Virtually every crisis that preoccupied Belyi's mind between 1906 and 1909 was reflected in the novel, from the failed revolution of 1905 to debacle of his love affair with Alexander Blok's wife.

In the house of the carpenter Kudeyarov, they hold orgiastic religious gatherings in honor of the Mother of God Matryona, who is supposed to give birth to the new Savior, the Dove child.

The protagonist, a young poet-philosopher, Pyotr Daryalsky, joins the cult and abandons Katya, the symbol of pure and idealized love, for Matryona, with whom he is chosen to create a Dove child.

He becomes jealous and plots to kill Daryalsky, while he learns that money, eroticism, murderous conspiracies and fake rituals are the driving powers in the sect.

Nikolai Berdyaev saw the novel as an "amazing book", representing the return to the traditions of great Russian literature "on the basis of the achievements of the new art".

The evocation of Gogol's manner... is not a case of simple imitation, but rather a response to the urge common to writers of Bely's generation, to demonstrate that their great 19th‐century predecessors were imaginative literary artists and brilliant stylists rather than merely topical social critics, as the earlier tradition.The novel is unique for multi-faceted narrative structure, which relies on skaz thechniques, Bely's ornamental style (according to Mirsky, ornamental prose is a term, opposite to Tolstoy's or Stendhal's analytical prose, prose which "keeps the reader's attention to every small detail"; the famous ornamentalists are Gogol, Rabelais, and James Joyce), rhetorical flourishes, digressions, and musical leitmotifs give the novel its richly varied texture.

Like in Petersburg and unlike his after-1917 novels, which differ with multi-faceted complex people, characters of The Silver Dove are not full-blooded figures in the Tolstoian sense; they are caught between reality and dreamscapes, rarely in control of their destiny.

[citation needed] In terms of content, the work reflects the atmosphere of the fin de siècle and decadence through the generated mood of unreasonable fear and the description of orgiastic excesses, which, especially in pre-revolutionary Russia, herald the imminent demise of the old order.

[citation needed] Among the themes of the novel are the fate of Russia, the role of consciousness, mystical anarchism, the dangers of uniting with the people in the hopes of creating a utopia, and relations between the folk (narod) and intelligentsia.

In so far as one can discern aspects of Belyi in the depiction of Daryalsky, Maria Carlson has observed that The Silver Dove represents a programmatic illustration of three fundamental concepts developed by Bely, namely, theurgy, "the creation of life", and "experience".