All these techniques were unorthodox for their time.Īll this aside, it’s a gripping read. There are fleeting allusions, scraps of dialogue overheard or interrupted, and rhythmic patterns and repetitions as well. The narrator also launches into philosophical and spiritual asides, not to mention prophetic commentaries on the state of the nation. It’s vaguely reminiscent of reading Gerald Murnane’s Inland in the way that the narrative swirls back and forth in time and place, and the intrusive narrator plays with the reader, forever reminding us that this is fiction. What this means is that Symbolist authors were keen to write ‘ in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning and were hostile to ‘plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description’.īely was one of the ‘Second Generation’ of Russian Symbolists ( influenced by Dostoyevsky’s novels – thanks to Judith Armstrong’s correction here, see her comment below) and reading Petersburg is a strange, disorientating – but also curiously enchanting – experience. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams. Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Wikipedia came once more to my rescue to explain that: Petersburg is one of these four because it’s an early modernist novel (pre-dating Joyce), but apparently it’s also a ‘Symbolist’ work. I’ve read the other three too: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time a.k.a. And Petersburg – like the rest of Russia – is in political turmoil…įirst published in Russia in 1913, Petersburg was ( according to Wikipedia) said by Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the ‘ four greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose’. It’s quite long, but it never loses momentum because of the central element in its plot: a young man who’s become mixed up with radical elements at university has been entrusted with a bomb – to kill his own father, who’s a powerful bureaucrat in 1905 Petersburg. I really enjoyed reading Petersburg by Andrei Bely.

Bely st petersburg