Andrey Bely's Petersburg

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.