Bely’s Petersburg is set in the days of the 1905 Revolution. A group of
Russian radicals plans to assassinate of Senator
Apollon Apollonovich
Ableukhov, but its revolutionary ideals quickly become a failed
conspiracy to commit patricide. The bomb is a can of sardines, and the
son, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, absentmindedly loses it, in
ultimately causing an explosion in his father's study. Bely
resorts to masterful use of hallucinatory images - the Bronze Horseman,
which is a hint at Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, visits Apollon
Apollonovich, setting a ghoulish theme heralding the decay of the
Russian nobility.Just as the city of St.
Petersburg, Bely’s Peterburg is saturated with the city’s mythology.
The book focuses on two archetypes: the
eternal Rome, and the
non-eternal, doomed, Rome, or Constantinople. Since Bely was a
Muscovite, he almost flaunts Moscow’s disdain toward its imperial,
alien, Germanic
capital twin. Bely exposed the city in dramatic,
mythical light, where hallucination is easily confused with reality.
The book is also the strongest among the books of the Petersburg genre,
artfully joining the works of Pushkin and Gogol, and, at the same time,
successfully demolishes the image of the Russian capital city.Peterburg the work has the same relation to the Russian language as Ulysses has to English.