Petersburg

Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev) (1880—1934) — one of the key figures of the Silver Age, a symbolist writer, mystic, and experimenter. Petersburg in the eponymous novel is a tormenting and mesmerizing city-dream, city-hallucination, and is also the main character of the work. Human destinies collide against the backdrop of majestic architecture. The revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is given a terrible task — to kill his father, a senator. According to the author's design — this is the final chord of the myth about Petersburg, created over a century by the geniuses of Russian culture: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky. The city on the Neva is described by Bely as a symbol of the precarious state in which Russia found itself at the beginning of the 20th century. The text is written in rhythmic prose, where poetic tropes can be discerned. Nabokov called the novel the third masterpiece of world literature of the 20th century — after Joyce's 'Ulysses' and Kafka's 'Metamorphosis.' This edition publishes the complete unedited version of the novel.