Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg” A Centennial Celebration

Celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Andrey Bely’s <i>Petersburg</i>, this volume offers a cross-section of essays that address the most pertinent aspects of his 1916 masterpiece. The plot is relatively a simple one: Nikolai Apollonovich is ordered by a group of terrorists to assassinate his father, the prominent senator, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nevertheless, Bely’s polyphonic, experimental prose invokes such diverse themes as: Greek mythology, the apocalypse, family dynamics, psychology, Russian history, theosophy, revolution, and European literary influences. Considered by Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the twentieth century’s four greatest masterpieces, <i>Petersburg</i> is the first novel in which the city is the hero. Frequently compared to Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>, no novel did more to help launch modernism in turn-of-the century Russia.