Petersburg (novel)

Petersburg

Cover of 1916 edition
Author	Andrei Bely
Original title	Петербургъ
Translator	John Cournos, John E. Malmstad and Robert A. Maguire, David McDuff and John Elsworth
Country	Russian Empire
Language	Russian
Genre	Symbolism
Publisher	M.M. Stasi︠u︡levich
Publication date	1913
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)

Petersburg (Russian: Петербург, Peterburg) is a novel by Russian writer Andrei Bely. A Symbolist work, it arguably foreshadows James Joyce'sModernist ambitions. First published in 1913, the novel received little attention and was not translated into English until 1959 by John Cournos, over 45 years after it was written.

Today the book is generally considered Bely's masterpiece; Vladimir Nabokov ranked it one of the four greatest "masterpieces of twentieth century prose", after Ulysses and The Metamorphosis, and before In Search of Lost Time.

The novel is based in Saint Petersburg in the run up to the Revolution of 1905 and follows a young revolutionary, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, who has been ordered to assassinate his own father, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a high Tsarist official, by planting a time bomb in his study.

Bely drew his characters from historical models: Apollon Apollonovich shares many characteristics with Procurator of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and Dudkin resembles the revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov.

There are many similarities with Joyce's Ulysses: the linguistic rhythms and wordplay, the Symbolist and subtle political concerns which structure the themes of the novel, the setting of the action in a capital city that is itself a character, the use of humor. The differences are also notable: the English translation of Bely remains more accessible, his work is based on complex rhythm of patterns, and, according to scholarly opinion, does not use such a wide variety of innovations. But these innovations, which subvert commonplace literary rhetoric, are necessary to conveying Petersburg at such a tumultuous time.