Speaking of Blok, the epigraph to his long poem Vozmezdie ("Retribution," 1910-21) is from Ibsen's play Bygmester Solness ("The Master Builder," 1892): Yunost' - eto vozmezdie ("Youth is retribution," the words of Solness). The name Solness comes from sol, Norwegian (and Latin) for "sun." There is also sol in Solveig, a character in Ibsen's play in verse Peer Gynt (1867). Blok admired Peer Gynt and in 1906 wrote several poems about Solveig.
As I pointed out before, one of the main characters in "Retribution" is Demon (the father of the poem's hero). Vrubel (the artist who, according to Van, made a portrait of his father, Demon Veen) is mentioned in Blok's Foreword to "Retribution." There are other affinities between Blok's poem and Ada.
It is worth noting that Solness (who falls to his death from the tower he built) is a colleague of David van Veen, the architect who built ninety nine memorial floramors (and died from a stroke while helping to prop up a propylon of his hundredth house). Cf. arkhitektor vinovat ("the architect is to blame"), the phrase that became proverbial in Tolstoy's family.
Speaking of horses, one is also reminded of kumir na bronzovom kone ("the idol riding his bronze horse") in Pushkin's long poem Mednyi vsadnik ("The Bronze Horseman," 1833) known on Antiterra as "Headless Horseman" (1.28). Decapitation is also mentioned in the Prologue to "Retribution" (ll. 41-46):
Но песня - песнью всё пребудет,
В толпе всё кто-нибудь поёт.
Вот - голову его на блюде
Царю плясунья подаёт;
Там - он на эшафоте чёрном
Слагает голову свою
Incidentally, mednyi ("of copper") rhymes with bednyi ("poor"). Demian Bednyi (Demon Veen's namesake!) was the Soviet poet who lived in Kremlin and published in Pravda his parody (Bilet na tot svet, "A Ticket to the Otherworld") of Sirin's poem Bilet ("The Ticket," 1927). It was the first mention of Sirin in the Soviet press.
Alexey Sklyarenko