stern" facade lay a shadowy world of intangibilities and unrealities, alien to man's reason and apprehensible only to his unconscious being---an "eastern" world. . . . (Bely xv).
This attitude toward the symbolism of Petersburg and the statue of Peter the Great dominates the Bely novel. Symbolically, then, Bely takes the spirit of the second part of the Pushkin poem and extends and expands it. Bely adds the self-conscious devices of the Symbolist approach, which gives the symbolism a humor absent in the Pushkin poem, but also gives it a contrived quality.
Both works use symbolism in ways meant to intrigue the reader, but in both cases as much confusion as curiosity is caused. Pushkin sets forth the symbolic power of Petersburg in unequivocal terms in the
...