In the two works, “The Bronze Horseman” and “The Flood,” the descriptions of people and nature are constantly merged. Pushkin describes the river Neva with feminine images and adjectives. Complementing her feminine aspects, “I love thy stern and comely face, / Neva’s majestic perfluctuation, / Her bankments’ granite carapace,” Pushkin uses feminine articles and describes her face as “stern” and “comely” (Pushkin, 9-10). He merges the natural beauty of a river with the romantic beauty of a woman. This becomes further sexualized: “Neva, her clamorous water splashing / Against the crest of either dike, / Tossed in her shapely ramparts” (Pushkin, 11). These descriptions maintain a somewhat militaristic quality, and yet are overly sexualized (for a body of water).

In contrast, in “The Flood,” referring to her pregnancy, “Her stomach was round, it was the earth. In the earth, deep down, invisible to anyone, lay Ganka, and in the earth, invisible to anyone, seeds burrowed with white roots,” Sofya feels within her a connection to the mother earth, and that motherhood is laced with death (Zamyatin, 276). Although new life comes from the earth and from the seeds planted there, it is also where the dead return, a haunting aspect of motherhood when juxtaposed with the earth. Her husband, on the other hand, is first likened to a machine, “And Trofim Ivanych could no longer suppress his laughter; it burst out of his nose and mouth like steam out of the safety valves of a boiler under pressure” (Zamyatin, 257). This description becomes more predatory, and yet still mechanical and cold, “Trofim Ivanych’s face twisted into a strange, slow, ugly smile; he seemed to be smiling only with his teeth” (Zamyatin, 264). His outward appearance reflects a contradiction between his feelings and how he acts on them (i.e. laughing mechanically, smiling through the fury). The intertwining of nature, humans and machines highlights the conflict warring within by bringing attention to the apparently incongruous aspects of humans, nature and machines.