the statue of the Bronze horseman (that Catherine dedicated to Peter the Great), to the small, beaten-down clerk who was pursued by it, during the flood of 1825.
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