Petersburg

Andrei Bely · 1880–1934 · Russia

Originally Peterburg (Russian)

Why it matters

A czarist bureaucrat is stalked through a city of shadows and fog by his own son, carrying a bomb timed to kill him. Nabokov ranked this rhythmic, hallucinatory novel with Ulysses among the century's four greatest: Russian Symbolism's strangest, most unjustly overlooked masterpiece.

At a glance

Dense sound-patterned prose and fragmented, hallucinatory narration make this one of modernism's hardest novels.