”Nikolai Apollonovich raised curious eyes toward the immense outline of the Horseman (a shadow had covered him); but now the metal lips were parted in an enigmatic smile.The storm clouds were rent asunder and, in the moonlight, clouds swirled like the green vapor from melted bronze. For a moment, everything flared: waters, roofs, granite. The face of the Horseman and the bronze laurel wreath flared. And a many-tonned arm extended imperiously. It seemed that the arm was about to move, and that me...

The twin spires of Time and Light stand out for me on the busy skyline of this phenomenal book. Time counts down the narrative while Light provides the special effects that rhythm the ebb and flow of the truly idiosyncratic counting down process. Yes, 'ebb and flow' is appropriate to mention here. We expect Time to move only in one direction and always at the same pace according to the age-old rules but Bely's Time strikes right through the rule book. It doubles back, and when it's not busy reve...

In his later years, when Andrei Bely was slowly going mad, he hacked his original text of Petersburg making it twice shorter and endlessly dryer in order to make it readable for proles. I doubt that any proletarian had ever read the novel but somehow this bastardly version had found its way to English translation. And only lately the adequate modern translation of the novel has been published in English. “Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic spines”Andrei Be...

A quick note on the four available translations: The first point is that there are two versions of this novel – the original of 1916 and a later version from 1922. The 1922 version was heavily edited by the author, with significant portions of the text removed, mainly to make it easier to read. He removed many of the more experimental sections, and added clearer structure at the expense of some of his flights of fancy. The shorter version is about 380 pages in the Maguire, the longer is 570 in t...

A curious work. Something definitely out of the common groove. But it is a novel, and there is a story that does get told, albeit in a rather quirky way. When the pace is strong, it's good and fun to read; while at other times when the pace is slow, the author becomes somewhat self-indulgent: entertaining himself with mists and shadows and other unsubstantial things. Not bad, not great; 3.5-stars, we'll call it 4.

The Bronze Horseman descends from his pedestal and goes visiting at night (it turns out that he smokes a pipe) (view spoiler)[ and indeed generally appears to have calmed down since the days of Pushkin's poem (hide spoiler)]. A young man has a bomb which is given literary expression - like a talking clock but with more drama. The wallpaper bubbles with crawling cockroaches.This is St. Petersburg before the revolution. It has a great long street on which are doors with numbers on them, numbers in...

Petersburg is a dream This is one the hardest reviews I've had to write as Petersburg is such an amorphous, intricate, multilayered book that it's hard to pin it down in any sense. It's powerful and yet playful, there are farcical scenes which yet contain something desperate and tragic about them. There is a plot but it's a relatively undemanding one, and it's not so much the plot itself which the narrative is interested in as the ways in which the story might be told. Even categorising the b

It is a cliché that all drunk people think that they are wonderful company, that, in the moment, they see in their rambling, slurred, and often nonsensical conversation the brilliant holding forth of a world class orator. Unfortunately for me I have never suffered from this delusion. Whenever I get drunk I am fully aware of myself, fully conscious of the torrents of bullshit pouring from my mouth, I just don’t seem to be able to stop the flow. Something happens when I drink, some kind of mechani...

I am a great lover of Russian literature, but will admit that I had not even heard of this novel, or author, until a Goodreads friend kindly recommended it.Set during the revolution of 1905, and published in 1916, this book is a swirling mosaic of colours and impressions. There is a basic plot, but it is the characters, and the city of St Petersurg itself, which is central to this sprawling novel. Apollon Apollonovich is a senator and Nikolai Apollonovich is his son. Some time before, Anna Petro...

Petersburg was written in 1913 and once your attention is drawn to the book it is apparent that this is rated by many critics as one of the great Russian novels of the c.20th (a competitive field). Goodreads has a mere 270 reviews (at 31.03.2021), yet there is even the Andrei Bely Prize, the oldest independent literary prize awarded in Russia. (started in 1978). Bely remains relatively unknown (in a “Pointless” Russian author quiz Bely would be a great choice, I suspect.) Why is this? Petersburg...

As a result in part of it's history, going many years without publication outside of the U.S.S.R., Andrei Bely's Petersburg (first written in 1913, and not translated to English until 1959) is woefully under-read. It is, perhaps, most often read nowadays for the praise it received of Vladimir Nabokov, who ranked it among Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce's Ulysses, and Kafka's Metamorphosis as the twentieth century's greatest novels. It is deserving of significant praise, though it's...

In which a story is told of a certain worthy personage, his intellectual games and the ephemerality of existence. Although it starts in a classical, satirical tone, the story of the Ableukhov family in the revolutionary year 1905, in Sankt Petersburg, becomes very quickly an intimate exploration of the human psyche. The events of the outside (real) world, the very existence of the imperial capital, become lost in the mists of confusion and inner turmoil that Bely's characters go through.I strug

“He was simply seized by an animal feeling for his own invaluable life; he had no desire to return from the corridor; he did not have the courage to glance into his own rooms; he now had neither strength nor time to look for the bomb a second time; everything got mixed up in his head, and he could no longer remember exactly either the minute or the hour when the time expired: any moment might prove to be the fatal one. All he could do was wait here trembling in the corridor until daybreak.”One o...

Yes, yes Andrei Bely, I shall plunge into your world of candy-coated crayons, supertzar Slavs, and sardine-can ordinance, of a père et fil in merry-go-round pursuit to discover and detonate the bomb. Lauded by Nabo, compressed and expanded, a slyly singsong cavalcade of daydream dalliance, mythomnemonic mayhem, and prancing prickliness, all coated with allusion and fired until the melancholic gloss shimmers like a midnight sun—I am firm in my faith in Davey Boy, clan McClan, clan McDuff, to ligh...

Wonderfully weird. Incredibly Russian. A tongue-in-cheek look at postmodernism (to some extent), but a masterful work of postmodernism in itself. I almost did my thesis on this book...the imagery and insane number of references to anything spherical (a ticking bomb and the rotating, thriving planet are the two driving forces of the story) has stayed with me for years. The translator's notes and the introduction are a MUST read!

Bely's early 20th century masterpiece can be read as the Symbolist instance of modernity's passage: where, following Realism's constitution of the City as a graspable object of knowledge, urban space is dislodged from its material substrate and becomes traversable solely through the irruptions of subjective experience.

This book is almost perfect and should be read by everyone.

Whoa. Fucken whoa. Really enjoyable, yet I constantly felt that to really appreciate the depths of this book I should have a 10 year minimum background in Russian literature and a good handle on the cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Fortunately, it doesn't take scholarship to appreciate life's farcical underbelly which Biely upturns with alternating emphasis on humor and pain. Sergey Sergeyevich's failed hanging gave me a whole new appreciation for the underlying ridiculousness of...

Vladimir Nabokov was half-right when he cited the top four greatest novelists of the 20th century. Joyce and Proust clearly are worthy of their luminous literary prominence. While I admire Kafka and his novels, I would hardly rank him among the top four of the century. Bellow, Faulkner, Barth, Hemingway, Gaddis and Vonnegut, for example, all out-gun either Kafka or Biely in their literary prominence. While I admire Nabokov, too, I also wouldn't rank him in the top four and my best guess is that

There's a bit of paradox here in that I can well understand why this book spawned an expurgated version,(multiple? by Bely himself) but also that it would have been impossible to do so without mutilating the atmospheric quality of the original. So, happily I have downed the 2012 Rossica translation prize winning Elsworth Englishing and suggest you do the same. Quick notes:-Lots of the cultural subtleties were lost on me, yet nonetheless I found it quite illustrative. The way of being depicted he...

A joyful, poetic celebration/explosion of all the wonderful and overdone themes of Russian/Petersburg literature. Unbe-fucking-lievable.p.s. nabokov called this one of the four great novels of the 20th c. the other three are ulysses, the metamorphosis, and "the first half of" in search of lost time. czech it motherfuckers.

This is one we can all relate to. You know that awkward moment when… your new totally RAD(ical) friends expect you to assassinate your old political father so they thrust a timebomb upon you and it causes you to have an existential crisis because you don’t really like your dad all that much I mean you have so little in common and dinners are so awkward and boring ever since mom ran away, but still he’s your dad and that doesn’t mean that you really want to be the one responsible for giving him t...

This could be the 1st purely dreamy books I've ever read. Not, he's a dream boat' type of dreamy. But actual occasions where the mind's dreams are set into text on a page. Then Belly incorporates allusions to an endless amount of materials & we've got some serious social commentary going on. It's celebrated as Russia's Ulysses. For style & word choice, perhaps it offers a nod to Joyce's artistic style. Bely repeats phrases throughout the book creating a subtext that stitches it's way through the...

The book is quite difficult but amazingly rewarding. You really have to gear up for it, as Bely is employing many of the modernist techniques such as fractured narrative and time. Also, the notes in the back, while amazingly helpful, especially if you have little context for Russia, are so extensive, it's as if you're reading two books at one time. I recommend this wonderful novel for those who simply want to go deeper into Russian Literature. If you have other big books by Tolstoy and Dostoevsk...

I found an excerpt of this in some random Russian lit reader. Five pages and I was hooked. I scoured bookstores until I finally located it (at the time, I couldn't even find it at Amazon). And I devoured it.Like the works of Gogol, Bulgakov and Dostoevsky, Bely's writing seems to straddle the line of reality and the absurd. At times blatantly humours, at times deeply philosophical, this book represents what for me is darn close to the ideal novel.

You really need to get the right translation to make this book shine as I’m sure it does in Russian. I think this isn’t really the best available, though no translation can obscure the author’s genius or creativity. It’s hard to imagine Bulgakov without Bely.

This book is really long and hard to follow and full of references, but also its really cool

One of the best russian books I have ever read.

Did this book bring me joy? No. Was it an objectively well-written novel that wove an intricate intertextual portrait of Petersburg? Yes. Can I picture myself wanting to read this again? No.

Even among those into Russian lit, Petersburg - Bely - appear to be swept under the rug. I've never read a Russian novel with such a strong sense of authorial voice. In fact, there's very few novels I can think of at all that entertain the notion of the living author so fully. I was told that this reads like a Modernist Anna Karenina, and I can see how one approaches this reading, but altogether Petersburg seems to me like a much more charismatic, modernist Crime and Punishment. Bely leaves Bulg...