Andrei Bely - Petersburg (2 translations)

* PETERSBURG (Penguin Classics, 1995 / 2011). Translated by David McDuff. 624 pp. -- PDF + ePUB

* ST. PETERSBURG (Grove, 1959). Translated by John Cournos. 332 pp. -- PDF


PETERSBURG (1913) is the Symbolist masterpiece of Russian novelist Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, better known by the pen name ANDREI BELY (1880-1934). When it was first published in its native land, it opened up a whole new era in Russian letters comparable to the change wrought in English literature by James Joyce's "Ulysses", but was not translated into English until 1959.

Set in St. Petersburg during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution in 1905, the novel explores themes of history, identity, and family by following a young student revolutionary, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, who has been ordered to assassinate a high Tsarist official -- his own father -- by planting a time bomb in his study. But the real central character of the novel is the imperial metropolis itself, caught in the grip of political agitation and social unrest. Intertwining the worlds of history and myth, and parading a cast of unforgettable characters, PETERSBURG is a story of apocalypse and redemption played out through family dysfunction, conspiracy and murder.

The New York Times Book Review hailed it as "the most important Russian novel of the 20th century", and it was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as "one of the four great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose", alongside Joyce's "Ulysses", Kafka's "Metamorphosis", and Proust's "In Search of Lost Time".