... and romanticism in Russia, especially for the poets who would become associated with the Decembrist Uprising, a failed attempt by liberal nobles to reform the absolutist state by military coup in 1825. Perhaps even more importantly, Byron also became identified with the primary candidate for the role of Russia’s...

... juxtaposition.’” Kathleen Scollins suggests that in The Bronze Horseman Pushkin may have both “explore[d] and conceal[ed] [s]ubversive ideas” associated with the Decembrist uprising by patterning his suffering hero after the Old Testament figure of Job. She notes that “several critics . . . have discerned...

... the metaphysical import of the nation’s historical destiny.3 Shortly before the verdict in the Decembrist trial was announced, the poet, fi lled with bad premonitions and yet clearly interested in securing for himself an opportunity to continue to work under the new regime, expressed to Pletnëv a desire...

..., a clear example of this idea is present in War and Peace . Tolstoy had originally planned to write a novel about the Decembrists, a group of young aristocrats who rose in favor of a constitutional monarchy at the death of Emperor Alexander I in 1825, for which they were later executed or confined...

... is Tiutchev’s half-mocking, half-consolatory address to the participants in the 1825 Decembrist uprising (1826), who naïvely believed that their “scanty blood would suffice to unfreeze the eternal pole.” Instead, “Barely, smoking, it [the blood] shone forth / On the age-old mass of 31 The Russian...

... that intentionally mixed psychological and political meanings, as in Pushkin’s “samovlastitel’nyi zlodei” (“willful/tyrannical villain”) in reference to Napoleon I, or in Fyodor Tiutchev’s address to the leaders of the Decembrist uprising—“Vas razvratilo Samovlastie . . .” (“Autocracy/Willfulness has...