A Reader's Guide to Andrei Bely's "Petersburg"

Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively.

Bely expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.

Author: Leonid Livak
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 01/12/2021
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780299319342
ISBN10: 0299319342
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Russian & Soviet
- History | Russia | General
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 20th Century

About the Author
Leonid Livak is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His books include In Search of Russian Modernism and The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination.