Petersburg (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital - a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg society in an exhilarating search for the identity of a city and, ultimately, Russia itself.

Literature & Fiction

Bely, Andrei

Literary

Penguin Classics

"The most important [...] Russian novel of the 20th century." -The New York Times Book Review Considered Andrei Bely's masterpiece, Petersburg, is a pioneering modernist novel, ranked in importance alongside Ulysses, The Metamorphosis, and In Search of Lost Time, that captures Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution in 1905. Exploring themes of history, identity, and family, it sees the young Russian Nikolai Ableukhov chased through the misty Petersburg streets, tasked with planting a bomb intended to kill a government official-his own father. Bely draws on news, fashion, psychology, and ordinary people to create a distinctive and timeless literary triumph. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

Portable Video: ENG & EFP

Product Description Andrei Bely is best known for the modernist masterwork Petersburg, a paradigmatic example of how modern writers strove to evoke the fragmentation of language, narrative, and consciousness. In the early twentieth century, Bely embarked on his life as an artist with texts he called “symphonies”―works experimenting with genre and sound, written in a style that shifts among prosaic, poetic, and musical. This book presents Bely’s four Symphonies―“Dramatic Symphony,” “Northern Symphony,” “The Return,” and “Goblet of Blizzards”―fantastically strange stories that capture the banality of life, the intimacy of love, and the enchantment of art.The Symphonies are quintessential works of modernist innovation in which Bely developed an evocative mythology and distinctive aesthetics. Influenced by Russian Symbolism, Bely believed that the role of modern artists was to imbue seemingly small details with cosmic significance. The Symphonies depict the drabness of daily life with distinct irony and satire―and then soar out of turn-of-the-century Moscow into the realm of the infinite and eternal. They conjure worlds that resemble our own but reveal elements of artifice and magic, hinting at mystical truths and the complete transfiguration of life. Showcasing the protean quality of Bely’s language and storytelling, Jonathan Stone’s translation of the Symphonies features some of the most captivating and beguiling writing of Russia’s Silver Age. Review Intermodal art was central to Russian Symbolism, but Bely’s four Symphonies resist easy definition. Rhythmic, motivic, visionary, commingling mundane matter with elevated spirit and shot through with satire, they relay Bely’s sense of symphonic music as a linkage of levels and moods. Jonathan Stone’s exquisite translation suspends the reader between the real and the more real. -- Caryl Emerson, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian LiteratureThe richly saturated prose of Bely’s innovative Symphonies demands an effective translation. Jonathan Stone has made a scrupulous, powerful version that conveys the work’s mythological complexity and the hypnotic effect of its verbal and musical texture. An essential book for study of the Symbolists. -- Sibelan Forrester, translator of The Russian FolktaleThose who read Stone’s introduction and translation with care will come away with an understanding that will enable them to appreciate what Bely is undertaking in the Symphonies, even as they work through the profusion of imagery and the fragmentary structure of these writings. There are very few works that compete with this volume in any way. -- Barry Scherr, Dartmouth College[A] Symbolist masterpiece by the writer whose work Vladimir Nabokov ranked among Russia’s greatest literary achievements . . . Otherworldly tales of haunting beauty and a welcome addition to the canon of classic Russian literature in English. ― Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewThe four works are all worthwhile in their own right but are, of course, interesting both for showing us the Bely the Symbolist in full flight but also showing us the writer of Петербург (Petersburg) in his early days. -- John Alvey ― The Modern NovelStone’s translation reads convincingly throughout, giving as good a sense as is probably achievable in English of what Bely was trying to do. It’s a tremendous achievement. -- Steve Dodson ― Language HatEncountering The Symphonies in Jonathan Stone’s sensitive renderings, one is struck anew by their daring innovation, which seems as fresh today as it did more than a century ago. As this handsome new edition demonstrates, Bely has outlived the fashions of later years: his works remain 'turned towards the future', their exuberance and brisk pace still urging readers on. -- Bryan Karetnyk ― Times Literary Supplement[A] sensitive and resourceful translation by Jonathan Stone . . . Collectively, The Symphonies offer a glimpse into the cradle of Bely’s art: less fully achieved than his

The Symphonies (Russian Library)

Columbia University Press

William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture (American Philosophy)

William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture focuses on the work of William James and the relationship between the development of pragmatism and its historical, cultural, and political roots in 19th-century America. Deborah Whitehead reads pragmatism through the intersecting themes of narrative, gender, nation, politics, and religion. As she considers how pragmatism helps to explain the United States to itself, Whitehead articulates a contemporary pragmatism and shows how it has become a powerful and influential discourse in American intellectual and popular culture.

Petersburg

United States

Indiana University Press

Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg is considered one of the four greatest prose masterpieces of the 20th century. In this new edition of the best-selling translation, the reader will have access to the translators' detailed commentary, which provides the necessary historical and literary context for understanding the novel, as well as a foreword by Olga Matich, acclaimed scholar of Russian literature.
 Set in 1905 in St. Petersburg, a city in the throes of sociopolitical conflict, the novel follows university student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, who has gotten entangled with a revolutionary terrorist organization with plans to assassinate a government official–Nikolai's own father, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. With a sprawling cast of characters, set against a nightmarish city, it is all at once a historical, political, philosophical, and darkly comedic novel.

"... 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—Beckett, Brecht, Buñuel—better get hold of Bely. He came first, and he’s still the best." —Washington Post Book World
"... a jewel-cutter’s showcase." —Kirkus Reviews
"... the most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century." —Simon Karlinsky
Here is the long-awaited, authoritative, unabridged translation of Petersburg, the Chef d’oeuvre of Symbolist writer Andrei Bely. Nabokov has ranked Petersburg beside Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the four great works of prose fiction of the twentieth century.

History & Criticism

Petersburg (Russian Edition)

Contemporary

One of the most important works of twentieth-century Russian prose, Kotik Letaev, the great symbolist novel of childhood, depicts the emergence of consciousness and its development into self-consciousness in a Russian boy growing up among the Moscow intelligentsia in the 1800s. Kotik's experience is based on elements from Bely's own early childhood, but on a larger level his experience represents the stages of human history, the history of philosophy, and childhood language development. The story, seen through the eyes of a child from the age of three to five years, is told in complex, poetically developed adult language, rich in imagery and musical sound effects.

Kotik Letaev (European Classics)

Belyx, Andrei

Northwestern University Press

When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in Gogol’s Artistry, the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in Gogol’s Artistry. Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely’s thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely’s argument in this book is that Gogol’s earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol’s prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely’s best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism.

Gogol's Artistry

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner (Adonis Press)

Written by three Russian artists who worked with Rudolf Steiner on the First Goetheanum during World War One, these dramatic accounts give vivid impressions of Steiner.

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Adonis Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bely, Andrei. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bely, Andrei

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bely, Andrei. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Petersburg (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

The Symphonies (Russian Library)

Petersburg

Petersburg

Petersburg

Petersburg (Russian Edition)

Kotik Letaev (European Classics)

Gogol's Artistry

Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner (Adonis Press)