St. Petersburg [Paperback]

Andrei Biely (Author), John Cournos (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 1994

In this incomparable novel of the seething revolutionary Russia of 1905, Andrey Bely plays ingeniously on the great themes of Russian history and literature as he tells the mesmerizing tale of Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a high-ranking Tsarist official, and his dilettante son, Nikolai, an aspiring terrorist, whose first assignment is to assassinate his father.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 25, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802131581
• ISBN-13: 978-0802131584
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #376,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a nonobjective treatise, August 30, 2001

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: St. Petersburg (Paperback)

...tick tick tick.....this is Turgenev's Fathers and Sons written after the modernist floodgates had been opened. My version of this has a Kandinsky on the cover and that is the perfect emblem to front this Russian avante garde revolution of a book. There is in it a live time bomb waiting to go off. It takes awhile to get used to Biely's unusual way with words(and I have no idea if this is a translation thing or not) but once you catch his rhythms it is a great read. We live in a much more settled civilization than the one this author experienced and documents but if you like to read things that remind you that culture occasionally does undergo monumental shifts, this is one of those works. Not perfection to our postmodernist ears but strange music indeed. Boom.

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a touchstone of modernism, November 30, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: St. Petersburg (Paperback)

It was Vladimir Nabokov's opinion that this novel is "One of the four great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose," in company with The Metamorphosis, Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. Andrey Bely (or Biely, I've found it spelled both ways) was the pen name of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev. He was a leading figure of the Symbolist movement in pre-Revolutionary Russia and, in addition to Nabokov, influenced Boris Pasternak and Yevgeny Zamyatin, among others. St. Petersburg is certainly as innovative as the other works Nabokov ranks it with, using characters and even geography as allegorical symbols for ideas, and written in a nearly stream-of-consciousness prose. But to my very pleasant surprise, it is much more enjoyable than these other touchstones of Modernism.

The action of the novel, and happily there is some action, occurs over the course of two days in 1905, when Russia, having lost the War with Japan, was wracked by strikes, conspiracy, violence and near revolution. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov is an elderly, but still devoted, Tsarist bureaucrat. His dilettantish son, Nikolai, who is dabbling in radical politics, has been given the task of murdering his own father; the chosen weapon, improbably enough, a bomb in a sardine tin. Just as the city of St. Petersburg--Peter the Great's "window on the West"--represents the point where the rational West meets the savage and mystical Orient, so this confrontation between father and son represents impending conflict between European reason and Asiatic barbarism, and the bomb itself represents the indiscriminately destructive forces about to be brought to bear on the decaying Tsarist state.

Though much of the story, inevitably in this type of modernist fiction, is obscure and barely coherent, the literally ticking time bomb gives the story a propulsive forward momentum which speeds the reader along and, though I'm certain I missed much of the symbolism, because the imagined clash between the main symbols proved eerily prophetic, we can read things into the story that Biely probably never intended. Biely's use of language and symbolism lends an almost feverish quality to the narrative, as if the whole thing were a particularly horrible dream. It is a story suffused with a sense of dread and with intimations of the chaos to come, both in the novel and in the society it depicts.

I don't know that it necessarily deserves quite the elevated position that Nabokov gave it, but it was apparently extremely influential on Russian Literature and it makes for an unusual but gratifying reading experience. You'll surely enjoy it more than you would the almost unreadable James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

GRADE : B

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best pre-revolutionary novels from Russia, April 13, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: St. Petersburg (Paperback)

This psychological thriller was way ahead of its time. The writer forsees the collapse of the old regime and the anarchy that will follow. Just simply one of the best novels of its type. I highly recommend it