The Admiralty Spire

A few weeks back, I blogged about the fantastic short story, The Admiralty Spire, by Nabokov. In it, the narrator alludes to Pushkin while discussing the title of the story, saying that it is a famous Pushkinian line and a part of an "iambic tetrameter". Now, I have never read anything by Pushkin and my knowledge of poetry in general is equally pathetic, so I didn't make out much from reading this little bit in the story. But some googling and I found this great poem by Pushkin to which perhaps Nabokov was alluding. It is called The Bronze Horseman which Pushkin wrote in 1833. The poem is about the fate of a poor young man and his family in the aftermath of the overflowing of the Neva river which happened as a result of the founding of the St. Petersburg city. Peter the great, the czar of Russia, founded this new capital of Russia to bring glory and prosperity to Russia but the whole project had an enormous human cost. As this wikipedia entry says, "Pushkin uses the flood of 1824 to show the conflict between the large interests of the state, represented by the Tsar's statue with its gaze fixed ahead and its arm reaching out towards the future, and the immediate needs of a simple person for life and safety".

Read the poem here.

A good biographical and critical sketch of Pushkin here.

And a picture of The Admiralty Spire here.