Influence of a Pushkin Poem on a Bely Novel

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

. . .
ger, clanging in his flight. . . . There the bronze horseman gallops still" (Pushkin 108). We find the same symbols dominating the Bely novel---the statue of Peter the Great (which comes to life in both works), the city of Petersburg as a character in its own right and a representation of the western world and its rational order, Apollon the bureaucratic character representing the repressive side of rationality, and Nikolai his son representing the coming-of-age all individuals must experience as they confront the world and its many choices. Despite the fact that the Bely novel owes a great dent to the Pushkin poem in terms of its symbolism, the fact remains that the two worlds portrayed stand finally in stark contrast to one another. Pushkin would not recognize the Russia of Bely's novel, nor its characters, nor the use to which Bely has put the symbols of Petersburg, the statue, and others. There is a shift from the first part of Pushkin's poem to the second in that the first part declares the undiluted power of Russia and the second introduces significant challenged to that power, even if those challenges are symbolic and hard to clearly define. In Bely, on the other hand, a later version of the country and its symbols is
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Approximate Word count = 1617
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)