Pushkin writes The Bronze Horseman
Pushkin, not Peter, coined the window to Europe — via an Italian
In autumn 1833 at Boldino Pushkin wrote his poem about Peter and the Petersburg flood. He footnoted the line about cutting a window to Europe: the image came from the Italian Francesco Algarotti, who called Petersburg a window through which Russia looks at Europe.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Did you know
Peter the Great never spoke of cutting a 'window to Europe'. The phrase is Pushkin's, from The Bronze Horseman (1833), and as he noted himself, the image came from the Italian writer Francesco Algarotti. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna — 19 years earlier
- 1833 Abolition of slavery in the British Empire — same year
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 6 years later
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 12 years later
- 1848–1849 Revolutions of 1848 — 15 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 5 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 6 years later
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 6 years later
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 2 years later
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 14 years later
Asia
- 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora — 18 years earlier
- 1819 Raffles founds modern Singapore — 14 years earlier
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 2 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 6 years later
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 20 years later
Americas
- 1822 Independence of Brazil — 11 years earlier
- 1835 Darwin in the Galápagos — 2 years later
- 1838–1839 Trail of Tears — 5 years later
- 1846 First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia — 13 years later
- 1846–1848 Mexican–American War — 13 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 18 years later
Alive at the time
- Alexander Pushkin (aged 34)
- Charles Darwin (aged 24)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 24)
- Karl Marx (aged 15)
- Queen Victoria (aged 14)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 12)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 5)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 73)
- Andrew Jackson (aged 66)
- Francis II (aged 65)