Recommendations
Books Like The Bronze Horseman by Alexander Pushkin
The empire is built on the graves of the powerless
If you were moved by Pushkin's founding poem of Petersburg — the flood that kills the poor man's beloved while the bronze emperor rides on — these works share the same meditation on individual suffering and imperial power, on the price paid for greatness by those who are not great.
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Eugene Onegin
by Alexander Pushkin
Pushkin's novel in verse — his other great work; the superfluous man and the woman who loves him; essential for understanding Pushkin's full range.
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Buy on AmazonCrime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's Petersburg novel — set in the same city as Pushkin's poem; Raskolnikov's crime and punishment occur in the shadow of the same imperial city that drowned Evgeny's beloved.
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Buy on AmazonPetersburg
by Andrei Bely
Bely's modernist novel — in direct dialogue with The Bronze Horseman; the bronze statue reappears as the symbol of empire that is about to fall in 1905.
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The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's founding story of the little man destroyed by St. Petersburg — the companion to The Bronze Horseman; where Pushkin's Evgeny confronts the statue, Gogol's Akaky becomes a ghost.
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Buy on AmazonRequiem
by Anna Akhmatova
Akhmatova's poem-cycle of Stalinist terror — the twentieth-century Petersburg poem in dialogue with Pushkin's founding myth; the bronze horseman now riding over Leningrad's victims.
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg novel of Prince Myshkin — the innocent destroyed by the city and the social world; Evgeny's story in a different register.
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Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
Pasternak's lyric novel of Russia's transformation — the same question as The Bronze Horseman (what is the cost of imperial modernization?) applied to the Soviet Revolution.
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Buy on AmazonPeter the Great
by Robert K. Massie
Massie's biography of Peter the Great — the historical context for The Bronze Horseman; the man whose vision and tyranny Pushkin is simultaneously celebrating and indicting.
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