Description
Book SynopsisCelebrating 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.
Trade Review“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 *
Table of ContentsForeword by Thomas R. Beyer Jr.
Acknowledgments
Vladimir Nabokov, “On Petersburg”
Introduction by Olga M. Cooke
Carol Anschuetz, “Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel”
Maria Carlson, “Andrei Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg”
Charlene Castellano, “Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg”
Jacob Emery, “Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg”
Roger Keys, “Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg”
Timothy Langen, “Petersburg as a Historical Novel”
Aleksandr V. Lavrov, “Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton”
Magnus Ljunggren, “The Bomb, the Baby, the Book”
Anna Ponomareva, “‘Know Thyself’: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg”
Ada Steinberg, “Fragmentary ‘Prototypes’ in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg”
Adam Weiner, “The Enchanted Point of Petersburg”
Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, “Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession”
Contributors
