Petersburg

Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) (1880-1934) is one of the key figures of the Silver Age, a symbolist writer, mystic and experimenter. Petersburg in the novel of the same name is tormenting and fascinating, a dream city, a hallucination city, and it is also the main character of the work. People's destinies collide against the backdrop of majestic architecture. Revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is entrusted with a terrible task - to kill his father, a senator. According to the author's plan, this is the final chord of the myth of Petersburg, created over the course of a whole 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 novel was originally called "The Varnished Carriage", the title "Petersburg" was suggested to the author by Vyacheslav Ivanov. The text is written in rhythmic prose, in which 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 "The Metamorphosis". This edition contains the complete unedited version of the novel.