Celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Andrey Bely’s Petersburg, 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, Petersburg is the first novel in which the city is the hero. Frequently compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, no novel did more to help launch modernism in turn-of-the century Russia.

“This collection of studies by American, British, Scandinavian, Russian and Israeli scholars is a welcome contribution to our knowledge of Belyi’s extraordinary novel. … What this collection does, and does brilliantly, is not so much to promote Petersburg to a wider readership as to provide a fascinating companion-guide, a complex and erudite Baedecker to the living world of Belyi’s invention, a guide which helps us situate it in its early twentieth-century Russian and European context.” —Avril Pyman, University of Durham, Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 96, No. 4

* Slavonic and East European Review *

Olga M. Cooke is Associate Professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. She edits Gulag Studies. Her recent publications focus on the works of Andrey Bely and on Gulag literature. She is completing a book called 'The Most Interesting Man in Russia:' Andrey Bely's Life in Letters.