This study will discuss the influence of Alexander Pushkin's narrative poem "The Bronze Horseman" on Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg. The study will consider the symbolism of both works, focusing on the symbolic significance of the statue of Peter the Great and of the city and society of Petersburg itself.
It is obvious immediately that the novel by Bely owes a debt to the poem by Pushkin. The epigraph which begins the first chapter of the novel is taken directly from Pushkin's poem:
Of it still fresh the recollection . . .
Lugubrious will be my tale (Bely 3).
It is, then, a serious and often solemn tale which Bely tells and which is influenced by the Pushkin poem. This is no surprise, because the central symbol in both works is a statue of a czar known for his imperial inclinations. The statue itself can be seen as a symbol of the city, and, as we find in both works, the city can be most foreboding.
In Pushkin's poem, we are introduced to Petersburg as a city of "billows desolate," "lonely," with "murmuring woodlands . . . all in mist beshrouded," a city of "ruthless winter, lowering/ With bitter frost and windless air" (Pushkin 95; 97). Pushkin, however, is not writing from a critical point of view; to the contrary, he repeats over and over that he "loves" (96-97) the city and everything about it. In the first part of the poem Pushkin glorifies the imperialistic destiny of Russia and the militarism of Peter the Great. He has Peter declare "From here
. . . shall we strike terror . . . and gall our mighty neighbor;/ 'Here cut'---so Nature gives command---/`Your window through on Europe" (Pushkin 95). It is the natural destiny of Russia, Petersburg and Peter the Great---man and statue, horseman and "Bronze Horseman"---to stand as symbols of Russian greatness and monuments to the vision and power of the rational Western mind. Part II of the Pushkin poem, however,
strikes a new note . . . : beneath the "we...