Petersburg

I own the Grove Press, 1959, hardcover edition of this book which I personally consider, in a word, magnificent. But I also wished to share my thoughts about Biely's superb novel here at the "softcover edition" site. This fictional account was artfully translated by John Cournos who also wrote an outstanding eight-page introduction to the book. Also included in this particular edition is an informative four-page foreword (essentially, an Andrey Biely mini-biography) by George Reavey. Anyone who is remotely interested in first-class literature in general, or in top Russian novels in particular can hardly afford not to read Andrey Biely's (born Boris Bugayev) intriguing account of a wild two-day period in 1905 St. Petersburg. Of course this is a crucial era of Russia's history because late that year a devastating general worker strike coupled with revolutionary riots transpired in this Russian Capitol. The insurrection was eventually quashed by Tsar Nicholas II's military forces but the episode was clearly a prophetic warm-up for the brutal 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The backdrop of 1905 St. Petersburg is notably integral to the story chiefly because it gives rise to the absolute credibility of sequential fictional incidents as they are related here. The St. Petersburg of this epoch flaunted a society, comprised of multiple divergent cultures and classes of people, most of whom were completely out of control. As Colin Wilson shrewdly asserted in his book Rasputin and the fall of the Romanovs: Colin Wilson. --, [paraphrasing here] "...all the men were intriguers and all the women were hysterical." And perhaps a more significant quotation from that same work explains the situation more precisely: "...freedom is an inner condition, and it cannot co-exist with boredom and the devaluation of life. In this sense, the inhabitants of St. Petersburg were less free than at any time since Ivan the Terrible." (Page 112.) Think of the antics found in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and amplify it to the tenth power -- that was Biely's St. Petersburg. And Biely has captured this ambiance and conveyed it so flawlessly that the astute reader is emotionally transported to that time and place. At first the text seems a jumble to digest as one correspondingly encounters in either Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, or perhaps in INVISIBLE MAN By RALPH ELLISON 1952 MODERN LIBRARY. But this minor annoyance soon passes as the reader begins to assimilate Biely's compelling literary rhythm. The dialogues in this book were for me reminiscent of the anxious, vague, incoherent, and abbreviated mumblings between Nixon, Haldemann, and Colson during the Watergate cover-up; however, in real life, and when people discuss such sinister topics... The central theme examines the relationship between an emotionally disturbed and elite young nobleman, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, and his aged father, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, who happens to be one of the Tsar's tyrannical, high-rank

...tick tick tick.....this is Turgenev's Fathers and Sons written after the modernist floodgates had been opened. My version of this has a Kandinsky on the cover and that is the perfect emblem to front this Russian avante garde revolution of a book. There is in it a live time bomb waiting to go off. It takes awhile to get used to Biely's unusual way with words(and I have no idea if this is a translation thing or not) but once you catch his rhythms it is a great read. We live in a much more settled civilization than the one this author experienced and documents but if you like to read things that remind you that culture occasionally does undergo monumental shifts, this is one of those works. Not perfection to our postmodernist ears but strange music indeed. Boom.

This psychological thriller was way ahead of its time. The writer forsees the collapse of the old regime and the anarchy that will follow. Just simply one of the best novels of its type. I highly recommend it