Influence
The work has had enormous influence in Russian culture. Dostoevsky's The Double: A Petersburg Poem (1846) directly engages with "The Bronze Horseman", treating Evgenni's madness as parody. Andrei Belyi's novel Petersburg (1913; 1922) uses the Bronze Horseman as a metaphor for the centre of power in the city of Petersburg, which is itself a living entity and the main character of Belyi's novel.
The statue itself, which is one of the symbols of Saint Petersburg in much the same way that the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of New York City, is now known as the Bronze Horseman owing to the influence of the poem.
Reinhold Glière made the story into a ballet (1950), and Nikolai Myaskovsky's 10th Symphony (1926–7) was inspired by the poem.
Read more about this topic: The Bronze Horseman (poem)
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“Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.”
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