The Image of a «Beaten Horse» as a Metaphor for the Suffering of the Humble and Innocent. Comparison of Pascoli, Dostoevsky and Nekrasov

Abstract

This article is intended to deepen the figure of the wounded horse as a symbol of universal suffering. The steps, Crime and Punishment of Fyodor Dostoevsky are considered, in which the protagonist Raskolnikov sees in a dream a farmer who wounds a small horse to death. This part of the novel refers to the poem by Nekrasov "before the Shummer", which Dostoevsky quotes in the novel. Through the networks of symbolic references Dostoevsky carries the poetry of the social Nekrasov into a metaphysical dimension, in which the suffering of a horse becomes a metaphor for the suffering of innocent and unavenged children, a theme that Ivan Karamazov encounters in the novel the brothers Karamazov. In the third case, in the poem "La cavallina storna" by the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli, the horse is a silent witness to the pain of the father's death, the suffering that puts everything, animals, people, things.