Petersburg

Petersburg (Russian: Петербург, romanized: Peterburg; pre-reform spelling: Петербургъ) is a novel by Russian writer Andrei Bely. A Symbolist work, it has been compared to other "city novels" like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz. The first edition was completed in November 1913 and published serially from October 1913 to March 1914 (and later reissued as a book in 1916). It received little attention and was not translated into English until 1959 by John Cournos (revised version) and David McDuff in 1995 (first version), over 37 years after the shortened and revised version and 82 years after the first version was published respectively. Today the book is generally considered Bely's masterpiece; Vladimir Nabokov ranked it one of the four greatest "masterpieces of twentieth-century prose", after Ulysses and The Metamorphosis, and before "the first half" of In Search of Lost Time. In 1922, Bely published in Berlin a revised edition which was shorter by a third than the first one. As Bely noted, "the new edition is a completely new book for the readers of the first edition". In the Berlin version Bely changed the foot of his rhythmic prose from anapest to amphibrach, and removed ironical passages related to the revolutionary movement. The second version is usually considered as inferior to the first one. The novel is the second part of Bely's unfinished trilogy East or West, while The Silver Dove is the first one.