Novel
Petersburg
Петербург
Andrei Bely · 1916
Opening lines
Аполлонъ Аполлоновичъ Аблеуховъ былъ весьма почтеннаго рода: онъ имѣлъ своимъ предкомъ Адама. И это не главное: несравненно важнѣе здѣсь то, что благородно рожденный предокъ былъ Симъ, то-есть самъ прародитель семитскихъ, хесситскихъ и краснокожихъ народностей.
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of most venerable stock: he had Adam for his ancestor. And that is not the main thing: incomparably more important here is that this nobly born ancestor was Shem, that is, the very progenitor of the Semitic, Hessitic and redskin peoples.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
St Petersburg, October 1905, in the aftermath of the war against Japan. Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a sixty-eight-year-old senior official, does not know that his son Nikolai, a student, belongs to a terrorist cell. From the terrorist Dudkin, Nikolai receives a time bomb hidden in a sardine tin: it is his own father he is charged with killing. Around them move Sofia Petrovna and Lippanchenko, perhaps both a revolutionary leader and an informer, and the city itself becomes a character in the novel.
Context
The novel first appeared in instalments in the almanac Sirin, from October 1913 to March 1914, then in volume in 1916. In 1922, in Berlin, the author produced a revised and shortened version, which he presented as a new book for readers of the first. The French translation by Georges Nivat and Jacques Catteau appeared in 1967, prepared by comparing the 1916 and 1922 editions; four English translations have followed one another, from 1959 to 2009.
Who it is for
A long avant-garde novel, dense and rhythmic, which assumes some knowledge of Russian geography and literature.
Prizes and reception
Often compared to Joyce's Ulysses; Nabokov ranked it among the four greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose.