Petersburg (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) - Softcover

Bely, Andrei

3.97

5,332 ratings by Goodreads

9780140186963: Petersburg (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140186964 ISBN 13: 9780140186963

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1995

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Andrei Bely's Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution in 1905. Considered Bely's masterpiece, the story follows Nikolai Ableukhov's journey as he is caught up in the revolutionary politics of those seminal days; exploring themes of history, identity, and family, the novel sees the young Russian chased through the misty Petersburg streets, tasked with planting a bomb intended to kill a government official - his own father. History, culture and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg in this literary triumph.

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Review:

" . . . the most accurate of all the available translations, and certainly the one that facilitates the greatest understanding of the original work."

(Michael R. Katz)

"The most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century." (The New York Times Book Review)

"A translation that captures Bely's idiosyncratic language and the rhythm of his prose, and without doing violence to English, conveys not only the literal meaning of the Russian but also its echoes and implications." (The New York Review of Books)

"This translation of Petersburg finally makes it possible to recognize Andrei Bely's great novel of 1913 as a crucial Russian instance of European modernist fiction" (Inquiry)

"All people who go in for the B's–Breckett, Brecht, Bu�uel–better get hold of Bely. He came first, and he's still the best." (Washington Post Book World)

About the Author:

Andrei Beley (born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) was born 26 October 1880. Beley was educated at Moscow University where he studied science and philosophy, before turning his focus to literature. In 1904 he published his first collection of poems, Gold in Azure, which was followed in 1909 by his first novel, The Silver Dove. Beley's most famous novel, Petersburg, was pubilshed in 1916. His work is considered to have heavily influenced several literary schools, most notably Symbolism, and his impact on Russian writing has been compared to that of James Joyce on the English speaking world.

David McDuff (b. 1945) was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he studied German and Russian. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Jospeh Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandinavian work; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; Complete Poems of Edith S�dergran; and No I'm Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya. His first book of verse, Words in Nature, appeared in 1972. He has also translated a number of nineteenth-century Russian prose works for the Penguin Classics series, including those of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov.

Adam Thirlwell (b.1978) studied English at New College, Oxford, and was subsequently elected as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1999. In 2003 his first novel, Politics, won the Betty Trask Award, and Miss Herbert, published in 2007, won the Somerset Maugham Award. Thirlwell's third novel, The Escape, was published in September 2009.

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