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 painful and mesmerizing city-dream, city-hallucination, and it also serves as the main character of the work. Human destinies collide against the backdrop of majestic architecture. The revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is tasked with a dreadful deed - to kill his father, a senator. According to the author's design, this is the final chord of the myth of Petersburg, created over the course of 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. Originally, the novel was titled "Varnished Carriage," and the name "Petersburg" was suggested to the author by Vyacheslav Ivanov. 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 "The Metamorphosis." This edition publishes the complete unedited version of the novel.