Reading Order
Petersburg Reading Order
Petersburg (1913) by Andrei Bely is one of the four great European modernist novels alongside Ulysses, The Remembrance of Things Past, and The Magic Mountain — a novel about which Vladimir Nabokov said it was one of the four greatest prose achievements of the twentieth century, and which has been far less widely read in the English-speaking world than the others. Set in St. Petersburg in 1905, during the period of revolutionary agitation between the Russo-Japanese War and the actual 1905 Revolution, the novel follows a plot that sounds like a thriller: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, the son of a Tsarist senator, has become involved with revolutionary terrorists and is given a bomb in a sardine tin to be left in his father's study. But Bely's method is symbolist, not realistic: the plot is almost impossible to follow beneath the layers of impressionist prose, symbolic structure (the novel is organized around the colors red, white, and grey — the colors of the Russian flag and of the revolutionary movement), and syntactic experimentation that make Petersburg one of the most demanding novels in any language. Bely was a central figure of Russian Symbolism — a philosophical and aesthetic movement that believed the material world was a symbol of deeper spiritual realities, and that literature's task was to reveal these spiritual realities through intense sensory experience and linguistic experiment. Petersburg is his attempt to apply the full resources of Russian Symbolism to the novel form, creating a work in which every detail of the physical city — its fog, its damp, its bureaucratic geometry, its river — becomes a symbol of Russia's historical crisis. The novel was written in 1913, the year before the First World War, and it is saturated with the sense of an imminent catastrophe that will transform everything: the city, the empire, the culture that produced both.
Where to start
Petersburg — the John Elsworth translation (Pushkin Press, 2009) is the most recent and most readable; the Robert Maguire and John Malmstad translation (Indiana University Press) is the scholarly standard. Both require patience and reward rereading.
Complete Petersburg Book List
- 1Buy
Petersburg (trans. John Elsworth)
Andrei Bely·2009·Elsworth's Pushkin Press translation — the most recent and most readable; captures Bely's syntactic experimentation better than earlier versions. - 2Buy
The Bronze Horseman
Alexander Pushkin·1833·Pushkin's narrative poem — the founding text of Petersburg mythology; the bronze statue of Peter the Great that haunts Bely's novel is Pushkin's. - 3Buy
The Overcoat
Nikolai Gogol·1842·Gogol's story — Bely's other essential predecessor; the grotesque bureaucratic city that Gogol created, transformed by Bely into a symbolist labyrinth. - 4Buy
Ulysses
James Joyce·1922·Joyce's modernist masterpiece — the closest parallel to Petersburg in scope and ambition; both novels take place in a single city over one or two days and use experimental prose to recreate urban consciousness. - 5Buy
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov·1967·Bulgakov's Soviet fantastical novel — the comic descendent of Bely's symbolist Petersburg; both present a city that is simultaneously realistic and mythological. - 6Buy
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak·1957·Pasternak's novel — a direct response to the period Petersburg depicts (1905 Revolution and its consequences); the most important Russian novel to engage with the same historical moment. - 7Buy
In the Penal Colony
Franz Kafka·1919·Kafka's story of bureaucratic machinery — the closest Western equivalent to Bely's vision of the imperial bureaucratic machine as a force of quasi-supernatural destruction. - 8Buy
The Noise of Time
Julian Barnes·2016·Barnes's novel about Shostakovich under Stalin — the St. Petersburg/Leningrad artistic tradition under political pressure; the same city in a different historical crisis.
Petersburg — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Petersburg by Andrei Bely about?
Petersburg is set in the Russian capital in autumn 1905, during the revolutionary agitation following the Bloody Sunday massacre (January 1905) and the Russo-Japanese War defeat. The main plot involves Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, the dissolute son of the pompous Tsarist senator Apollon Apollonovich, who has become entangled with socialist revolutionaries. He is given a bomb in a sardine tin with instructions to place it in his father's study. The novel follows Nikolai's attempts to escape this impossible situation — he is simultaneously terrified of the revolutionaries, incapable of action, and unable to confess to his father — as well as his father's own fears and the city's revolutionary atmosphere. But the realistic plot is almost entirely subordinated to Bely's symbolist and impressionist method, making the novel more an experience of consciousness and symbol than of sequential narrative.
What is Russian Symbolism and why does it matter for Petersburg?
Russian Symbolism was a philosophical and aesthetic movement of the 1890s to 1920s, influenced by French Symbolism (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud) but with a stronger metaphysical dimension: the Russian Symbolists believed that the material world was a veil over deeper spiritual realities, and that art's task was to pierce this veil through intense sensory experience and linguistic experiment. Andrei Bely was the movement's most radical prose practitioner. In Petersburg, Symbolism means that every physical detail of the city — the bronze statue of Peter the Great, the fog from the Neva, the geometry of Nevsky Prospect — is simultaneously realistic and symbolic; the revolutionary bomb plot is simultaneously a literal thriller and a symbolic account of the apocalyptic transformation of Russia that Bely believed was imminent. Understanding Symbolism's dual-register approach (everything is both literal and symbolic) is essential to following the novel's method.
Why did Nabokov call Petersburg one of the four greatest prose masterpieces of the twentieth century?
Nabokov's famous judgment (in Lectures on Russian Literature) placed Petersburg alongside Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Proust's In Search of Lost Time as the four greatest prose works of the century. He valued Bely's linguistic virtuosity — the syntactic experiments, the rhythmic prose (Bely had trained as a musicologist and believed prose should have musical structure), the density of symbolic reference, and the quality of hallucinatory vividness with which he created the Petersburg atmosphere. Nabokov also acknowledged that Petersburg is difficult, partly inaccessible, and not for all readers — but for those who can follow its method, it represents prose fiction taken to an extreme of ambition that very few works in any language match.
What is the significance of St. Petersburg as a city in Russian literature and in Bely's novel?
St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as Russia's 'window on the West' — a city built on swamps by forced labor to be a European capital, artificial and imposed rather than organically grown, embodying Peter's coercive modernization of Russia. In Russian literature, the city became the site of this ambivalence: is Russia European or Asian? Is modernization liberation or violence? Does the city represent progress or a betrayal of Russia's organic culture? Pushkin's Bronze Horseman (1833) established the mythological terms: the bronze statue of Peter, symbol of imperial power, pursues a poor clerk who has lost his beloved to Petersburg's flood. Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely all write within this tradition. In Petersburg, the symbolic opposition is made explicit: the senator father represents Western bureaucratic order; the son represents the revolutionary destruction that is coming.
What should I read after Petersburg?
After Petersburg, Bely's own Kotik Letaev (1922) — a stream-of-consciousness autobiographical novel about early childhood — shows his development. For the Russian literary tradition that feeds into Petersburg, Gogol's The Overcoat and Dostoevsky's The Double are essential; Pushkin's Bronze Horseman establishes the founding Petersburg mythology. For comparable European modernist novels, Joyce's Ulysses (which Nabokov pairs with Petersburg) and Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) are the closest parallels in ambition and method. For scholarly context, David Bethea's The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (1989) contextualizes Petersburg in the tradition of Russian apocalypticism.
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