Petersburg (novel): Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Petersburg or St. Petersburg (1913, revised 1922) is the title of Andrei Bely's masterpiece, a Symbolist work that foreshadows Joyce's Modernist ambitions. For various reasons the novel never received the attention it deserved and was only translated into English for the first time in 1959 by John Cournos, over 45 years after it was written and when Joyce was already established as an important writer.

The novel is based in Saint Petersburg and follows a revolutionary who has been hired to assassinate his own father, a high Tsarist official; there are many similarities with Joyce's novel, such as the linguistic rhythms and wordplay, the Symbolist and subtle political concerns which structure the themes of the novel, the importance of the respective capital cities and city life as a setting for the novel, and that the main protagonist in both is Jewish (Joyce and Bely were not Jewish), although the differences are also notable: Bely remains partly more accessible and, according to scholarly opinion, the range of his innovations is smaller.

Themes

There have been three major translations of the novel into English:

• St. Petersburg or Saint Petersburg, translated by John Cournos (1959)
• Petersburg, translated and annotated by John E. Malmstad and Robert A. Maguire (1978) (paperback: ISBN 0253202191)
• Petersburg, translated by David McDuff (1995)