{"id":11135,"date":"2026-02-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11135"},"modified":"2026-02-18T22:21:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T03:21:22","slug":"petersburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/19\/petersburg\/","title":{"rendered":"Petersburg."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrei Bely was the pen name of Boris Bugaev, a Russian poet and novelist whose peak period came at the end of the Imperial Era, publishing through the Revolution but ultimately finding his works out of favor with the Soviet regime. His novel Petersburg<\/a><\/em>, originally intended as the second part of an unfinished trilogy, appears frequently on lists of the greatest novels ever written. It appeared on The Novel 100<\/em>, a book that attempted to rank the hundred greatest novels of all time, and Vladimir Nabokov named it one of the four great works of 20th<\/sup> century literature (along with Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/a><\/em>, Kafka\u2019s The Metamorphosis<\/em>, and the first half of Proust\u2019s In Search of Lost Time<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story revolves around a father and son who represent the past and the future of Russia. Apollon Apollonovich is a senator and head of something called the Institution, the nature of which Bely doesn\u2019t reveal. He\u2019s verging on retirement and seems largely consumed with work, especially since his wife ran off with another man two years before. His son Nikolai, also known as Kolenka (which confused me quite a bit), is sort of a layabout with no apparent job. He\u2019s loosely involved with revolutionaries who are quite serious about their business \u2013 which leads one of them to hand him a \u2018bundle\u2019 that turns out to be a bomb that Nikolai is supposed to use to assassinate his own father. The bomb, which comes in a sardine tin, has a clockwork mechanism that Nikolai accidentally activates, leaving him 24 hours to dispose of it or else have it explode in his father\u2019s house. Complicating matters further is that he\u2019s in love with a married woman, Sofia, who becomes part of the conspiracy. There\u2019s also the \u2018red domino,\u2019 appearing at various parties in that hooded cape popular at masquerades in the 19th<\/sup> century, which appears to be more than one character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot is somewhat beside the point, according to just about everything I\u2019ve since read about Petersburg<\/em>, but there is some narrative greed here to keep you moving, not least to see what\u2019s going to happen when the bomb finally goes off. Bely seems mildly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, but not to the point of supporting murder; it\u2019s as if the book itself is advocating for a nonviolent overthrow of the Tsarist regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no question in my mind that I missed a lot of the subtext in the book. Daniel Burt, author of The Novel 100<\/em>, points out that Petersburg<\/em> presaged what James Joyce did in Ulysses<\/em>, both in making a city the central character in the book and in engaging in all kinds of wordplay, including puns and other jokes. Many of these probably don\u2019t survive the translation into English, and in general I did not find the book funny in any way except maybe, if I squint a bit, the series of events that befalls Nikolai to prevent him from either fulfilling his mission or throwing the bomb in the river. I also lack the knowledge of St. Petersburg\u2019s geography and some of the Russian literature that directly influenced Bely, notably Pushkin and other poets, although there\u2019s an obvious parallel to Turgenev\u2019s Fathers and Sons<\/em>, which I have read because it was also on Burt\u2019s list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n